#5 You nailed it Doctor. I'll quote OlduberGroober's recent comment at Qwiket.
I believe, with no scientific but plenty of practical evidence, that bureaucracies invariably and quickly reach a point where they are spending much more time and effort on the bureaucracy than on their mission. NASA is a prime example of this, bumming rides to orbit on Russian rockets and having their best American successes hiring SpaceX and OSC to do what NASA once did. Mostly they endlessly design the next big thing, but never actually get it to fly. Like most other federal agencies, they are a bureaucracy-shaped rathole we throw money down.
My solution: Every single bureaucracy should be closed and replaced every 25 or so years. One could avoid 'startup shock' by having two competing agencies with staggered terms. There would need to be a strong bias, encoded in law, against hiring people form the previous agency.
It's an ugly solution, but less ugly than what we have now. |
