What I have noticed in dealing with various agencies at all levels is they mostly have not adopted labor saving technology. Agencies get important by growing the staff and the budget.
I worked in a mid-sized public bureacracy for 28 years, 14 in the bowels in Headquarters at a management level. I was consider creative, persistent and practical. It was like pulling water up hill to accomplish some of the things i did. Going through committees, specialist staff ( I in stalled a LAN in an agency that was totally mainframe and the IT staff just about had a heart attack.), directors staff, director and deputy directors, unions. Then outside the agency, the secretary’s office, the department of General Services, The department of finance, the assembly and senate budget committees and the governor’s blue pencil veto of something his office already approved.
My experience sold me on the concept of benign dictatorship.
“... Agencies get important by growing the staff and the budget.”
Hints at author Terris’ central theses. Those of us who had to work with various agencies may have encountered them elsewhere:
1. No “outsider” can possibly learn enough to manage a single agency. The day-to-day realities of the job will bring him down to earth. Soon.
2. Each agency (nanny-state entitlement-disbursing agencies at any rate) has a mission so vital, so necessary, that it’s beyond good and evil. Which places it that much farther beyond the ken of the deplorables.
3. Therefore, the “administrative state” is immune, no matter what our outsider-president and his appointees intend or attempt.
Gen.Blather’s final sentence neatly sums up a bit of bureaucratic logic many Americans have not yet grasped:
Agencies are formed to accomplish specific tasks. But every one of them has to compete each year, for funding and status. Inevitably, they fall into competing with each other. Officially, they need more funds and bigger staffs to accomplish their mission better, but the reality is that bigger, more-lavishly-funded agencies improve their status in the hierarchy.