Who is using three as an excessive number?
Having 2.5% of the entire workforce having p-cards seems like it's probably excessive. With 1,200 clinics and 12,000 cards, that's 10 per clinic... and yeah, that seems excessive to me.
The article mentioned needing things for emergencies as a primary reason to not reduce the number of purchasers from 12,000 to ~500. But most clinics aren't hospitals, and most of them aren't dealing with emergency situations. Those happen at hospitals, of which there are 170.
Why?
2.5% means that in a department of 100 people, only 2-3 have the ability to make purchases this way. Probably the manager, an assistant and a clerical lead. Given that a 100 person department is rather large, it means that a (still not small) department of 40 people would have one person able to make this type of purchase.
I know you are an advocate of a centralized bureaucracy for purchasing and accounting, but in practice that's not conducive to smooth and efficient operation.
Also, "emergency situations" in the context of purchasing for a department does not correlate to "medical emergency." It corelates to "we need this ASAP." It's not something that happens at hospitals and not clinics. Someone may have in another post mentioned risks to patient health, but that's not really the right parameter. And the situation at the VA is not unusual.
In the early 90s, I worked on a large field water quality modeling project. We manufactured a great deal of our field sampling equipment and installations. Consequently, we used an awful lot of hardware: nuts, bolts, cable, hose clamps, lumber, etc. This was pre-P-Card, so we had to use a different method. We had a standing PO at several places...TSC (Tractor Supply Company) was one. My boss would just send one of us over to get what we needed. Each month, the bill was sent in and paid. Pretty much the same thing as a P-Card.
The alternatives would be:
- Make a new PO every time we needed a few bolts. then wait a day or two for purchasing to process the order and then some vendor to ship them to us,
- Find the one person in the building you think should have a P-Card and drag them to the hardware store. Which would likely mean that you are using a professional engineer as a gopher.
- Ask staff to make the purchases on their personal credit cards and then submit paperwork for reimbursement. Of course, the employee would not be compensated for any interest accrued waiting for purchasing to process the reimbursement. And I've seen reimbursements take over thirty days.
And that's just for stuff we need in the office/lab/shop. this was a field project where we were making our installations 200 miles away from the office. This is where P-Cards/T-Cards are
really important. You don't always know what you are going to need until you start work.
Now, applying that to a hospital, clinic or office. Purchase orders are great for things that you know you are going to need in advance. They absolutely suck for unanticipated needs. Pulling some department head out to Wal-Mart to buy some widget is like pulling the P.E. out to the hardware store to buy bolts. It's stupid, wasteful, and inefficient.
I know I'm going on about this in excessive detail, but it's really annoying when someone who is probably more familiar with the need for office supplies thinks they know how non-office environments should work.
The DOGE approach on this falls into the category of "Break Things." And it's a
stupid idiotic approach that should almost never be used. It originates from Facebook, who abandoned it in 2014. Is it used here out of malice? Probably not, unless they are deliberately trying to set departments up to fail. More like out of incompetence and laziness. There is an approach along the lines of "lets change/remove this and see who screams" rather than doing the job correctly and investigating what something does, who uses it, and then developing a better way of accomplishing the task if needed.
