I ran across some interesting remarks by Donald Rumseld about the bureaucratic explosion in Washington of the last twenty to thirty years:
“Well, I suppose the two things that leap to mind — one is the interaction between the Congress and the department has changed dramatically since the 1970s. Back then the — as I recall, the authorization bill was about 50 or 60 pages. Today it’s 900 pages. The degree that the committees of the Congress — the staffs have blown up by many, many multiples on the congressional committees, with the result being that there are just an enormous number of requirements and inhibitions and restrictions and prohibitions that are imposed on the department. We’re up, I think, in the 900 level of reports that we send up there. I don’t even know who reads them, but we’re killing trees all over the globe. And it’s — they get put into the law and then people just keep doing it. If we just could knock off half of the reports and cut the rest of them in half and use a single color — (laughter) — like black and white — (laughter) — and then put them on the computer and give them the electrons and let them make the paper, we could save so much time and so much effort.
But the second thing is the interagency process. If you think about it, our overnment was organized in an earlier period. These departments and agencies the president has practically no ability to change without congressional approval. And the nature of our world in this 21st century is so different that all you can do is about from time to time add a new department. So over my lifetime, I’ve seen the Department of Housing and Urban Development added and the Department of Transportation added and the Department of HHS added and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs added, and now the Department of Homeland Security added. But nothing ever ends. We just keep layering on top.”
Well CAB (the Civil Aviation Board) ended (thanks to a campaign by the head of it). And general price controls (put in place in 1971) were eventually rolled back – but normally once government does something it does not get rolled back.
In the military area budgets are sometimes cut (it is virtually the only large area of government where budgets are ever cut) and general conscription has been removed (since the mid 1970’s), but certianly things are much more bureacratic than they once were.
MacArthur and Patton had a lot of trouble in their own lifetimes – these days such individualists would have no place in the military.
Paul Marks.
Where’s Rummie’s voice on the need, or the lack thereof, for a Department of Homeland Security?
NASA is a really bad example of bureaucracy run amok. Back in the glory days, there was hardly any bureaucracu, mostly engineers and scientists. These days, it’s mostly bureaucrats, with very few scientists and engineers. You could say that the ‘crats ate the organization; NASA these days is mostly an organization that doles out contracts to big aerospace firms and provides bureaucratic oversight.
I used to work as a contractor at Langley Research Center and the government scientists/ engineers there are not replaced when they retire/ die.
This might sound like a good thing from a libertarian perspective, but IMO it’s not, since there’s nothing resembling a free market for space research and travel.