Administrative Inefficiency Quotes

In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]

The bureaucracy is what we all suffer from..

The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.

I regret that on my arrival in Mesopotamia I was too much occupied with military matters, and too ill-informed regarding the political problem….[We had] a scratch and somewhat incongruous team of administrators with the majority possessing little exact knowledge of the people they were called upon to monitor

Bureaucrats, dunderheads and knaves have always denounced congressional oversight.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

Not much shall be feared nor expected from a people whose principal ministers, principal merchants, and principal generals consume day after day smoking tobacco and playing at chess, while the citizens and soldiers are sauntering in rags, sleeping against walls, or praying away their lives …. Such is the military and such the industry of Barbary.

I have worked in every - every Democratic administration since the Kennedy administration, and I know dysfunctionality when I see it.

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

I resigned because the government failed to implement all my plans.

If there is evidence that an employee has broken the law, caused harm to veterans, or have violated the public trust, they should be terminated immediately. Instead, due to overly cumbersome and lengthy arbitrations as well as extensive bureaucratic red tape, VA has not been able to remove employees as quickly as we would have liked.

We must fight against negativeness - especially bureaucracy, corruption and wastefulness.

We have bloated, out-of-control, and unresponsive government agencies that need to be reined in and focused by Congress to deliver results.

The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.

The nannyism is partly to distract from the corruption — and partly just another opportunity to leverage it. A good general rule is that the more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.

People complain about bureaucracy. You haven't seen bureaucracy until you've seen bureaucracy in China.

Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.

Government on its own is always inefficient.

Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth.

I have done it [appointed commissions] regretfully and with the hope that it would be temporary. But after a commission is established you find it always wants to enlarge itself, employ more people, is very busy with Senators and Congressmen to impress upon them the great value of the services of the commission, and even when I talk to people that I appoint to commissions and tell them I would like them to go on to various boards with the idea that they may be abolished, they say they ought to be abolished, but when they have taken their position they very soon seem to change their mind.

I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.

I think there's definitely billions and billions in waste, fraud and abuse. There's billions that can be generated in the economy by eliminating the bureaucracy.