Comment by cowfriend

yeah, the claim that the bureaucracy is the thing that is broken-- can we look at a few things?

Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?

Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.

Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.

And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.

So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.

Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.