Stop Treating Federal Spending as a Jobs Program

There’s a quiet rot in how the federal government spends money, and naming it is the first step to fixing it: too often, the point of the spending is the spending itself. Programs and contracts get sized, sited, and sustained because of the jobs they spread across districts — not because of what they actually deliver for the country.

That’s the real problem. It’s bigger than any single wasteful contract.

When the goal becomes the jobs, the mission suffers

Once a program is valued for the paychecks it distributes rather than the results it produces, everything bends in the wrong direction. Work gets stretched out instead of finished. Outdated systems get kept alive because shutting them down would mean lost jobs in the right districts. Coming in under budget can even be treated as a political failure, because it means less money flowing to the contractors and communities that have come to depend on it.

This is how a government ends up spending more and more while building less and less. The taxpayer foots the bill twice — once for the work, and again for the inefficiency baked in on purpose.

Don’t reward unfinished work

The second failure compounds the first. Contracts are routinely written to pay for cost overruns and to accept delivery of things that don’t actually work yet — half-finished systems, equipment missing the features it was bought for, projects waved through so the books look clean. Paying in full for work that isn’t done doesn’t just waste money; it teaches every future contractor that finishing — and finishing right — is optional.

Imagine signing for a new car that arrived with no brakes, and paying the full price anyway. We’d never do it in our own lives. Government shouldn’t do it with ours.

Our approach

Spend to accomplish the mission, not to distribute jobs. Every dollar should be justified by what it delivers for the country, full stop. If a program’s main argument is the employment it spreads around, that’s a signal to rethink it — not to fund it.

Buy at a fair, fixed price. Move away from open-ended arrangements that quietly absorb every overrun and toward firm commitments, the way serious projects are run everywhere else.

Never make the final payment for work that isn’t finished or doesn’t perform. Hold the last dollar until what was promised actually does what it was promised to do. Results earn payment; excuses don’t.

None of this means abandoning the workers or communities involved — it means being honest that the way to help them is real, productive work the country actually needs, not make-work dressed up as policy. A government that spends to build, rather than to be seen spending, is one we can finally afford.

The fuller case is in Righting the Ship.