Quotes About Bureaucracy

The actual encounter was always confusing, eleven minutes of liminal contact in which I tried to conduct myself in a way that would make the doctor like me, in the hope they would take some true interest in my plight. But their day was full of tests to order, bureaucracy to cut through, an education that taught them not to say, "I don't know what's wrong with you." And so we stood together in a tiny antiseptic room, the doctor and patient, a world apart.

During these months, I calculated, I spent a day and a half per month just moving paper and electronic records from doctor to doctor. I spent an additional three days traveling to doctors' appointments, during which I often waited for an hour or more to be seen for ten minutes. (Or fifteen, when my doctor had time.) Putting it all together, I realized that each month I was losing close to five out of twenty workdays—nearly a quarter of my work time. The

Weber also saw that a bureaucratic world contained risks. It produced increasingly powerful and autonomous bureaucrats who could be spiritless, driven only by impersonal rules and procedures, and with little regard for the people they were expected to serve. Weber famously warned that those who allow themselves to be guided by rules will soon find that those rules have defined their identities and commitments.

Government is dysfunctional.

A lower-ranking official was served tea on a plain tray. Once he reached the rank of chief of sector, the tray suddenly sprouted a napkin. In apparatchik-speak, the promotion was referred to as 'receiving the napkin.

Everything in government seems to take longer than it should. My vetting process dragged on. Making sure the subsidies embedded in my Stanford mortgage did not violate conflict-of-interest rules took several weeks to resolve. Even though I already had a top secret security clearance, I had to get a new one to become ambassador. That

The New Republic had traded efficiency for democracy and oligarchy for bureaucracy—and had done so willingly and knowingly.

You've worked for the government too long to imagine they have the resources or competence to cover shit up. Never attribute to conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by clusterfuckery.

The bureaucrat fell from the sky.

Bannon's strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.

On March 27, the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in charge. Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by creating more of it, a committee to end committees.

from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.

The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn't simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.

Ce n'est pas très difficile de travailler dans un bureau, il suffit d'être un peu méticuleux, de prendre des décisions rapidement, et de s'y tenir. J'avais vite compris qu'il n'est pas forcément nécessaire de prendre /la meilleur décision/, mais qu'il suffit, dans la plupart des cas, de prendre /une décision quelconque/, à condition de la prendre rapidement; enfin, si on travaille dans le secteur public.

To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run afoul of some agency or other.

The thought of having become an item in a file calms me. I imagine the volume, its cloth binding; its slightly sad cover; I gently flatten myself between the pages; I am squashed.

Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which will put 16 500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill.

The plague of government is senile delinquency.

While meteorology as an applied science has made tremendous strides in the past fifty years, we have not yet discovered a cure for bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the residents of the 138,000 damaged buildings continued to swelter and suffer. Local Miamians, as well as citizens from Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, attempted to drive bottled water, food, clothes, and other supplies into the stricken area. They were successful during the first few hours; but they were shut down by the end of the first day. The same bureaucrats who were giving mixed signals to Washington seemed to prefer organized suffering to disorganized relief.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.

The answer for healthcare is market incentives, not healthcare by a Godzilla-sized government bureaucracy.