You make some great points in your post @dwinblood. Waste and abuse run rampant in all areas of the government. My biggest beef is at the end of the fiscal year when organizations feel the rush to make big purchases and use up the remainder of their budget because they are worried they will not get the same level of funding the next fiscal year.
Not to mention I used to review and approve all the travel vouchers in my organization and when I tried to call people out for unnecessary spending, the leadership would just kind of ignore it and find some lame excuses to overlook it: "maybe there wasn't any hotel availability in that town" or "it's an authorized expense". I caught one incident where a guy stayed in a town an hour and a half away and drove all those miles every morning and because I knew the guy, I knew it was because he wanted to hit the bars in that city and he knew the town where he was supposed to stay had zero nightlife. People need to have the cajones to call out when they see that kind of stuff. Just my two cents.