Government Inefficiency - WHY?

Beaurocracy. Paperwork. Protocol. Inflexibility. When requirements are too strict it makes everything more inefficient.

I work for USPS (which I need to make clear is NOT run on tax dollars and so is not technically federal, but is still held to rules imposed by Congress, so things are run in a very similar manner). We aren't allowed to be more efficient. If we do something against protocol we get in trouble, even if it saves time and money and makes the customer happier. And then there will be paperwork and more paperwork. A for-profit company would be glad if their employees found a way to do things better, but nooo, not a federal agency (or quasi-federal like USPS). They tell us we need to run the agency more like a for-profit business (which it is!) And less like a federal agency, but then when we try to do that they get mad. There are a million things we're required to do, every one of them takes more time and more money and annoys the customers more. In the small office I work in, we try to ignore some of those things and just make the customer happy (gasp! What a concept) but then if management finds out they get mad and make us stick to the "proper" protocols. My cousins works for the DMV and he says it's very much the same. And my dad was in the Navy and that was pretty much the same.

I guess with government services, they don't care because they have no competition, if you want your driver's license or your carry permit, you HAVE to deal with them, you can't go elsewhere if you don't like the service. Tough bananas. With sending packages, people DO have options, there is competition, and so that's why USPS is in bigger trouble than other federal agencies.

Several factors at work:

1. Job security. You are more likely to die at your desk in a federal job than you are to be fired.

2. Unaccountability. Did anyone get fired for buying $900 hammers for the Air Force? If you aren't happy with your service and complain, will anyone be disciplined?

3. Job compartmentalization. You're not allowed to do a job that not strictly your job. This is good in the military, so no "little cog" can negatively affect the big picture. But in other places, not so much.

4. Overly concerned about union work rules. They don't want an ambitious or intelligent employee to "kill the job" by doing it better or faster. Preserving the right of a union member to that job is more important than doing the job well.

However, I don't think you want just anyone able to register a car or something online, with no human interaction. There is a huge amount of liability involved there. Also, a good deal of variation; try to get a hot rod registered, someday.

As to the concealed carry license, I would have looked up a local instruction site and asked them.

This is because nobody seems to know who's responsible for this. Let's talk about general office supplies. . .Post-it notes, pens, copy paper, toilet paper, Lysol, Windex, etc. My boss knows he can get these things cheaper at Wal-Mart or Dollar General. But he's only allowed to buy from the supply catalog (and the supply company has no incentive to make their prices competitive, since there's no choice but to use them. So they charge 4-5 times more). He's mad because he's paying $10 for a $2 pack of Post-its, and his boss is riding him for going over his operating budget. So he complains to his boss, who says "not my fault, I'll see if I can forward your complaint to someone who has some power over this". So she talks to her boss, who says the same thing, and then HIS boss says the same thing. . .and so on ad infinitum. Possibly even the Postmaster General doesn't know who's responsible for that policy. And if they were forced to discipline someone for this waste, they'd fire somebody like my boss, who was only doing what he was told even though he disagreed with it (if anybody was fired over the military thing, I'm sure he was a powerless sacrificial lamb as well).

I saw a lot of this when I was working for a company that hauls a lot of ordnance, explosives, etc., for the military.

We picked up one pallet of small arms ammunition (.45, 9 mm, and shotgun shells) for the security department at the CB base in Biloxi, MS. We picked it up at a Navy base in South Carolina. It wasn't a full pallet; probably less than 100 lbs, total (including the 50 lb pallet). You could have gone to the WalMart across the street from the CB base's front gate and bought it all for less than just the shipping charge from SC to MS.