SR 104-08: Finish the Damn Audit Resolution (Tabled)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

This was always the problem with audit. Congress took a massive amount of work, most of which will never be used for anything, and dumped it on an already overburdened GM office (now separated into the CG's office or whatever). Even active GM teams that tried to work on the audit made extremely slow progress. At this point, it's a pipe dream that is never going to happen and these continuous resolutions are essentially Congress whining at the game engine to do their job for them.

This happened twelve years ago and has continued since, so it is not like this is something new. There is this thinking that the GM office isn't working, lets fix it legislatively usually in the form of dictating what the GM must do. However, none of these actually make anything happen and unless and until you have someone who can get things done, nothing will change by passing a resolution or a bill dictating to the officers.

It is the literal definition of pushing on a string.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Didn't the SOIA deal with domestic/budget stuff before it was abolished?

1. Game Engine versus cabinet level policy execution
The GM/Comptroller is suppose to simulate the effects of actions made by the SoIA and SoS
The SoIA and SoS are suppose to implement domestic and foreign policy of the administration under the direction of the represent, to which the GM/Comptroller reacts

2. For a time pre-reset, this was muddled by having the SoS and SoIA do their own simulation, which resulted in SoS's awarding themselves Nobel Peace prices and such forth, as Adam Griffin used to emphasize frequently.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I assume no one here is a personification of Explorer right???

personification of Explorer?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

So this has been sitting a month now it seems.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Note the following is about all the "bills on hold" not just or even this one in particular:

At some point a choice has to be made here.

1. What is the process and outreach for finding replacements for CG and SoS? Are people being actively sought out, are efforts and outreach being made? Or are we just waiting for the phone to ring. I know this doesn't ensure success, and could lead to 100 nos, but you also may just find a yes.

2. What is that we need these people to do? We are "waiting for the SoS" on a particular other bill, but what is it that we need the SoS to do? The SoS advises the President along with the NSC (if it is constituted in a given administration) and then executes the administration's and thereby the country's foreign policy. However, in the absence of the SoS, the administration still exist and the administration theoretically would have an opinion or strategy for a given situation. This is not to dump the load on Sev, I know very painfully well what it is like to have your people resign midstream (glances at some people around the room. ), and in a rather painful example I did the work of the Archivist myself and spent much of early August 2018 putting bills on the Wiki.

3. The Comptroller doesn't work the same way because the GM team is independent from the executive branch. However, at some point we may have to consider sacrificing accuracy for functionality. Make some reasonable calculations based off previous data and then go from there.

4. While I would never consent to agree to Oakvale's opinion that the GM team should be abolished. To some extent we have unintentionally, fallen into a place where he has something of a point. We cannot just pause everything for months on end waiting for the phone to ring, and some white knight to ride in on shiny steed to save us, we have to save ourselves. At the very least we need to be discussing how we can work around these problems because something has to give to break the log jam for the sake of the game.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Nothing is stopping anyone from finishing the audit on their own in the absence of a CG. The entire audit process was based around looking at the the RL budget detail and identifying areas of potential waste from programs that had been transferred over from RL with the reset and were therefore 'hidden' in the rather broad outline that we use in-game. Specifically, Mr. R and I were using the budget appendices (see: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BUDGET-2018-APP). Anyone who wants to contribute to the audit can just look through that pdf and identify areas of redundant spending. It's a measly 1300 pages, should be a piece of cake.

Really, though, the entire premise of giving the audit to the GM department was/is stupid, because the numbers in the RL budget, absent any major changes, should be in-game canon, as the original post-reset budget was transferred from RL and that template has been used ever since. Therefore, the Game Engine's authority really shouldn't be needed at all. IIRC the only reason why we went through with a GM-controlled audit in the first place was because Mr. R agreed to do it (naturally he was very excited about the opportunity to recommend massive spending cuts in an official capacity).

Even beyond that, the idea of having the GM team audit the budget makes no sense in terms of game structure. It is kind of like asking God to audit the real life budget. It is the right idea (possibly), but it is really the work of Congress itself under its constitutional provisions as guardians of the purse strings (insert gratuitous lengthy remarks on the origination of the power of the purse, Glorious Revolution and such forth and such like 2013 style). Alternatively, it could be the work of an "independent organization" like a public watch dog group or think tank, a congressional committee (if we had those, not saying we should just throwing it out there), or even the DPC, BPC or similar such entity constituted legislatively or by executive order.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I am not exactly sure why an audit is needed, and in many cases, things identified as wasteful spending by an audit can actually be useful. In any case, I don't think spending cuts are a good thing with the pandemic still going on.

The main purpose and benefit would be to consolidate efforts. There is the ribbon cutting effect whereby politicians benefit from creating a new program rather than expanding or improving an existing one. Consolidating those duplicated efforts is of benefit from reducing expense on administrative cuts and also from utility of money spent standpoint.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Aye