The government is wasteful. This is an axiom of conservative politics that is hard to disagree with. The evidence comes in droves. Stories of bridges to nowhere, billions of unaccounted for military spending and the endless accusations that government agencies are overpaying for this or that, quickly turn abstract claims into real outrage. Wasteful spending is inherently a concern when it comes to the government, which does not have a profit motive and a system that incentivizes over budgeting/spending. Even very liberal budget experts state without hesitation that government waste has to exist because the modern budgetary process is inherently setup up in a way that incentivizes it. Hence the necessity of budget acts in the 1990s which utilized threats of sequestration, to force austerity. Naturally this should result in elimination of activities that do not support the success of ambitious agency heads. But we don’t have those budget acts anymore and the federal government is so large that it seems impossible for it not to have hidden waste within.

$16 muffins are not a good example example of this. The real waste is never this easy to find and never this politically ripe.

The political drama over the revelation of the Justice Department’s report was to be expected. Legislators like Rep. Poe took the report, seemingly without any other investigation, and jumped on the opportunity to profile an example of government waste. As some expected, the story of the $16 muffin is quickly shaping up to be a mistake by those who complied the report rather than the government caught in its typical throws of wasteful spending.

Even if this happened to be a case of silly government bureaucrats it amounted to $4,300. I’m not going to waste any time putting this into context of the budget or GDP or military spending or anything else. Its an insignificant amount of money on its face. I as mentioned before the real waste is going to be found in deep in the budget, and its going to be hard find. Its is also going to be at least a little politically difficult to call it “waste” because if it got in the budget, and is a meaningful size, at least a couple of important people had put it there. But this is the real work that legislators who want to claim to be budget hawks need to do. It takes political courage. It takes long hours and hard questions. Clearly, this work is not being done. Instead, we have apparently false claims about muffins that amount to a smaller sum than the government probably spends on coffee filters in one day.