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There is a
momentum for all bureaucracies to grow, which must be taken into account by
society. A few examples from the United States suffice to illustrate
this trend. The combined staffs of the members of the U.S. House of
Representatives and Senate have more than doubled during the past twenty years;
"today's Congress is becoming a kind of bureaucracy itself." The
White House staff of the president has grown from a core of 14 persons in 1945
to 568 people in 1989. The Pentagon--the world's largest office
building--houses some 25,000 of the military and civilian staff employees of
the U.S. Department of Defense who oversee the operations of over 2 million military
personnel at the present time. An exceptional example of bureaucratic
duplication occurred at a U.S. Army post during the Vietnam War when 22,000
Vietnamese were employed as support staff for 26,000 Americans who were
themselves supposed to be support troops. Despite the avowed intentions of
recent presidents and legislators to reduce the size of government, federal,
state, and local bureaucracies continue to grow: to accommodate an increasing
population, to serve special bureaucratic purposes as noted above, and in part
because of the tendency to add more people in a period of expansion than are
really needed.
Businesses
expand for the same reasons except that purely political padding is less a
factor, if it exists at all. Eventually, general economic conditions or direct
competition force businesses to pare the "fat" that often results
from the built-in momentum of growth. "The new chairman of the General
Motors Corporation . . . said GM would try and remove layers of bureaucracy and
give more decision-making power to lower-level workers."
There is a
momentum for all bureaucracies to grow, which must be taken into account by
society. A few examples from the United States suffice to illustrate
this trend. The combined staffs of the members of the U.S. House of
Representatives and Senate have more than doubled during the past twenty years;
"today's Congress is becoming a kind of bureaucracy itself." The
White House staff of the president has grown from a core of 14 persons in 1945
to 568 people in 1989. The Pentagon--the world's largest office
building--houses some 25,000 of the military and civilian staff employees of
the U.S. Department of Defense who oversee the operations of over 2 million military
personnel at the present time. An exceptional example of bureaucratic
duplication occurred at a U.S. Army post during the Vietnam War when 22,000
Vietnamese were employed as support staff for 26,000 Americans who were
themselves supposed to be support troops. Despite the avowed intentions of
recent presidents and legislators to reduce the size of government, federal,
state, and local bureaucracies continue to grow: to accommodate an increasing
population, to serve special bureaucratic purposes as noted above, and in part
because of the tendency to add more people in a period of expansion than are
really needed.
Businesses
expand for the same reasons except that purely political padding is less a
factor, if it exists at all. Eventually, general economic conditions or direct
competition force businesses to pare the "fat" that often results
from the built-in momentum of growth. "The new chairman of the General
Motors Corporation . . . said GM would try and remove layers of bureaucracy and
give more decision-making power to lower-level workers."
