Why I don’t like bureaucracies

  Counting my time in the army and my years as a diplomat I was part of the government bureaucracy for over fifty years. You’d think after all that time I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, hard-core bureaucrat. You’d be dead wrong. I don’t like bureaucracy, in fact, I absolutely hate bureaucracy. It’s said that bureaucracy is necessary to keep organizations from making rash decisions. The problem is that it often keeps them from making any decision or causes them to make some really stupid decisions.

 

Reading my Sunday, November 26, 2023, edition of The Washington Post reminded me of just why I have such a jaundiced view of bureaucracies and bureaucrats.

 

The story was about a 61-year old doctor who applied to renew his passport, something he’d done several times in the past without a hitch, and now that the U.S. Passport Office is getting its act together and beginning to issue passports in a more timely manner, he expected no problems this time. He was, after all, applying early just to be on the safe side. Hah! Was he in for a surprise. Instead of a notice of his appointment for getting his new passport, he received a letter from a State Department official informing him that he was no longer a U.S. citizen.

 

This was a man who had been born at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC nearly 62 years ago. He attended Georgetown Preparatory School, George Washington University and Boston College, and got his medical degree from Georgetown Medical School. His older brother, born in Kansas, ran for the U.S. Senate from Maryland in 2012. For more than sixty years the US government has been documenting this man as an American citizen, even though at the time of his birth, his father was working for the Embassy of Iran and had diplomatic immunity. Okay, so sixty-one-plus years ago, someone screwed up and issued a US passport to someone who wasn’t entitled to it, and over the years they kept renewing that person’s passport because someone was too lazy to check the records, or too stupid to understand the regulations.

 

So now, some sharp-eyed bureaucrat does check the record and says, ‘oops, we screwed up, but you’re screwed.’ You can apply for permanent residency, but who knows how long that’ll take, or whether or not the bureaucrats who handle that will know what they’re doing or even care that you’ve served the community for decades, including risking your health and safety during the Covid pandemic? The problem here is that the bureaucrat who sent the letter is within his legal right to do so—but because he’s doing it right and according to the rules, it doesn’t make it right. Sometimes, before you blindly follow the rules, you need to look at the circumstances and see if there might not be a kinder, more humane way to handle the situation.

 

In this case, my sympathy is with the passport applicant and I hope it gets settled in a way that’s legal but at the same time fair.

 

But, I’m not holding my breath for that to happen. It is, after all, a bureaucracy.