I went to my State Capital a few years back to a bid opening that happened to be in an adjacent building, the Capital building took center stage front with a massive plaza circled by state office buildings. I was astounded by the amount of people buzzing around, lots of people in suits with brief cases marching around on phones in a hurry to get somewhere. I’m in Levis, a golf shirt and ball cap, that’s my work attire.
I’m a project manager from a small company in a small town sixty miles away who is trying to secure a state funded construction project close to our office. I walked into the building and noticed the hallways and lounge areas were adorned with paintings, plush furniture, polished tile floors, large floral arrangements, expensive window treatments, and snotty office people giving out directions and passes.
I entered the meeting room where the bid opening was to take place, there was a large table probably sixteen feet long, oval shaped with a floral arrangement in the center and a bottle of water in front of each chair, the chairs were the ergonomically correct kind with a contoured mesh back and cushioned seats, I saw some like them in Staples for around six hundred bucks, there were 20 of them in the room.
Four state employees entered the room bantering back and forth as they took their seats at the head of the table, there were five bidders present. The bid opening took five minutes and I did not get the project, the state rep who read out loud the bids thanked us for showing up and we were done.
The amount of work from our private little business to produce a quote for the project was minimal, the amount of resources the state had to enlist was enormous which is the gist of this story. For the state to do this project, there was a study, land procurement, survey, civil engineers, printers, online resources, then four state employees to inform me I was not low bidder. That doesn’t take into account the office, the building, the utilities to run it, and people to clean it. Thousands of well payed state employees with fantastic benefit packages and pensions spending enormous amounts of other peoples money.
Multiply that by hundreds and hundreds of thousands and you have the federal government. A few million well paid federal employees and politicians with fantastic benefit packages and pensions spending enormous amounts of other peoples money. It is a leviathan that feeds off the backs of it’s citizens and private business, it has the IRS as an enforcement arm, an education department to mold the next generation, and a slew of alphabet departments to make sure everyone follows the rules.
The small details of how the country runs is of little consequence to the next President or members of congress, like my state government there is no limit to the amount of minions it will take keep the windows clean, they just want them cleaned.
For our elected politicians in Washington there is no limit to the size of government or how much money they need to spend to keep it running, they just want it running. Efficiency is for the four government employees telling the contractor he is not low bid……but they don’t care either…..all they want are the windows clean.
