Currently:
The system of budgeting rewards empire building. More resources, more people, more equipment, more support -- more money budgeted.
The system also encourages politicians to spend more money to effectively pay-off voters to re-elect them.
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Future:
The system should be setup to reward those who come-up-with or do lower their departments spending, thus lowering the budget requirements of the department. For government employees (non-elected or non-appointed positions) the rewards could be some percentage of the amount saved.
The system should be setup to discourage politicians from spending money to pay-off voters. This could be done by reducing the politicians salary and/or benefits; since they are elected to serve vs. being hired. Another possible way would be to lower the number of terms they are allowed to serve.
This could be based on their Federal to State spending per constituent vs. a national average OR based on whether the annual budget is increasing or decreasing the national debt.
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How the actual performance Appraisals are determined and done is not as important as implementing a system that discourages wasteful spending and encourages savings of We the People's hard-earned dollars (aka Taxpayers money).
The key is to hold Politicians, appointed officials, and government employees accountable for the spending of our money.
Comments (4)
Excellent suggestion. The sickness of empire building also exists in private industry - especially in big firms.
Hi ricardomigrant:
Yes, unfortunately empire building exists even in private industry. The amount of resources wasted in doing so impacts all interested parties. I have seen people not get raises or miss-out on essential business training; all because another manager was wasting money building up his empire.
In one case, by the manager adding more workers, he was able to add a couple more supervisors, which led to him getting authorized for a new set of offices for his now bigger staff, along with all new furniture. Almost a half-million dollars was wasted. Take that one case and magnify it to be representative of Big-Brother and you are talking billions of dollars of waste.
Along those lines, one of the government waste policies is the "user it or loose it" budgeting system. If you don't spend all your allocated budget this year, next year your budget is reduce to less than what you spent this year. Another area of waste is you have to spend the allocated money this year, even though it would be better to hold off spending the money for another one to two years.
Overall, the current system is rigged to encourage spending. There needs to be something done to encourage savings and discourage spending. Rewards are the best motivational method. But sometimes you have to have repercussions for unacceptable behavior.
Sincerely,
Photosrme
Its called an election. Everyone thinks its the government employee that really control the budget, but its actually elected officials. Lok at Michigan. There are several billions of dollars in government reform that could be done immediately and would be long lasting, but the elected officials and their appointed department heads are hacking at the bones of the poor when they continue to eat at the larder. No one wants to tough tax reform becaue it may make someone who could write a $5000 check get upset.
Not done. So the government worker comes up with a great idea that will save $$$, create a more open and transparent govt and they get their head handed to them on a performance appraisal because they were not in the right political camp! Hmmm. How do we work on continual growth and betterment rather than empire building?