“... 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.
There is a truism I learned from a bright guy when i made manager. If we give you a million you will probably do some good work because there is more to do than what we can currently do. If you have to cut a million somehow you will do so and your department will survive and three years from now people will think the status quo is normal, just the way you do now.
Pubic agencies can expand or contract as they need to or to survive. no one says,. if you cut our budget, we can no long continue.