zlacker

Cynical viewpoint, downvote if you must: It is the dream of right wing populists everywhere to demolish government bloat, leaving just the bits that are actually useful.

But: https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/seoc2/1996_1997/ad...

Any bureaucracy evolves, ultimately, to serve and protect itself. So the populist boss snips at the easy, but actually useful parts: Social safety nets, environmental regulations, etc. Whereas the core bureaucracy, the one that should really be snipped, has gotten so good at protecting itself that it remains untouchable. So in the end the percentage of useless administratium is actually up, and the government, as a whole, still bloated but even less functional. Just another "unintended consequences" example.

We'll see if Argentina can do better than this.

>>Markus+(OP)
In my locale, every time there are budget cuts or cost increases it is the popular and the visible government functions which get the axe. I.e. The parks department has four layers of management and manages a ton of no-bid contracts, but swimming pools will be closed rather than building cheaper in-house expertise. I guess it's better than deferring essential maintenance, but somehow I suspect maintenance is also already being overly deferred. One wishes they would take an axe to Parkinson's law of growth instead.