By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
The growing condemnation of DOGE is ironic in view of the fact that when elected to office many presidents, including Democrats, set up similar programs to cut back on the perennial problem of waste in order to trim our bloated government.
President Johnson focused on reducing wasteful spending, particularly in the Department of Defense. President Obama saved taxpayers billions of dollars by cutting waste and increasing government efficiency by terminating poorly performing projects and deploying state-of-the-art fraud detection tools to crack down on waste.
He focused agency leaders on achieving ambitious improvements in high-priority areas and opening the government up to the public to increase accountability and accelerate cost saving innovations.
President Trump is attempting to do the exact same thing. In his case, enormous opposition exists to his attempts to replicate the work of Johnson and Obama.
Because of using Elon Musk as an adviser, thousands of Teslas and dealerships, and hundreds of charging stations have been destroyed or severely damaged. Biden’s global-warming, clean-energy goals be damned.
While I cannot comment on the wisdom of the current Trump cuts, having worked for the government for most of my life, I can verify the enormous waste that I saw first-hand.
After a name change of one institution I worked at occurred, I was informed it cost several million dollars to alter the signs to reflect the new name. This is ironic, especially because we used the old name for years, and many of us still do.
At another government institution, I remember hundreds of reams of stationery were in the trash due to a department name change. When the embossed, high-quality paper stationery was sitting outside ready to be hauled away in the trash, I looked in a box.
I realized all I had to do to have enough paper for two decades was to cut the heading name off. Unfortunately, before I could save a few boxes, it poured rain, ruining most of the paper.
Another example was the endless so-called updating of the facilities. I remember one after-another major remodeling project where the construction workers had to demolish one room or often gut an entire building.
In one case, the workers had to use jackhammers to remove the expensive ceramic-coated tile from the building’s floor.
One of the workers mentioned to me that it was an expensive waste “to have to replace the beautiful floor, that would last for a century, with carpeting.
But I was paid to do a job, so I did it, but felt ‘what a waste.’” Rooms were built, altered by making them larger, then altered again by making them smaller, and then changed again, making them longer. In another example, an administrator, a male, replaced a female administrator.
The male administrator had to replace many of the furnishings, which he felt were too feminine, with masculine ones. The furnishings were sold at a sale for little to nothing. I bought several of the high-quality, very expensive furnishings, for pennies on the dollar.
Probably the biggest expense was to create new positions and hire new administrators, often paid twice that as faculty. One day, I had some free time and asked a secretary what the new administrators did all day.
She replied, “Not much.” During the time in-between administrators, which was in one case three months, the department ran very well. When I asked the secretary how that could be, she answered, “We do most of the work regardless if we have someone filling the administrator’s chair.”
One college where I taught had a large video library which I used frequently. Then, some administrator got the brilliant idea to pay for an online video source. Our in-house collection was soon decimated, forcing us to rely on online sources.
I had so much trouble finding and using the online material, partly because they did not carry the more technical films I required, that I gave up and ended up purchasing the videos I needed for my science classes, adding to my already large home collection.
A lifelong friend worked in a state government (not Ohio) as the head of the Data Analyst Department. He loved his job.
Then, another management level was hired to supervise him. Soon, problems arose which, although frustrating, he dealt with.
Then, a third level was hired. When a request came for a data analysis job, he now had to wait for approval. He often waited and waited for weeks.
When he finally completed the data analysis, it was approved at the first level of management, but not at the next higher level. The reason?
My friend explained that the way the manager wanted it done could not be done (the manager knew little about computers. His master’s degree was in administration). So they farmed out the job.
In the end, the consulting firm they hired was also unable to do the job as requested. The top-level management then hired another firm, which determined the cost would be over $300,000, so he requested justification for the high cost.
The reason was a new program had to be written. In the meantime, my friend spent day after day with nothing to do, partly because his second-level administrator would not approve several data analysis jobs. He wanted to work and had to spend much of his time attempting to look busy.
After over 30 years, he finally left government employment, enjoying a very large severance package that enabled him and his wife to literally travel the world.
Although these examples are trivial compared to the savings of over one-trillion Trump achieved, they add up. A total of 1,626 public, degree-granting colleges exist in America, thus in a decade waste reduction may produce a trillion dollars of savings.
Since the 3,982 degree-granting postsecondary institutions also receive billions of dollars of state grants, the actual ten year savings may exceed a trillion dollars.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. All 60 of Bergman’s books are on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other bookstores.
