Who exactly do you think staffs this part of a science institute? Bureaucracy is just another word for the kind of well-staffed administrative system that can handle these tasks.
I think a lot of the objections here aren't really bureaucracy in terms of government employees doing things. A lot of what people mean when they complain about "government bureaucracy" is really that it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks. So discussions on this tend to get confusing.
Regular people (including me) think the same thing about why software projects take so long. In fact I consider engineering to be a form of bureaucracy. And I've had long conversations about it with friends who are developers, but it's still hard for an outsider to fully grasp why it's so hard. In turn, they can't understand why my job can't be replaced by AI.
Maybe there's an equivalent of Knoll's Law for non-media concepts.
Everything I know how to do is complicated and people don't understand why it's complicated. Everything else is obviously excess bureaucracy and could be done with a LLM running on a ZX80.
The reason bureaucracies seem efficient is that they must be able to (1) complete the mission reliably over long periods of time, in the face of (2) staff churn and loss, without (3) collapsing the first time a critical mass of experts leaves the org. This means you have to sacrifice systems that rely on the enthusiasm of "10x experts" in favor of systems that can reliably recruit talent (at GS salaries.) And this is before you get to the mountains of political crap placed on an org by elected leaders.
It is incredibly challenging to create orgs that reliably stay on-mission over many years.
Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).
As for the terrible salaries and mountains of political crap, that's the real issue here. But these are changeable and shouldn't just be accepted as inevitable as is so often done by defenders of government bureaucracy.
It's also worth mentioning that governments and companies inherently must operate differently. Governments are not set up to recoup investment; in fact, proponents of small government (as opposed to no government) generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons" by funding initiatives and programs that fundamentally do not make sense for a single market player to address. I.e. government helps when there isn't a good path for a single market player to see a good/reliable economic and market-competitive return from their investment.
>> generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons"
Not anymore. Great many now believe that there should be no commons, that everything should be owned by someone and leased back to those who use it. Such people see it as the duty of government to efficiently disperse the commons to the highest bidders. Those bidders will then "protect" their asset by ensuring it is put to the highest economic use.
> The report examines evidence from nine sectors - electricity, health, waste management and water, prisons, buses, ports and airports, railways and telecom,.
Yeah, if you examine only utilities and monopolies they are not more efficient than the government. That's not a surprise because they don't face competition and are heavily politically controlled.
Only every single interaction with the government I have ever had and the experience of everyone I know who works in industries where they have to deal with the government on a regular basis.
If lived experience is the only bar of evidence you will consider, there are plenty of stories of fraud, corruption and anti-competitive behavior in industry that have hurt real people. Insurance (duh), devs who get shafted by Apple store policies or other entities without recourse to a human, outright scams and spam i.e. cryptodumps, every major game release that seems to either get delayed or released with show-stopping bugs, etc
A profound number of companies fail every year and cease to exist, which is probably more inefficient (and also not an outcome that many would consider acceptable in a government context.)
Of the ones that survive[1], some may be more efficient, but whether they remain efficient, effective and extant in the long term is not a given.
Leadership can reform enterprise IT, sometimes including staffing cuts while also improving productivity. I have personally seen this happen. It can actually get better.
This is why some people are optimistic about recent efforts at doing the same in government bureaucracy. It's possible to trend upwards.
You think that would be sufficient? Did you read the article?
I did, and I have previously read an article in (iirc) The Atlantic about the screwfly program when it was working. It was a monumental effort to push screwflies back to the Darien Gap, involving widespread coordination of cattle ranchers and government workers, constant flyovers of planes dropping huge numbers of sterile flies, and a massive breeding program.
Two university students in a van can get about as much done as it sounds like. Some problems require coordination, government involvement, and yes, the organization — i.e., bureaucracy — that implies.
