Comment on the Belmont Club "The needle in the haystack"

How are problems solved? By having the right people in the right places.

How do you get the right people? The traditional bureaucratic answer is by credentialing, a form of peer review in which hoops are jumped through so the HR people can assure themselves that the "Best qualified" list sent up for managerial review will not be held against the resume screener.

Who selects the HR resume screener and establishes the review and staffing process? The same people who staff HR, it is a self replicating perpetual motion machine.

These are problems that afflict every bureaucracy and they are compounded in a system of government administration because there are no countervailing forces. Even today Obama's flood of words meant exactly nothing. No one was fired, no simple method of updating watch list reviews was announced. No clear statement was made that anyone who assists an airplane bomber will be killed and anyone who is within 500 feet of an airplane bomber or anyone who has assisted them is at risk. So what did Obama say? That he really really means it that in the future managers will be held accountable and that he had already budgeted a billion dollars for new equipment for TSA. That holds the federal managers to the same strict standard as Iran. They must be quaking as they figure out how to divert the new equipment budget into air conditioning and better video at the manager's offices.

Readers of the Belmont Club may take it as a given that I have inserted links and quotes from Yes Minister here.

BTW, the administration thought this was a good time to announce that the ban on traveling to the United States if you are HIV positive is now lifted. That should spare Andrew Sullivan some embarrassment about his visa status the next time that he gets himself arrested.