Defense spending seems untouchable, but I can’t help thinking we could save so much by trimming waste in the military budget. Do we really need some of these massive programs when other priorities like healthcare and infrastructure are underfunded? Curious where others stand on this.

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We have so much waste and bloat in the DoD budget that, presuming there was legitimately effective leadership and financial management in the Pentagon, I'm 100% confident we could lop >20% off the DoD budget without negatively impacting mission readiness.

Adherence to actual financial management best practices and zero based budgeting would go a LONG way towards rightsizing federal expenditures.

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One of the primary sources of waste is the merger of social/political considerations with acquisitions. Something like ~30% of the budget has to go to small businesses, with a large chunk of those being socio-economic based (veteran owned, located in economically disadvantaged areas, etc). This creates a whole industry of contractors that aren't economically viable except that they know the process and the regulations and find niches to take over and provide bloated services at way above market costs. With major systems you have manufacturing being dictated by congressional districts instead of business judgment. And the whole bid protest system exists to cut graft, but ends up shocking up an enormous amount of effort by acquiring offices, acquisition offices, and lawyers to just award a contract, by providing a thorough enough explanation. Then a tiny fraction of effort is spent issuing good contracts that benefit the government and get it what it needs. The incentive is just getting a contract through the protest process, not getting a good contract. That's an awful incentive if you want a functioning government. But allof these issues are entrenched in sympathetic causes (limiting corruption, benefiting vets) or low-visibility congressional pork so they'll never go away without a true WW2-style enemy at the gates forcing them too

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SpaceX feels expensive. 🌕

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