Maggie's Farm

I highly recommend The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction by Dominic Cummings. It is full of insights into the failings of bureaucracies, government by crisis and news cycle, and hollow leadership.

The essay is long, but the excerpts below give some of the flavor.

... Most of our politics is still conducted with the morality and the language of the simple primitive hunter-gatherer tribe: ‘which chief shall we shout for to solve our problems?’ Our ‘chimp politics’ has an evolutionary logic: our powerful evolved instinct to conform to a group view is a flip-side of our evolved in-group solidarity and hostility to out-groups (and keeping in with the chief could lead to many payoffs, while making enemies could lead to death, so going along with leaders’ plans was incentivized). This partly explains the persistent popularity of collectivist policies and why ‘groupthink’ is a recurring disaster. Such instincts, which evolved in relatively simple prehistoric environments involving relatively small numbers of known people and relatively simple problems (like a few dozen enemies a few miles away), cause disaster when the problem is something like ‘how to approach an astronomically complex system such as health provision for millions.’

... students leave university for politics and the civil service with degrees that reward verbal fluency, some fragments of philosophy, little knowledge of maths or science, and confidence in a sort of arrogant bluffing combined with ignorance about how to get anything done. They think they are prepared to ‘run the country’ but many cannot run their own diaries.....................................

Balzac: Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/bureaucracy.html

IF THERE IS A SINGLE STUMBLING BLOCK ON THE ROAD TO THE FUTURE, IT IS THE BUREAUCRACY AS WE KNOW IT.

***
This echoes  the Peggy Noonan article on bureaucracy and is in keeping with the fumbling, bumbling response by the Public Health sector, at every level to Ebola, as an example.

Edward T. Hall on Bureaucracy: “no soul, no memory, and no conscience….” Edward Hall was the pioneer who wrote “Beyond Culture”.

“By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory and no mind. They are self-serving, amoral and live forever. What could be more irrational? Changing them is almost impossible, because they function according to their own rules and bow to no man, not even the President of the United States. Custom, human frailties, and the will to power keep our bureaucracies going. … Paradoxically, most bureaucracies are staffed largely with conscientious, committed people who are trying to do the right thing, but they are powerless (or feel powerless) to change things. None of which would be so serious if it weren’t that these are the very institutions on which we depend to solve all our major problems. Some answer must be found to bureaucracy.”

  “Bureaucratic and institutional irrationality occur because, of all man’s institutions, bureaucracy in all cultures has a tremendous potential to be counterproductive. This drive toward inefficiency may be a direct consequence of blind adherence to procedure, but it also stems from bureaucratic needs for self-preservation and a vulnerability to pressure groups. The combination is unbeatable.”

 

“Bureaucracy on the life-destroying scale described by Edward T. Hall is an industrial era phenomenon. Only a bureaucracy can turn ordinary, decent people into participants in gigantic atrocities that go on and on, and absolve the people who operate the government machine from personal responsibility for the consequences.

The above is from 9/25 Chicagoboyz.net

The gist of the comments is not about the source of government employees, it is about the nature of bureaucracies, nor is it unique to America.
Mostly, the comments assume employees working in good faith, but still, those employees, regardless of source, don't seem to wrap their minds around cost benefit analysis, or the law of diminishing returns, or resist the impulse to expand a department's turf, nor do the comments address corruption. Even a legit civil service doesn't eschew sending employees on Vegas larks. Consider also the duplication; it is bureaucracies all the way down to the municipal level.
I, for one, understand that there are many positions that require a minimum level of expertise and I wish we could have government employees, who were on the level. For example, I think it is important that MSDS documents follow the same standards and formatting. I would like to see government engaged in unbiased, honest analysis and dissemination of Best Practices. I think I am spitting into the wind.

More fairly witty quips on bureaucracy:

http://www.searchquotes.com/quotes/about/Bureaucracy/3/

A little humor from the late Mitch Hedberg

I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut... I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I give you money and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I can't imagine a scenario that I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut.

To some skeptical friend, 'Don't even act like I didn't get that doughnut, I've got the documentation right here... It's in my file at home. ...Under "D".'