The Bureaucracy is the New Aristocracy. For the past several decades the government bureaucracy, at all levels, has entrenched itself dramatically and demonstrably and remains largely unaccountable to anyone. There is no meaningful legal requirement to disclose information to the citizens. Inquiries by elected officials are generally unproductive as there is little obligation to report the truth to them either. There is virtually no punishment for the various misdeeds by bureaucrats regardless of the severity.
Just in the past few days, there was a report that the Federal Trade Commission has been abusing its authority by bringing cybersecurity cases against companies without evidence of any clear violations and without ever giving standards to establish what constitutes a violation.
There was a report in California that an employee in its Department of Motor Vehicles has been sleeping on the job several hours a day for the last four years. Apparently her supervisors were well aware of this and did nothing to rectify the situation. All the while, the good employees had to pick up the slack.
There are thousands and thousands of these types of stories. The entire problem may be expressed most accurately by the departing remarks of General Eric Shineski, the former Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2009-2014).
“We now know that the VA has a systemic, totally unacceptable lack of integrity within some of our Veterans Health Administration facilities. That breach of trust involved the tracking of patient wait times for appointments. The initial findings of our ongoing review of other large VA healthcare facilities also show that to be true. That breach of integrity is irresponsible, it is indefensible and unacceptable to me. I said when this situation began that the problem was limited and isolated because I believed that. I no longer believe that, it is systemic. I was too trusting of some, and i accepted as accurate, reports that I now know to have been misleading with regard to patient wait times. I can’t explain the lack of integrity amongst some of the leaders of our healthcare facilities. This is something I very rarely encountered during the 38 years in uniform.”
Despite this terrible indictment of the VA, it seems that the problem went on unabated and even got worse. It lead to the death of our veterans who depended on the VA. No VA employee was seriously disciplined. If this is how are veterans are treated, imagine how badly regular citizens fare within the bureaucratic corruption.
There are many good government employees who are dedicated to public service and do a superior job often under difficult circumstances. We need to support them and eliminate those who are damaging our country and wasting our tax dollars in the process.
It may also be productive to sometimes use private contractors for certain types of work to diminish the bureaucracy.
This New Aristocracy must end before we lose even more freedom.