LogFAQs > #970360807

BeerOnTap posted...

This is your money being spent haphazardly without any care or deliberation.

While I agree that a spending bill of that size obviously isn't being read by the people voting on it, and that's kind of a problem, it's not like somebody in some back room somewhere threw together a bunch of random numbers and sent it off to be rubber stamped with no oversight. That bill is the product of numerous rounds of lower government officials conducting analyses and working within their own departments and smaller teams to put together their pieces of the budget, passing through multiple layers of more detailed scrutiny and approval before ultimately coming here for final approval. There is plenty of care and deliberation happening, it's just happening behind the scenes.

If anything, bringing something of that size and complexity to the top like this is stupid, since the vote for approval mostly boils down to "did somebody I like put this together?" and "do the people who voted for me want me to approve things or not?", rather than actually doing anything to assess the content or context. It should really be split into multiple bills and left to multiple departments to handle, with final approval consisting mostly of "each department wants X and has scored Y points on our prioritization algorithm, how should we distribute it?" As it stands, it's pretty much just performative.