As far as I can tell, Barr is only slightly more visible than Jeff Sessions was. This whole attorney general job makes me want to ask:
As far as I can tell, Barr is only slightly more visible than Jeff Sessions was. This whole attorney general job makes me want to ask:
In partial defense of Barr, there are 115,000 bureaucrats working at the DOJ. That is a massive organization chart.
If you have ever worked in a large organization - its not like a construction crew where a supervisor gives instructions to his team and then does a daily walk through to look over their shoulders. There are way too many people - it is impossible to achieve that direct span of control. So everything is done according to written policies and procedures. The policies are reviewed annually, changes recommended, procedures are tweaked.
Departments report results up through so many layers of bureaucracy and it takes forever for them to percolate up to the top. There is plenty of opportunity to massage the reports and make yourself look good. By the time a problem comes to light (if ever) it’s way too late for corrective measures. So they tweak the policies again. Nobody gets fired because there isn’t enough accountability to even assign blame.
This is the problem with a bloated bureaucracy - zero accountability.
The ONLY solution is cut it down to a hundredth the size. Or whatever size it was under George Washington (if there even was even a DOJ then).
115,000 people? Really? It is simply absurd to think that we need that many people to do anything useful. That number of people didn’t get hired deliberately out of need - it just grows like a fungus and there’s nothing to stop it.
I’ve been in a big organization before - not THAT big - but big - and I’ll tell you, it’s not as easy as it sounds to just get hired by the board as CEO, or appointed by the President as AG, and go over and make 115,000 people do what you want them to do. They know they will still be there when you are long gone, so they can just wait it out.
Just to go around and shake 115,000 peoples’ hands - if you met 50 people a day, five days a week, it would take 10 years. And that’s just shaking peoples’ hands one time - evaluating performance of key personnel and determining who needs to be fired? It’s impossible, which is exactly why it never happens.
When there is a President with enough balls and political clout to just fire EVERYONE in the entire Executive Branch and start from scratch - that is when the swamp will drain - it’s the only way, unfortunately.