Thursday, June 06, 2002

Top hats and tin badges

If this evening's news reports are right, the President is about to call for a very large reorganization of government. In the newest scheme, disparate agencies - Lawrence Livermore Labs, the Coast Guard, FEMA, the Secret Service, INF, Border Service, et cetera - are going to ripped from their cabinet departments of origin, and placed under the direction of a new Cabinet-level officer, the Secretary for Homeland Security.

I can't sufficiently express my scorn for the idea - a sick monoculturing of bureaucratic ecologies. Previous examples of same sort of mega-Organization? Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in Stalin's Soviet Union - a dysfunctional octopus of incompetence, empire building, and autistic malignancy.

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