The guys and gals are either really old, long since retired or early mid career working their way up through the committee later. Reliable service on committees helps research grants and favors to flow.
They serve on comittee after committee after committee. They sit through days and days and days of endless boring briefs by other "experts" who try not to tell them anything and the job of the panel is to make sure that they don't hear anything that they were not supposed to.
Then the committee takes the facts that were presented, and find the facts (those same facts, since the committee are all chosen for their reliablility) and then they will recomment that the government continue to study the options that the government said it was studying anyway, perhaps with the assistance of another paid committee.
The reward for all of this is pay(on some occasions), travel and second rate hotels, cheap wine and fattening hors d'oevres, and really really boring companionship of other boring committte members.
Then you spend weeks writing a thick report that no one will read that sits on the shelves of bureacracies and eventually the national archives, collecting dust. But occasionally someone will come along dumb enough to ask a question that the commission has reviewed (for the seventh time in the last 22 years) and the really idiotic quesitoner will leave with a box full of such commission reports to wade through before he/she can come back and ask another question.
The corruption is not the expense of these commissions (no one gets rich serving on them). It is that these are an excuse for heads of government never to make a decision on a major issue affecting the citizenry of the united states. The cost is the fact that the government spends a trillion a month doing nothing because it cannot decide what to do if anything other than continue to waste the taxpayers money.
I agree that its not a joke, but the joke is that we’ve all known about this for so long that it was a pop culture reference almost 30 years ago. But when “our” party is in power (whether “we” happen to be the left or the right), we give the government a pass and assume that it is looking out for our best interests. Its like DHS and the TSA. When the Republicans were in power, most people here hailed Bush for creating an agency to keep us safe. Some of us pointed out that the KGB is the Committee for State Security, which sounds a lot like DHS and had similar roles and mandates. But “our” guy was in charge so it was good. Now that the reins of that organization has been handed off to the “other” party, we hate it.
Regardless of who is in charge, government is NOT our friend. Never has been. Never will be. The People are a commodity to it, and a cheap and expendable commodity to boot. They work hard to only keep us happy and prosperous enough to keep going back to work and spending our hard-earned money. They only protect us from our enemies enough to keep them from shutting down our economy. The US government has evolved in the last century into something very dangerous and evil because it wears the face of an angel and has the soul of a demon.