oneway1

It is hard to look at the public sector in America and not see a large, metastasizing cancer.

The state is constantly expanding its power and reach. New regulations and executive orders (at both the state and federal level) number in the tens of thousands, and are being issued in a torrent.  No citizen … no human intelligence … can fully comprehend the size and scope of our Leviathan.

Why doesn’t this thing work?  Why doesn’t more of it make it better? Why can’t thousands of pages of new regulations and orders, thousands of new and bright civil servants, as well as billions more dollars fix things?

Among the many reasons –poor leadership, perverse incentives, least common denominator thinking, featherbedding, power hunger, etc.—one thing we seem to want to forget is a crucial organization flaw in nearly all government projects.

Government programs are typically designed to be unitary and exclusionary. They have a singular mission with no clear time limits, few if any concluding objectives, and no accountability to similar or adjacent government activities.

A mandate is put forth and then the sun never sets. Each agency, program or bureau becomes an endless one-way street with not a turn-off in sight. And poor results only beget more bureaucracy.

When you attend conferences with public sector officials, you often hear them talk about how their bureau, administration, agency, etc. was “stood up” to address this or that issue.

Nothing is ever fixed inside an existing organization. Instead, another organization is created to address the problem created by the others.

This certainly happened with the Intelligence “community” and Homeland Security after 9/11. Instead of fixing the lack of communication between Intelligence organizations or tasking existing law enforcement with protecting citizens from terrorist threats, whole new bureaucracies were created.

It’s happening now with the Affordable Care Act. The law calls for a Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board that not only will dictate “fair prices” for individual health policies … the political focus of Obama Care … but fix rates for all health payment systems from Medicaid to Medicare and everything in between.

Another endless mandate without any clear definition of what success is supposed to look like.

So why are we surprised by so much waste and failure? And why are we so willing to pile on more?

On a similar note, view my post on the 50th anniversary of The Great Society and the War on Poverty.