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THE CHURCH OF BUREAUCRACY

I suppose everyone has heard you can put a live frog into a pot of cool water, turn on the heat, watch the water boil and the frog cook, without his first jumping out. Americans are frogs when it comes to the growth of government and of its bureaucracy. Seventy-five years ago, the Federal Budget, supporting a whole range of interventions into our daily lives, was a mere four billion dollars. Now, it is in the trillions of dollars and the bureaucracy has swollen to a position where it is our most prominent church. A large number of Americans either worship bureaucracy or serve in its choir. It is the biggest single burden placed upon the liberties of Americans, and is involved in every facet of behavior. It is the American Cancer.

Legislators and executives, to regulate certain isolated human functions, establish new bureaucracies. For the most part, they are watchdogs over the activities of people. Like all organizations within organizations, they must either grow or die, and since death is not their aim, they find excuses to grow. What soon characterizes all bureaucracies is routine. They acquire procedures, use them, and they become repetitive routines which never change. As to competency to regulate anything, they become like the night nurse in the hospital who, making her midnight rounds, wake the patients to give them their sleeping pills. When faced with decision-making, they create a committee who must consider all the facts and facets, match it to existing routines, and pass judgments. If the decision is one that allows a new idea or invention to go forward, something that challenges the accepted and established routines, they will say no.

Look at the American bureaucracy today. From the Executive Branch, you see a giant organization chart with fifteen cabinet departments answering to the president, each one a massive bureaucracy we recognize and accept, laughingly, as thoroughly incompetent and unable to perform its assigned tasks. New cabinet officer appointments have no effect below their own level and change nothing. The bureaucracy itself will not allow it, or consider it by a lethargic, disinterested and cowardly committee. The framework established by our Founders, gave us four cabinet officers to assist the President. There was a State Department, a Treasury Department, a War Department and a Justice Department. Under the auspices of all four departments, all that was ever required of the Federal Government could be found.

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