Nowhere have the ineptocrats been more evident than in President Obama’s Department of Energy, under the management of soon-departing Secretary Steven Chu.
Nowhere have the ineptocrats been more evident than in President Obama’s Department of Energy, under the management of soon-departing Secretary Steven Chu.
I’ve spent 30 years dealing with state and federal environmental ineptocracies and 10 dealing with the DOE. Until recently, DOE couldn’t get the software for annual electric generator reports working until a month or two after the reports were due. The best example of ineptocracy had to be the environmental permit writer who put the method for solving two equations with two unknowns into a permit with an example that was done incorrectly.
I observed, far too long ago, that in a long standing bureaucracy, it is not the Peter Principle at work, it is the Inverse Peter Principle. If one is truly competent, one escapes the bureaucracy and goes to work for himself or for private industry. The remaining largely incompetent individuals rise proportionately to their incompetency to do anything beyond creating still more paperwork for outsiders and busywork for themselves. The person who can do absolutely nothing of value to anyone on earth rises to the top.
Once at the top, the ultimate incompetent multiplies the paper and busywork for everyone until it consumes the space to store the paper and the time available to process it. Then, he spends the next decade or more failing to build a computer system to eliminate all the paper and to simplify the busywork. His staff and his budgets expand exponentially in proportion to his failure to meet his stated goals. He uses this expansion as a measure of his success. The unmet goals were merely a means to his ends. He never intended to achieve anything of value from the get go. He ends up destroying value and making it impossible for countless others to create value.
Why do we continue feeding this monster?
This may be the only thing that saves the population from the “regulation-mongering” bureaucrat; too inept to make new regulations and then too inept to enforce them. It’s like Congress going on vacation. I wish they would do it more and spend less time creating “politically whimsical” laws based on the latest biased poll.
“The government that governs best, governs least”
Great addition to the language – describes all political parties in the U.K. Most provincial & federal parties in Canada.