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In this modern, technologically enabled age, we often see explicit examples of bloated public sector bureaucracy’s inability to provide a service, deliver on a promise or otherwise operate at expectations. We’ve become accustomed to packaged excuses, a series of well honed announcements about limitations, regulatory requirements, procedural hurdles, governance considerations and a bibliography worth of doublespeak.

We’re left to wonder whether anything is reasonably possible to achieve through our established framework of systems, the origins of which likely had altruistic purposes. When we first decided that there was a need for government intervention or oversight, we restricted the creation of new offices to fairly focussed responsibilities. Then the good idea fairy visits, the expansion of things to be considered, the possibility of extending current programming to a slightly broader audience, to adapt to changing situations leads us down a preverbal superhighway to expansion. Long before taking a breath to reflect, we’ve created a monstrous behemoth, a leviathan of consumption to address what was at one point, a reasonable consideration.

The question is whether, at this point in history, with the taxpayer broke and the borrowing heydays behind us, should we look at a version of “gutting” the public service? Is there a rational argument for a significant reduction in “nice to haves” and concentrate on what is mandated?

Within EM, bureaucracy is preventing rapid, agile and resource intelligent preparedness, response and recovery operations. The calls for additional resources are because the beast is hungry, it wants to feed, to grow, to oversee more and more. If we were to expand resources in EM, there would likely be a bureaucratic addition, governance and additional regulatory frameworks to oversee the expansion. 

More resources ≠ more capabilities, just more governance.

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