I agree with you completely Lee. The question is do we just let it get worse and worse until the whole nation collapses under the weight or can we do something, anything, to stop it or slow it down? I wish some of our politicians knew this and/or cared enough to fix the bloat. How do we make government as efficient as private/public companies when they have different purposes and goals? I might have added “accountable” but companies aren’t very accountable except in a monetary way –“Fines” (which would be like fining ourselves) or going out of business (something that would be too disastrous a solution for a government we all rely on one way or another). You might have some good ideas, since you actually are familiar with their inside workings in a way I never could be at this point of my life. Thanks again for you comments.

Owning is possibly cheaper than renting in private industry depending on the stability of your business and the real-estate market. But we are talking about the government and the General Services Administration (GSA) which is probably one of the most inefficient, bloated US agencies. lol

Thanks for your detailed explanations/observations on government, Lee. I have only worked for for-profit public or private companies. They do things a bit differently, it appears. I do not think I have ever heard such a detailed, personal first hand insider account of general government practices before.
“When Regan came into office it was wiped out to cut cost. Training was done by program employees and contractors. I ended up doing a lot of training later in my career even though it was not part of my job description. I had to have more staff to get the assigned work done plus training.“—All of the smaller companies I worked for had any training done by a regular employee who was familiar with the operations of the job the trainee was about to do. Basically it consisted of the trainee following around the regular employee for a week or two (at most). Turnover was not constant (or I would be one of those leaving. Bad company.), so neither was training. Production of that regular employee suffered somewhat while doing so, but the company would take that into account and not penalize the regular employee for it. If a trainee couldn’t get a basic grasp of their job duties after one or two weeks, see ya. After your training, you could still ask questions of a more experienced employee as they came up. In my case, after 3 months anywhere I generally was as knowledgeable as any average long time employee. I like to learn and do so constantly. In at least one case, after only three 3 months I myself was told to train a new hire. I distinctly remember one trainee asking me how long I had been there and when I said “3 months” the shocked expression on his face made me laugh. He told me thought I had been there for around 10 years. This method was used by all of the small privately owned companies and some publicly owned ones I worked for. At a large publicly owned company I once worked for, there was an employee from HR with a small team (like a teacher and 2 assistants) who trained classes of maybe up to 30 new hires at one time. Sometime it might just be a handful. I think that was for one week. Then the new hires that passed were set loose and any questions they had after that were answered by the experienced employees around them.
“For background we paid rent to GSA for our space who leased it from the actual owner of the building. The Green requirements significantly raised the cost of construction and subsequently the rent charged by the owner which GSA passed on to us. There was a study done several years ago that determined that despite the long term cost savings projected Green Federal buildings actually increased long term costs of space and saved nothing.“—Isn’t the fact our government is paying rent or leasing instead of owning the building part of the problem? Everyone always is saying how renting or leasing is cheaper, but is it really? A company I worked for once leased an electric tow motor. The tow motor was there when I arrived and remained when I left 10 year later. It was still there 7 years later when I visited. It was as good as the newer ones we had just not as pretty. I preferred it over the new ones, myself. More reliable. Like a luxury car with more doodads, there were more things that could go wrong on the new ones. During my time there, the company was told they paid the lease so long they could it buy it for 1 dollar. I think I had been there around 6 years at that point. It was probably around 11 years old at that point. Apparently the company had paid for the original cost of the new tow motor 3x over by then. Another company one of my friends worked for had a piece of expensive electronic equipment that they had a maintenance contract for. Somewhere along the way, the company stopped using the equipment. Nobody ever cancelled the maintenance contract. My friend said the company paid 60 grand for the contract (over a number of years) after they stopped using the equipment before someone realized. Oops. I looked up “rent versus buy” on the internet. They mostly claim renting/leasing is cheaper than buying but they leave out context. If you stay at or use for short periods of time, yes. The longer you use or stay the less beneficial renting or leasing is. Check out this summary section on renting versus buying housing from “NerdWallet”. I underlined the parts that I feel add some context to the question—“There’s no single answer to the question “Should I rent or buy?” Your solution depends on where you live, whether renting or buying an equivalent home is cheaper, and on additional assumptions you can include in your analysis. A handful of shifting factors can also influence your answer, many of them out of your control, like the direction of the housing market, interest rates and returns on investment.
When comparing the two options, renting can often come out ahead, at least compared to the early years of a home purchase. But like the tortoise racing the hare, owning a home is more “slow and steady,” a marathon instead of a sprint. The virtues of buying grow when you stay in a home for a while. As the years pass and your home’s equity and value have a chance to build, less of each mortgage payment is used to pay off interest and more goes toward your principal.
Whether renting is cheaper also depends on whether renters invest what they would have spent on a down payment and any savings they accrue from renting each month. Home buying costs more upfront, but you can get some of that back (and potentially more) when you sell the home. To match or exceed a home buyer’s return on investment, renters must invest, not spend, those savings.” —-Is the government a short term or long term lessee in your experience? I am guessing they do not change buildings or upgrade them very often. Was that your experience? The one where the Green requirements significantly raised the cost. Were those changes made mid-stream or were they planned that way from the beginning? Changing requirements mid stream can increase costs substantially. I have seen it often happen to the cost of our military equipment like Fighter Jets and Warships.
“I can promise you there staff assigned to implementing those programs and writing the mandatory reports to the Administration and/or Congress showing progress. At the ordinary employee level this usually meant required annual training on the topic in vogue at the time. For example, I had annual Diversity training in my later years. It was essentially the same training every year often by the same contractor. By the time I retired i knew it so well I could have taught the course.“–This just seems like another example of government bloat to me. I can see some staff permanently assigned for writing the reports, but it seems to me it should be centralized staff that would then gather the data from the heads of each department or division within government. If they have staff like that duplicated elsewhere, it seems wasteful to me. Something I assume goes on no matter what new initiative was started. Like your “annual” diversity training. Why annual? There was a company I worked at that had a manager that sexually harassed an underling. The company had “sexual harassment” training for everyone. By HR, not a contractor. One time. Everyone had to sign a paper saying they had the training and understood it. Get caught sexually harassing someone after that and you could be fired almost immediately after the investigation is completed. We didn’t need training every year. I can safely assume new hires also got that training once going forward. That is just an example of more government waste to me. Not the Diversity training. Annual Diversity training. I would not be surprised if the trainer (a contractor, you said) got paid per trainee attending so annual training it is. I had a friend (he got married, I lost touch) that was skilled with computers who worked for a company. He realized he was underpaid. He asked for a raise. They said no. He left. The equipment was old so few knew the computer language it used anymore. They asked him back. He went back as a “contractor” at 3x the wage they paid him before. They probably found out they would have had to pay more than that if they hired someone new with that amount of experience in an obsolete computer language, if they found anyone at all. He also told me once the more money he makes, the less work he has to do. Another friend I knew well (dead now) went from wages in the low $40000s annually working 45 hours a week as assistant manager to earning over $100000 annually working 7 hours a week as manager. His underlings did the rest of “his” work for him. His out of town “boss” had no idea and thought he was still putting in 45 hours a week. Are government employees monitored any better than my friend was? These are just my experiences and observations concerning wasteful spending at companies. I bet government waste could put those stories to shame.
“And of course there is the “Use it or Loose it” problem when it comes to Appropriated funds.” and “On the appropriated side our budget from the Administration and Congress was based on what we spent the year before. Even if we were more frugal or efficient during the year at years end there was always a push to spend every nickel so as not to lose our base funding in the new fiscal year and then to ask for even more the next year especially if there was some new “hot Topic” in congress that we could justify requesting funding for.“—This one I have been aware of for a long time and I always thought it was stupid. Even some (many?) public and private companies operate this way. Punishing a Department or Division within government for saving taxpayer money rather than rewarding them. How about making sure it was a sustainable lesser use of budget first (over multiple budget cycles, I would imagine at least 2 -5 years) and then rewarding everyone in that Department or Division with a bonus based on how much money the tax payers save over time? And allow at least some of a budget surplus to ride permanently as a bit of a rainy day fund or perhaps to eventually fund something the Department or Division needs or wants that isn’t ever going to be in the budget (as long as there is a benefit to the taxpayers involved. A trip to Paris or wildly extravagant party for everyone in the Division or Department is not the type of thing I have in mind). Or peel off just a portion of any surplus to go to the general government finances. That would encourage everyone working in government to constantly think of ways to operate more efficiently instead of allowing wasteful practices to go on and on. Could be a one time bonus for everyone there, or a small addition to an hourly rate, or maybe even some way I haven’t thought of but someone else will.
Aren’t these current practices basically why I keep hearing Social Security is always in trouble? Congress keeps raiding money out of it. I assume if that money was never raided, Social Security would be spinning off enough interest income it would be self funding or even profitable instead of in trouble today. Does anyone know enough about that subject to show I am mistaken?
Now to me, this is a conversation. I do not think the new initiatives are the problem, I think they way we handle any new initiatives is the problem. You disagree and may still feel that way, but we both explained why we feel that way and no insults needed to be traded. Thanks Lee. I quite enjoyed hearing your experience working for government. This might be my longest post ever. Maybe even longer than Dazed and Coinfuseds’ longest post, and that is saying something.
I would like to point out to everyone that does not like long non-coin related posts here (I personally do not care, as long as they are civil. Learning about more than coins here I consider a positive unintended result, not a negative one.), I did not bring up government first (Craig did-“federal unionised employees at that,“), and my posts that are strictly about coins tend to be much, much, shorter. Just saying.

It depends on the Administration and can change drastically when the Administration changes. For example early in my career we had a large (excessively so) in house training staff. When Regan came into office it was wiped out to cut cost. Training was done by program employees and contractors. I ended up doing a lot of training later in my career even though it was not part of my job description. I had to have more staff to get the assigned work done plus training.

Green initiatives generally impact the cost of rent. We did a major renovation to our building several years ago which had to comply with Green requirements. For background we paid rent to GSA for our space who leased it from the actual owner of the building. The Green requirements significantly raised the cost of construction and subsequently the rent charged by the owner which GSA passed on to us. There was a study done several years ago that determined that despite the long term cost savings projected Green Federal buildings actually increased long term costs of space and saved nothing.

As to Social issues even though most agencies will not have positions labeled as such (there is a standard catalog of position titles you have to choose from) I can promise you there staff assigned to implementing those programs and writing the mandatory reports to the Administration and/or Congress showing progress. At the ordinary employee level this usually meant required annual training on the topic in vogue at the time. For example, I had annual Diversity training in my later years. It was essentially the same training every year often by the same contractor. By the time I retired i knew it so well I could have taught the course.

And of course there is the “Use it or Loose it” problem when it comes to Appropriated funds. My Agency was majority funded through user fees charged to large corporations for services provided in their exporting of commodities but we also received Appropriated funds because much of the work we did in Standardization benefited the domestic market in general. On the User fee side constantly worked with our customers to improve efficiencies in our services to me their needs in a cost effective manner. Unlike the Mint we had direct involvement which each individual customer and their trade associations. In addition to quality cost was always an issue. On the appropriated side our budget from the Administration and Congress was based on what we spent the year before. Even if we were more frugal or efficient during the year at years end there was always a push to spend every nickel so as not to lose our base funding in the new fiscal year and then to ask for even more the next year especially if there was some new “hot Topic” in congress that we could justify requesting funding for.

After a quick search Lee, (I tried “Green, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and other social Initiatives at the U.S. Mint”) I did not see anything showing they hired anyone for those types of positions. Did they make those hires where you work, Lee? Or did you find anything to contradict that? Does anyone else know the answer?
I am guessing the number is zero or one. Sounds to me like something they could just modify in an employee handbook or add to the HR officials’ current duties.
I tried to look up “Employee count and positions held at the U.S. Mint” on an internet search, and nothing specific came up for me.
I did see the U.S. Mint website has a “Working at the United States Mint” section off the main page under “About”, then “Careers”. There is an “Employee and Labor Relations Specialist” position listed there. Is that the type of position you are referring to? Interestingly, if that is the type of position you are referring to, the page also says it has not been updated since 2017. Either it is just out of date, or it is operating the same way as it did under the previous President.
I see that Biden signed an Executive Order on his first day in office called “Executive Order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce”. This paragraph was in section 1: “As the Nation’s largest employer, the Federal Government must be a model for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, where all employees are treated with dignity and respect. Accordingly, the Federal Government must strengthen its ability to recruit, hire, develop, promote, and retain our Nation’s talent and remove barriers to equal opportunity. It must also provide resources and opportunities to strengthen and advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the Federal Government. The Federal Government should have a workforce that reflects the diversity of the American people. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible workplaces yield higher-performing organizations.
Federal merit system principles include that the Federal Government’s recruitment policies should “endeavor to achieve a work force from all segments of society” and that “[a]ll employees and applicants for employment should receive fair and equitable treatment in all aspects of personnel management” (5 U.S.C. 2301(b)(1), (2)).”
I didn’t notice anything bad anywhere in that entire statement or in the Code, did you? I assume the top part is what Biden added and the second part was the original Code.
Looks like U.S.C. 2301 has been around a long time, but I couldn’t figure out how long. It appears it was modified (or added?) in 1978, then 1990, and 2014 if I read the data correctly on the Law Websites I looked at. I am a legal amateur. I looked at Cornell University and a .gov site for the info.
I am guessing that whatever bloat has possibly occurred in our U.S. Mint, or the rest of our government for that matter, it didn’t just happen because we initiated “Green, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and other social Initiatives” recently . It’s not like I used to hear until now about how efficient and lean our government is. It has been bloated my whole life at the least.
I would imagine if you have been in government for 42 years, you know that as well.
By the way, I didn’t see anything about “Green” in any of those mentions. The only “Green and the Federal Government” thing I do know about personally was through a penny stock I used to own (from 2010-2017, EFOI) that had a contract with the Navy to replace all their conventional light bulbs on their ships with LED ones. I just did a search now and saw they signed a new 5 year contract in 2020. Not sure if they would be a good investment today despite the current cheap stock price, I would have to research them all over again. The Navy was thrilled. They used to have sailors constantly changing bulbs (there are a lot of light bulbs on even a small ship, imagine on an Aircraft Carrier) but when they changed to LEDs, they lasted much longer and saved tons of money on labor, bulbs, and power usage. They were 1/4-1/2 done with all the conversions across the entire Navy when I sold my position. No modifications were required to any existing light fixtures. Going Green looks like a win for all U.S. citizens in this case.
Thanks for your comments. I learned some new things and noticed what EFOI is doing for the first time since I sold my shares. I sold them in 2017 for a reason and based on todays current share price I was quite right to do so, but that the contract was renewed in 2020 is at least one good sign in their favor.

Christo,

Unfortunately for the future of the numismatic hobby in the USA, most serious coin collectors are old White men. I saw a photo of last month’s ANA coin show & convention first day ribbon-cutting ceremony where collectors were waiting to get into the bourse floor & of about 35 people in the photo they were all older White men, except for 2 females & 1 person of color.
How many kids under age 18 do you know who are serious coin collectors (numismatists)?

Happy Collecting!

NumisdudeTX

True.

But mostly I was trying to bring a little positivity/humor to an increasingly negative comment section.

Hopefully young collectors don’t think all of the cranky old guys in this thread are the norm in this hobby.

You are correct to point that out. Federal employee unions cannot bargain on wages only conditions of employment. The government determines a COLA each year which is applied to retirement benefits (social Security and Federal retirement) but not necessarily to the GS Schedule. The President makes a recommendation for an increase to the GS-Schedule but Congress has the final say on Federal Employee pay raises which in my 42 years of Federal service was always less than the official COLA.

The bigger salary cost problem for Federal Agencies just like Universities is administrative bloat. I’d be curious to know how many people on the Mints payroll have nothing to do with its core functions but are being paid for work on Green, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and other social Initiatives.

On the other hand……..The mint ends up producing far fewer silver proof sets then originally planned due to slower sales and the rush to get one creates FOMO. The secondary markets sees quadruple price gains before years end, and……

I’m sure glad I got mine this week!

😉