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Comment by cduzz | Hacker News Reader

I suspect it's just the opposite.

There is no bureaucracy tasked with building.

Instead there is an executive committee tasked with supervising consultants who are supervising construction firms who are contracted to do the work.

There is no professional project management class in the actual government because "we don't need them when we can save money hiring consultants."

https://www.google.com/search?q=consultants+to+run+infrastru...

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Just because bureaucracy is outsourced to private corporations doesn't change much. It's still basically bureaucracy, decisions are not made by elected representatives but by opaque and complicated bodies and processes that are insulated from accountability.

Completely agree.

I see the push back on bureaucracy all the time in ways that imply government is the problem. When explained, what it ends up perpetually looking like to me is rent seeking middlemen who are really good at pointing at every one but themselves while they line their pockets.

The government giving money to rent seeking middlemen is corruption and a common problem with bureaucracy. The corrupt bureaucrats here realized it is more efficient to extract value by using private corporations, so the root of the problem isn't the corporations but the corrupt bureaucrats.

Private corporations often gets good value from outsourcing, why can't the government? Corruption, plain and simple.

This really sounds like what I would call bureaucracy. Not project management, but nesting dolls of grift that create double-binds and negative externalities - all of this under complex, often criss-crossing laws that can only be interpreted to varying degrees of definition by lawyers who charge $1500 per hour.

It's why upstarts (like America was in the 20th and 19th centuries) are so competitive. They have the frontier, emptiness, a blank slate.

"It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.”

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