Bureaucracy as a Virus
The virus of bureaucracy began with the State Department, only with nine members, but soon burst into an epidemic after WWI and the New Deal. Agencies swept across America because of the demand fro...

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Bureaucracy as a Virus

The virus of bureaucracy began with the State Department, only with nine members, but soon burst into an epidemic after WWI and the New Deal. Agencies swept across America because of the demand from citizens, states, and cities that had social and economic problems. In order to solve the problems, the president appointed officials to create agencies to carry out necessary tasks. The bureaucracy is an inevitable outcome from Modernity, as Max Weber describes, because of a money economy, division of labor, and private parties that grow more bureaucratic. Parkinson’s Law suggests that works and personnel expand to consume available resources. Viruses spread from the host to the recipients in order to take up all the resources to grow and thrive more. However, Peter’s Principle states that people are promoted until they are incompetent in their position. If this is true, the Bureaucracy is a massive body of useless individuals taking up space and wasting money. Just like the Black Plague which is forever with us, the bureaucracy is always here, though not always noticeable to citizens. They hold the most power, however, mainly due to their sheer size.

The Bubonic Plague could not be controlled in the middle ages because it was so massive and contagious. The bureaucracy has grown through the ages, and has become immune from any popular or democratic control because there are so many millions of people involved. It is able to waste millions of dollars on only maybe 70,000 workers, because there is no upper authority holding them back. The power is placed into private, not public hands, so sometimes the tasks they accomplish aren’t responsive to the public good. It is like a maddening virus that causes hives which itch all over but cannot be removed, the more you itch and irritate them, the worse they become and the more the virus spreads. Bureaucracies can be slow, unjust, and insufficient, but exists because the clientele needs them. Growth of the bureaucracy is because of the demand of service, just like the Post Office. States are the biggest clientele for grants, and in the 1960’s the President finally ruled that grants must be given for a national improvement, and important reason, not just given out for the sake of giving money. However, just like the virus which morphs and changes, using loopholes to spread and infect more, the bureaucracy seems to find ways to waste huge amounts of money and grasp an enormous amount of power over the people and government.

The government strives to make changes for economic, social, and educational improvements, so they delegated their power to the private agencies to follow through with the goals. However goals keep changing in order to please different clients, and sometimes the tasks done don’t have an ultimate goal, but just maintain a small degree of order. By the huge size of bureaucracies, problems arise within them because officials can not decide how to meet the indistinct goals. To solve the issue, more positions are created, and the agencies expand, causing more of a problem than they had before. Sometimes, attempts to cure a virus only cause a further outbreak and worse new strain to arise.

This virus in our political system can not be eliminated, because to cause a drastic change in revision among the agencies would raise more havoc than they cause as they are. Clients would expect far better agencies to be created, and when that is not accomplished, the public will pronounce their anger. Because the massive amount of power in this virus, it will never be stopped. It only grows, creates more problems, and grows more to “fix?those problems. Without any figure of authority to answer to, bureaucracies are able to expand and follow out their duties without any submission or guidelines. There is no end to this self- inflicting virus, and the public is left helpless to their regulations and own interests. The virus has taken over, and only time can foretell the future of our country in the hands of the true authority: the Bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy as a Virus
The virus of bureaucracy began with the State Department, only with nine members, but soon burst into an epidemic after WWI and the New Deal. Agencies swept across America because of the demand fro...