After paying people to leave, one federal agency is scrambling to fill positions

[Metaphorical]

21. The Bureaucracy Paradox

I had two very interesting discussions this week.

The first was with a person working for the Government Printing Office (GPO) who has been trying to modernize (with only very limited success due to funding) a sixty year old printing system for Congress.

The other was with a MAGA who tried to talk about how everything was getting bureaucratized and the number of people who were involved in the bureaucracy were outnumbering those who did "productive" work (and of course, this was only in the government). He ran his own business, and was a fan of Trump's.

There's a certain willful blindness I see frequently working as a consultant. ALL organizations have bureaucracies. They evolve both because as organizations get larger, lines of communication and authority get to a point where someone needs to manage them, track them, and organize work. Most of the time, they are the silent glue that holds an organization together, and here, expertise becomes critical. Business owners of course see THEIR managers as being critical (in part because many of them CAME from management circles) but, because they see the government as a parasite on their ability to make a profit, they see any government employee (but in particular "The Bureaucracy&quot as being particularly egregious, because they see it as coming out of THEIR taxes.

There is a deeper factor there too. If someone owns a moderate to large company, they are used to privilege in their company. The government, however, does not privilege them (or at least they see it as not privileging them), and because they are not given due status in comparison to what they are used to, they feel offended that they are not given the respect that they are supposedly entitled to.

Especially with GS Contract Civil Service, most departments have very minimal budgets, and very strict rules on what those budgets can be used for. Their salaries are on the low end for people with equivalent skills and experiences. What they get in return typically has been a certain degree of job protection, but even that's been disappearing.

Musk upended the corporate world by firing most of the people working at Twitter. This was possible because the infrastructure was already there and fairly foolproofed by the time he took over, so he's been basically siphoning off technical capital without replacing it. Eventually the well will run dry there (I believe he had X.ai "buy" X( nee Twitter) primarily as an accounting dodge, not a technical merger, primarily to keep the company afloat long enough to sell it to the next fool). However, the Federal government has always been run lean, so functionality is going to start failing soon.

Ayn Rand has done more to poison Western Society than anyone on the planet.