The Gluttony Beast aka Bureaucracy

By Felix Alvarado

February 10, 2015

Often we use the word bureaucracy without really understanding what it means.  Every level of government from city hall to Washington DC has a bureaucracy.  A bureaucracy has a life of its own.  Law enforcement officers, firemen, teachers and all the employees at each level of government is a bureaucrat.  The bureaucracy is there no matter who gets elected.  Institutions reflect the values of the electorate that created them.  As such to a certain extent they do represent mainstream America with all its strengths and frailties.  Because bureaucracies are sedentary in nature the values they represent may be a generation or two behind.

In Washington the president appoints the secretaries to run a specific part of the federal bureaucracy.  The tentacles of the federal bureaucracy reach into every state in the form of laws or offices that are there to enforce the laws, laws passed by Congress or created by the bureaucracy itself with its statutory power.  Laws enacted by the bureaucracy do not have to be approved by Congress.  We are seeing the President use his executive power to allow some undocumented immigrants legal status.  He delegates his decision to the Department of Homeland Security that carries out his directive.  So a federal bureaucracy enforces laws passed by Congress or created by itself.

Some of the laws have accumulated over several generations.  Departments may go through several names changes or reorganizations.  The Department of Defense was once called the Department of War or War Department.   In all probability the laws will be passed on to the new bureaucracy.  The department of Homeland Security merged over twenty minor offices into one huge department.  In both cases the laws were carried forward.

Internally bureaucracies do investigate themselves they do have internal checks and balances.  Bureaucracies conduct their own investigation and mete out consequences for violation of department or agency rules.  But since the check is done by the person in charge the investigation may be somewhat tainted.  An example is the medical care provided to veterans in Arizona.  The VA knew they had a problem but did little to correct it until the news media revealed the problem.  Then the problem was a scandal. 

Sometimes the power to investigate is taken from the bureaucracy and handed to an unbiased party like a grand jury.  For that reason when a young man was killed by a police officer recently the case had to be presented to the grand jury to see if criminal laws had been broken by the police officer.  The general population is not always happy with the decisions of grand juries as was in this case.

Why is a bureaucracy like a gluttony beast?  The bureaucracy is like an old coal burning railroad engine it takes a lot of coal and a lot of water.  For taxpayers coal and water is the same as money.  That is if you want the train to continue on its journey you must feed the gluttony beast.