Bureaucratic Obstruction Quotes

How can faceless bureaucrats in an intelligence agency deny brave soldiers a chance to tell the truth?

There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.

… a man remarkable even among civil servants for adroitness in baffling inconvenient inquiries, resource in raising false issues, and, in, short, a consummate command of all the arts of officially sticking in the mud

I am sorry to say that sometimes matters of very small importance waste a good deal of precious time, by the long and repeated speeches and chicanery of gentlemen who will not wholly throw off the lawyer even in Congress.

As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy.

The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential.

The major functions of the government are … operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

Bureaucrats lodged deep in agencies slow the impact of Trump's demands. Low-level staffers leak private meetings. The Department of Justice has gone rogue. The Swamp, it turns out, fights back.

I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that revealed things. If there were, they were concealed from me too. And if there were, well I wouldn't be the first American president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere, hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But if so, they successfully eluded me...and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you I did (chuckling) try to find out.