It's the worst sort of bureaucractic bullshit.
I would think that is par for the course within almost any area of the public sector.
Generally speaking, I find working within the federal bureaucracy to be annoying and sometimes cumbersome, but usually manageable. There's a lot of extra paperwork and documentation, and congressionally-mandated but otherwise useless online training courses to take, but usually you're allowed to do your job as long as you meet your timelines and stay under budget.
But the travel restrictions are just dumb. There were some bad apples in one agency who totally defrauded the government, and I support firing those people and even recouping the lost funds from their personal accounts. But to then turn around and punish 2 million other federal employees, who had nothing to do with those few bad apples, is obviously a political ploy to appease the angry mobs and not in any way related to the problem at hand.
Imagine some punk kid from your town steals a car. Rather than put him in jail and return the car, the city council decides that everyone in town is henceforth limited to 1.5 miles of driving per week. You have to continue paying for your car insurance and maintenance, you're just limited in how much you can drive. That's about the closest analogy I can think of to the way they've handled the federal travel scandals. It doesn't address the problem and it hurts people who haven't done anything wrong, but oh boy does it play well in the headlines.
How do you think the taxpayer feels when they read stories about the Feds spending $2.2 million dollars to study lesbians obesity?
I imagine that people who have no interest in obesity research are pretty pissed off about it. I bet some folks are also annoyed that the government is trying to cure cancer, is conducting a war, is monitoring citizen's emails, is regulating pollution limits, is reforming schools, and is building space probes. The US government is like the most diversified company in the world, and there's always going to be something to hate in their business plan.
Personally, I really hate that the government is giving 40 billion dollars per year to the oil and gas industry, consistently the most profitable industry on the planet and simultaneously the largest recipient of government tax breaks and benefits. I think that's straight up fraud, stealing from the American taxpayer to line the pockets or corporate titans. And it pisses me off way more than any little 2 million dollar obesity study ever could. Just to help you out with the math, that's 20,000 times the amount you're upset about, taken from taxpayers and given to Chevron and Exxon and Shell. Twenty thousand times as much. Per year.
And even that 40 billion is small change in the grand scheme of things. We spend roughly seven hundred billion dollars on national defense, another seven hundred billion on medicare, and another 700 billion on social security. As ridiculous as the 40 billion oil and gas industry subsidy is, we could double it by only cutting those three programs by less than 2%.
And that 2 million dollar obesity study? Suddenly it's a rounding error. Your calculator doesn't have enough decimal places for it to even show up. Government is huge, and punishing workers with pay freezes or restricting employee travel is not the way to balance the budget. We need significant structural reforms to the things we actually spend money on, not headline-making publicity stunts (like a shutdown) to trim a few million here and there.