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An anecdote that shows how much damage stupidity in the federal government can do...

A friend of mine was a supervisor of a very obscure part of a large federal agency. She and her ten employees managed a minor federal program that subsidized private businesses.

They would cut checks to those businesses on a monthly basis after the businesses submitted the required paperwork.

When she took over the supervisor job (thirty years earlier!) her boss explained that the old computer program that created the checks had some minor bugs in it that affected about three checks a day.

They had tried to get the software fixed but the big bosses did not get it done—so the supervisor had an office rule that certain types of transactions were not to be put in the computer but instead were to go to her office for processing.

The supervisor would then manually calculate the correct amount and manually issue the checks to the businesses—about three a day.

She was very good at her job and there were zero complaints. For decades morale in her shop was solid. She went though about a dozen bosses in her career—and none of them wanted the hassle of trying to get the software fixed since everything was running so smoothly.

So—finally she is ready to retire. She is the only person who knows when to cut the manual checks and how to calculate the correct amount.

She sits down with her (latest) boss and explains the problem. She wants to train someone to do this. The idiot DEI boss says her position will remain vacant for a while so there is nobody to train.

So she retires.

The employees started putting those unusual transactions in the computer. The program issued checks for these specific transactions for a nominal amount like one dollar and mailed it out to the businesses.

The businesses immediately called the office to complain. The clerks promised to look into the problem and get back to them.

The clerks quickly realized they had no idea what the problem was and nobody could help them—so they did nothing.

At thirty days or so the businesses started calling her old boss—and the old boss assured them she would “take care of it” and then did nothing.

At sixty days the business called her old bosses boss—same response.

At ninety days these businesses from all over the country contacted their congressional offices.

At one hundred and twenty days the Secretary of the Agency was looking at dozen of Congressional letters demanding immediate action and threatening Congressional hearings.

Punchline: It cost the Agency millions of dollars to hire a consultant to figure out what the problem was, and millions of dollars more to totally redo the software.

This could be happening anytime with hundreds of obscure federal offices—one retirement and one idiot manager at a time.

I did two years of “Kaizan” process improvements in our company back in the 90’s. We would go around to each region and implement “solutions.”

We would come across stuff like that often. Problem resolution is like water, it will often go the course of least resistance (impact on the person resolving it.)

We had operations who dispatched to trucks, and the would use a “roundabout” method to get information out to the field. When we pinned down why they did not follow procedure, it was because ten years ago the dispatcher dated one of the field guys. When they broke up, she refused to deal with him. So they routed the calls through a third party. Then other people did the same thing. In the end, hundreds of transactions a day went through multiple parties when it could have been done by a single person.

Insanity rules the world some times.