Salena Zito, Real Clear Politics:
A subtle but constant collision occurs in the nation’s capital every day.
It is something that people who work here wouldn’t necessarily notice because of their jobs, or that first-time visitors might overlook as they take in the architecture and history.
On one side you have the sheer weight and power of the federal bureaucracy that so irks and burdens Americans.
The U.S. government has well more than 2,000 overlapping, under-performing, over-regulating, inefficient agencies, so removed from their original purposes that no one knows how many agencies, offices and government corporations exist.
These are run by federal employees who, for the most part, are decent people but who probably couldn’t tell you if their job is duplicated seven times over by 20 agencies, or who exactly runs their department, or to whom they ultimately answer — which is, essentially, you.
Because of the bureaucracy’s size and power, scandals and negligence are endemic. Think of the Department of Veterans Affairs failing veterans who die from lack of care. Or the Justice Department, spying on reporters and seizing their records. Or the Internal Revenue Service, targeting conservatives. And where do you even begin with the mess that is the Secret Service, the CDC’s incompetency during the Ebola outbreak, or the National Security Agency program that collected millions of Americans’ phone records?
More.
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