And the Sequester Had to End? That Is Insane!

The hue and cry from Dear President and his adherents was that they couldn't manage under the budget sequester.  It was cutting to the bone and beyond.  BS!  Lies! Look at it -- 65 percent waste, self-perpetuating bureaucracy, dysfunctional, and secret, autocratic and unaccountable. Here is what one of Obama's insider, true believers has to say as he walks out the door.

The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the “remarkably dysfunctional” federal bureaucracy. David Wright, director of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), writes in a scathing resignation letter obtained by ScienceInsider that the huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI “the very worst job I have ever had.” 

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It is actually worse than it looks.

David Wright writes that working with ORI’s “remarkable scientist-investigators” was “the best job I’ve ever had.” But that was only 35% of his job; the rest of the time he spent “navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy” to run ORI. Tasks that took a couple of days as a university administrator required weeks or months, he says. He writes that ORI’s budget was micromanaged by more senior officials, and that Koh’s office had a “seriously flawed” culture, calling it “secretive, autocratic and unaccountable.” For example, he told Wanda Jones, Koh’s deputy, that he urgently needed to appoint a director for ORI’s division of education. Jones told him the position was somewhere on a secret priority list of appointments. The position has not been filled 16 months later, David Wright notes. 

OASH itself suffers from the tendency of bureaucracies to “focus … on perpetuating themselves,” David Wright writes. Officials spent “exorbitant amounts of time” in meetings and generating data and reports to make their divisions look productive, he writes. He asks whether OASH is the proper home for a regulatory office such as ORI, noting that Koh himself has described his office as an “intensely political environment.”

A committed, competent, intelligent and fair minded President could get rid of half of the federal bureaucracy and the only differences we would note is the government would improve.  But you all blessed us with Dear President.  God help us all.

Oh! For you low information voters out there, HHS is the department that gives us Obamacare. Sweet.