The Great Relocation of Errors

A Study in the Efficient Movement of Incompetence

The heavy brass paperweight sat motionless atop a stack of triplicate forms in the corner office of the Department of Oversight, its surface dulpons by a fine layer of dust that had accumulated since the last reorganization in late autumn. Outside the window, the rain was performing its customary, uninspired drizzle over the municipal plaza, blurring the edges of the statues that stood there to enough to commemorate men who had died for causes that had since been forgotten. A single, yellowed memo lay partially obscured by the weight, detailing the recent merger of the Bureau of Efficiency with the Office of Streamlined Operations, a move that had been celebrated in the morning papers as a triumph of modern governance.

There is a certain nobility in the concept of reform, a quality that suggests a fundamental cleaning of the house, as if one might simply open a window and allow the stale air of bureaucracy to depart into the night. We are taught from our earliest school days that reform is a transformative process, a way of scrubbing the grime from the gears of the state until the machinery runs with the silent, frictionless grace of a well-oiled locomotive. It implies the removal of the rot, the excision of the tumor, and the honest application of a new, more vigorous standard of conduct. It is a beautiful, if somewhat naive, notion that suggests the problem lies in the substance of the law rather than the nature of the men tasked with enforcing it.

However, a closer inspection of the various committees and commissions that have graced our legislative history reveals a much more subtle and practiced art form. This is not the art of reform, but rather the art of redistribution. It is the process of taking a well-documented failure, such as a bloated department or a corrupt agency, and moving its constituent parts into three new, equally expensive, but much more vaguely named entities. The dysfunction does not vanish; it merely undergoes a change in geography. It is much like moving a pile of manure from the center of the stable to the corner; the smell remains exactly the same, but the stablehand can now claim he has tidied the floor.

I have always found it remarkable how much energy is expended in ensuring that the same old mistakes are given a fresh coat of paint. When the Committee on Administrative Rectitude was established to address the rampant waste in the postal service, the primary achievement was not the reduction of waste, but the creation of a secondary layer of auditors whose sole purpose was to certify that the waste was being recorded according to the new, more complex guidelines. The waste continued to flow with its accustomed vigor, but it now possessed a much more impressive-looking ledger. The burden of the error had not been lifted; it had simply been distributed across a wider, more professional-looking surface.

This redistribution is often accompanied by a great deal of fanfare and the hiring of expensive consultants who arrive with leather briefcases and an air of profound, unearned certainty. These gentlemen examine the existing chaos, find it quite agreeable in its current state of disarray, and then propose a new structure that incorporates all the old errors into a more sophisticated framework. They do not seek to fix the leak in the dam; they merely suggest that the water be redirected through a series of much more expensive, much more complicated, and much more ornamental sluice gates. They specialize in the logistics of the detour, ensuring that while the flood remains just as destructive, the path it takes is documented in a much more expensive series of maps.

A clerk in the basement of the Registry Office, a man who has survived four different administrations and at least six different “Modernization Initiatives,” recently remarked upon this phenomenon with a weary sort of wisdom. He noted that the recent merger of the Filing Division with the Records Management Group had not actually resulted in fewer files, nor had it made the retrieval of documents any less of a Herculean labor. What had happened, he observed, was that the files were now being kept in two different buildings, and the staff had been doubled so that there could be someone to oversee the movement of the files from the first building to the second. He seemed quite satisfied with this arrangement, as it meant his particular desk was now part of a much larger, and therefore much more insulated, bureaucratic ecosystem.

A junior inspector from the newly minted Bureau of Efficiency, tasked with verifying the efficiency of the very merger in question, recently stopped by the clerk’s desk to check a single, trivial timestamp. Upon seeing the mountain of duplicate paperwork, the inspector merely adjusted his tie and noted, “The paperwork is significantly more organized now that it is twice as thick.”