The government is unbelievable. I should be prepared for all of this since I worked for the Navy last summer and all, but I still am not. After going to dozens of meetings (most of which don't actually produce any work... just plans for more meetings), talking to lots of people and just seeing what goes on at CMS, I have figured out what we do: nothing. Right now we have four concurrent audits going on, all of which take up government resources on both ends (auditor and auditee). Basically, CMS uses 1/5 of the federal budget so lots of people want to see where the money is going, but I guess they are not doing a good job. I will tell you what we do:

1. Deal with audits. Four concurrent is a bit out of the ordinary, but there are always lots of audits of CMS. One of the audits that they are doing is checking whether select laptops are encrypted, which sounds great, but that requires all of these people to stop whatever nonwork that they are pretending to do, bring their computer downstairs and get it back a few hours later.Yeah... I don't know how they are going to check their email and CNN either.

2. Set policies for the real workers: contractors. The government setup policies that force most work to be contracted to private industry to get the best price. What they did not do was to get rid of the people who used to be doing that job. So now we have all of these contractors doing the actual work, and the government workers sitting around "managing" them. So they instead just set hundred page long policies, have meetings on them and rework them over and over again.

3. Talk.I cannot believe how much people just sit around and BS with each other. It is great for "team building", but people do it for hours. There is one guy in the cube behind me who seriously will get into conversations about anything with anyone. One second he will be talking about how much he hates the project he is on, and the next he is talking about how much he hates the 5/6 year old soccer league that he coaches.

I was always against government programs like Medicare, social security and welfare before because they make people lazy, but I did not even account for the massive amount of beurocracy that they create, and the amount of laziness on the inside they create. Amazing... and I committed to working for them. Sigh.