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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

You can't vote out the bureaucracy.

You can fire them. Differentiating between a cleaning of house and heartless cutting of services, however, is difficult.

Firing people protected by government contracts and strong unions is surprisingly hard.

C-level people in those organizations are not protected by strong unions or government contracts. (Although they may come with golden parachutes.) They are also the people who can institute meaningful change.

> heartless cutting of services

Quite the dichotomy you've established. Cutting of services is automatically 'heartless'? As they are always useful, necessary, and better than alternatives... while cleaning house to replace them with another set of politicians with the same prerogative is the 'good' solution?

Context matters. Neither are automatically better solutions, nor is chopping services necessarily 'heartless'.

Kansas has a tiny government already, I'm not sure there's much left to clean out except the elected positions.

Expand the bureaucracy by adding a Department of Transparency.

Hehe reminds me of the computer engineering adage: "The only thing that can't be solved by another layer of indirection is too many layers of indirection."

Sounds Orwellian. Corrupt systems seldom improve after being fed.

Not at all. A big issue with government transparency is that agencies control data and have little incentive to release.

Having professional data oversight and built in transparency would build institutional protections against Governors of Mr. Brownback’s ilk.

Thank you! My club in university was Students for an Orwellian Society. It's good to hear I still have the knack for it.

It's not the bureaucracy. It's the politicos sitting on top of the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats would rather do their jobs and give honest reports about it to the legislature and the public.

You absolutely can vote in politicians who can fire people, until the toxic culture of the bureaucracy is replaced with something else.

In this case, though, the bureaucracy exists to protect the politicians.

You mean "Drain the swamp"?

Well, that has worked great so far.

It works better when your idea of draining the swamp isn't stuffing it with your cronies.

Many countries (That are not the United States) have this largely figured out.

In theory yes. In practice never seems to happen like that.

You can fire apointeees who run the place.

Nobody working in CPS wants to be in a place where child abuse is covered up and ignored. That’s a leadership problem.

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