Tim says:

“”get rid of the deadweight bureaucrats or we will all go down in flames.

The more I try to supply the cogent reply this deserves, the more I’m having trouble spitting the words out.

The *intent*, I believe, is, indeed, for us all to go down in flames. These bureaucracies, no matter the original intent, always morph into a self-serving beast. Those who institute them know this. They are instituted to exersize control over a populace {through regulation, mostly} without the due oversight of Congress.

There is a ‘culture’ maintained in such organizations and this culture, no matter how vile, is inevitably exported to the local communities. There is incentive to pad more and more individuals into it as then it becomes ‘too big to allow to be disbanded’. As such, they are all on the government dole in their own right.

Take the DMV — no matter how many employees stuff one of those offices, there is going to be a long line behind only one of them as they make a big show of inspecting a car title, or whatever. In my case, it is invariable that I have not signed my middle initial right. Over the years, I’ve tried some thirty different variants of J. to no avail — it’s always a runaround, and then the final truth of it comes to a deliberate culling of older vehichles through multiplying mandated contact with overweight, obnoxious do-nothings.

I’ve been in the university setting under contract to epa, tva, and the department of commerce. I’ve done my share of fucking off but my self-reported timecard usually would show 2hrs, 3hrs… rarely 8. But, even in that setting, the 9 to 5 was encouraged because that’s how my ‘labor’ was billed out to those inflexible agencies, at their behest. In hindsight, God bless the honest secretary tirelessly waging away behind the scenes to protect us from having to spend our time trying to scrub off the direct stench of such bureaucracies.

With EPA, I know there are good researchers, lab and field technicians, programmers, modelers, and presenters there. But going into the field with them requires the attendant gaggle of accountants, lawyers, auditors, and more auditors::

Bean counters have their place but I suppose most of it was just as a show “look how diligent we are with every penny of your money” — Shit! loose those guys and I could bill for 20 minutes instead of 8 hours running around trying to get a replacement organic chemistry sample line because some unskilled, unknowledgeable, yet proud government employee took it upon himself to clean it with methanol.

And then comes the policy — to appease EPA, large swaths of land which I cherished as a lad were clearcut for certain municipalities to come into ‘attainment’ with their arbitrary surface ozone limits because trees really do cause those limits to be exceeded. Also, the aforementioned cost of new vehichles is an environmental cost. Only, it’s one that falls mostly on the third world and not US soil which has already been polluted.

I suppose the whole perk/bonus/incentive thing was somehow trying to mimic the successes in the private sector but they lack context to understand the spirit of it to where it becomes “here’s a bonus for sitting here 9 to 5, doing your time, being a placeholder to help swell our budgets.”

I truely believe that society as a whole would be better off just to take that useless deadweight and pay them just as much to stay home — At least, that way they’re not out actively fucking up little timmy’s beloved environment with their good intentions.