Hi Steven, I'm sympathetic to your feelings about new, inexperienced managers barging in and arrogating to themselves important decisions without the benefit of consulting the people who are in the best position to know what the implications will be.
But going beyond that, let me propose that each government is dysfunctional in its unique way, and the primary challenge faced by the US government seems to be that it is overly bureaucratic. Americans love management as a topic, and they love to manage, to sit back and tell other people what to do, to put in place all kinds of processes and to hide behind such processes in order to avoid personal liability. There is a similar overgrowth that can be seen in US legal practice. The following article is about the small team that fixed the healthcare.gov website, and it shows a little of what a group of Silicon Valley expatriates encountered along the way, trying to work with US government agencies: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/ Eric
