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A paradox at the heart of American bureaucracy - Regions

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Noah Smith argues that our public agencies are underfunded and understaffed, lacking the capabilities to swiftly promulgate rules or make the decisions we ask of them. Others argue that the explosion of veto points has systematically empowered parochial private interests at the expense of the public good, as Will Rinehart catalogs. Ezra Klein’s famous “everything bagel liberalism” hypothesis suggests bureaucracies become dysfunctional when they lose focus, trying to accomplish everything, everywhere, all at once. Each of these three theories is true to an extent, but there is an underlying commonality being overlooked: the way in which we hobble public priorities–even narrow ones–from the very start. At times, the quickest way to doom a project to be over-budget and long-delayed is to make it an urgent public priority. Not because government is bad at executing its aims per se, but because added requirements and expectations that come with disbursing public money do not apply to equiva

A paradox at the heart of American bureaucracy Making something an urgent public priority creates new roadblocks to its execution. Nov 01, 2023 10 Share American bureaucracy is choking itself with its own red tape (via DALL-E 3) Why do so many feel like American bureaucracy is deeply broken? Noah Smith argues that our public agencies are underfunded and understaffed , lacking the capabilities to swiftly promulgate rules or make the decisions we ask of them. Others argue that the explosion of veto points has systematically empowered parochial private interests at the expense of the public good,

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