This is one thing that constantly pisses me off, especially with those making a huge deal out of "government is too expensive, private industry can do it cheaper": Sure, you can do anything cheaper when you cut corners, don't have any accountability, screw over people, not follow rules, etc.My experience is that being "lean" and "six sigma" is like the holy grail for management and accounting, until they realize what's required to get there and stay there, then they back off and want to do just enough to call themselves lean.
There are also plenty of places that poorly manage their supply chain under the guise of being lean, only to bear the cost on the back end. Nothing like sitting on $200K in WIP while it waits for $1K worth of hardware to come in.
*Looks around for potential Black Belt mentors...*
Time and time again, with "privatization" we are lured in by "oh, this will be cheaper", then there doesn't end up being any accountability and it ends up costing a lot more in the end. Look up Organization Designation Authority (ODA) for the FAA. The list goes on and on and it usually ends up with something either failing catastrophically because the revenue/money was never enough for the true cost of the operation, requiring way more money than planned, or having to revert back to increased oversight, because the farmed-out regulatory requirements were not followed.
Also, back in the Army, when our motto was "do more with less". We were actually told this BS by leadership and all sorts of people bought into it. It is just complete insanity when you think about it. I hate sayings like that...like "trust, but verify". Well, if you actually trusted, you woudn't have to verify. The fact that you have to verify inherently means you don't trust. Don't sit here and tell me the sky is green.
Back to the cost-cutting though, lots of **** is real expensive. You want to control costs, sure, but some of this is why business is hard. Not everyone gets to make it.