Observing Los Angeles County's Wasteful Practices

I worked in the private sector before I worked in the County Government, and was shocked to see the degree of waste when I joined the County more than a decade ago. Taxpayers should be made aware of this mistreatment of their tax dollars. I notified my superiors of issues, and they rarely seem concerned. In general, "rocking the boat" is considered a far bigger "sin" than waste, and thus waste continues in the name of office politics.

NOTICE: Please see the disclaimer first.

Most of the observed waste falls into one or more of four categories: 

The first is being "penny-wise-pound-foolish". This is a British expression about over-focusing on little things such that you don't notice or don't get around to bigger things. A common excuse for doing this is "it takes too many resources to just look into an issue raised". In some cases it's true, but this excuse is way over-used. It's laziness. I'll visit ways to manage the expense of waste studies later.

The second is "spread the waste to hide it". A young child will learn that if they smoosh their vegetables around the plate, parents are less likely to notice they didn't finish them. A comparable administrative version is to add or leave wasteful processes and paperwork in place because streamlining would be "too expensive". But this may mean thousands of employees are spending extra time on administrative gobbledygook. This extra time may not show up on any budget report, but still costs taxpayers. For example, spending say $200k to prevent a million dollars in extra work spread around to many groups is skipped because it's not typically tracked. More examples will be given later.

Cutting a group or project that would simplify a process for employees becomes a bragging point, "See, I'm cost-cutter!", but in fact it's jacking up costs by spreading the waste thinner and wider. It indeed takes an item off the budget sheet, a bragging point, but waste then grows into other forms that don't have a budget sheet item. It's still waste, just stealth waste. Note this is also penny-wise-pound-foolish.

The third problem pattern is lack of cross-branch coordination. Bureaucracies like hierarchies, also known as "chain of command". Often there are opportunities to cut costs or be more efficient by coordinating across branches in the organizational tree. But such is often skipped because "hopping branches" is discouraged in Tree Land. You are only supposed to go up or down a branch, or at least pressured to. 

Because of this "tree love", surpluses and shortages of labor and materials happen simply because the left hand doesn't want to talk to the right hand to share or trade resources. Once when I complained about such, I was told point blank by a supervisor, "But that's the way we do things here!" as if it were gospel. In the County that indeed does seem to be gospel. I've heard many many variations on "Shuddup, we're used to waste, don't rock the boat!"

The fourth is perpetual budget shortages. "There's no budget" is often the excuse given for being wasteful. Short-term budget shortfalls are expected, but I've seen the excuse used for more than a decade. If waste continues that long, it's not a "budget shortage", but a shortage of management motivation to change bad habits: a Sanity Shortage. 

Some tried to paint me as a perfectionist to slander me. Some fixes are indeed not easy or not cheap, but we can at least identify the low-hanging-fruit of waste cleanup. Many of the anti-waste practices we'll get into are common to the private sector, who will go bankrupt if they over-waste. In the County, taxpayers are bailing out the waste without even knowing it because they don't know it exists. Bankruptcy spanks the private sector for waste, but nobody is spanking the County, so they waste on...

👉 Examples and case studies will be given in this blog over the months. 

Here are general suggestions for correcting them:

The lowest hanging fruit solution is to include an anti-waste section in all Department's policy manuals and send out an email notice to all employees, alerting them to its existence. I couldn't find any anti-waste clauses in some existing Department policy manuals. That's unacceptable. 

Have a way to report and log potential waste, and do periodic follow-ups. Even if a Department can't solve all waste issues, just knowing somebody is looking will motivate managers to do something about many bad practices. Right now, people rarely check, and waste lives on.

A more expensive prevention technique is to audit the workloads of random employees to make sure the policy is being followed. By doing it randomly, you save the expense of auditing everyone, but still sending a message that wasters can be caught and punished. The audit rate doesn't have to be high to start having an impact, and thus doesn't have to cost much.  

The auditors should probably interview employees without their managers being present in order to get more candid responses. Otherwise, they'll often tell their manager what they want to hear instead of the truth. And there should be a way to anonymously report such waste in general to avoid retaliation by immediate managers.

There should also be at least one efficiency analyst for the County and at least one for bigger departments. They monitor the "waste log" mentioned and try to solve the biggest sources of waste by coordinating solutions and resources among different parts of the County. A surplus in one spot can fill a shortage in another. (There are various different job titles an efficiency analyst may fall under.)

Most of what such efficiency analysts do is formalized common-sense, such as cost-versus-benefits analysis comparing the cost of fixing X versus the cost of leaving X broken or convoluted. 

👉 More about the Waste Tracking Log and Waste Policy 

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