[boop]

What we REALLY have in the US is a government run by an un-elected bureaucratic state.

Think of all the extra-Constitutional departments that issue and enforce edicts, like the Department of Education, the Energy Department, ATF, etc.

These should be things that the democratically elected congress should be doing.

Not paper pushers with an agenda.

[Sequoyah101]

Long ago, congress also lost the picture. They became too self-important to be bothered with detail and so gave away those obligations. I think it was somewhere along about the time of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 that Congress took action to formally give up power to federal bureaucrats. We went from Zero base budgeting to Base Line budgeting with automatic increases built in for inflation and "just because" and created the monster that is now the CBO. Believe it or not, Carter tried to return us to Zero Base Budgeting sanity. IMHO we would be better off somewhere in between the two but without the automatic increases built in to anything.

I am reading an interesting book written by General George Kenny, "General Kenny Reports". It is amazingly fast paced written in first person for the most part. Something like 800 pages and I managed only 129 yesterday evening. It has been used as a text for War College. The fineness of detail is astounding. Kenny was commander of allied air forces and Fifth Air Force in the SW Pacific in WWII of course.

What Kenny found when he took command of a failed outfit was what I have said about organizations with too many people. He even found the mess of a version of DEI. Provide someone a position and he will make a job out of it. Without direction and need he will build an empire of trouble. That is what Kenny found when he arrived in Brisbane, Australia in September 1942. He dismantled it. Quickly! He also dismantled the ridiculous version of DEI he found.

Managers, and the higher they are the worse it is, inevitably think that when you have less of something, like progress, you need more of only one thing, people. I can think of many times I have taken over a problem only to be offered more people to fix it, that is not usually the solution. Onboarding more people into a mess without a solid plan or need only makes a bigger mess. The world is often Pareto or should be. When 20% of the people are producing 80% of the work you need to get the 80% the hell out of their way and start again from there. Argentina?