It's actually not sure that they are doing work. There are backlogs because the employees and management are slow, inefficient, and don't make changes that would be made by a private organization either staying up to date or being replaced by a competitor.
(There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)
Defund the organisation to point of total chaos and near-collapse. Blame employees for collapse in work quality.
Here are some more generally true statements:
Increase profits and improve efficiency by cutting out maintenance tasks and firing the people who do them. Blame accidents or outages on employees, customers, bystanders.
People die? Company goes bust? Who cares? Even if there are consequences, the executives/officials to blame have already taken the money and moved on to the next thing. You can't prosecute them or get the money back (unless they were stupendously dumb and got directly involved and stayed on 'til the bitter end and centres of power were so affected that prosecutors can't ignore it: see Theranos, Enron, etc.).
Even without governments being overthrown, government agencies get deeply reorganized fairly often; often for reasons of politics rather than efficiency, but nevertheless.
We don't share preconceptions (I see multiple problems at multiple levels of public org charts, and in the electorate), but I see and appreciate why you might have that priority.
While I myself am frustrated with the bureaucracy and inefficiencies of govts, but I am not sure if its entirely fair to compare a govt with a private company/org - at least based on the scale they operate on and the profit motive, which make it very different.
> It's actually not sure that they are doing work.
> (There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)
Guess, based on that I cannot really have a counter argument here :)
From what I understand, queueing theory would say a backlog that doesn't go away but also doesn't keep growing means you're staffed to just barely keep up on average.
It's not given that the queue backlog is staying even, but you would also have to factor the externalities of better or worse performing offices into the queueing analysis. Slower government workers have consequences like the public giving up and bothering to add to the queue, and occasionally, lawsuits due to failure to perform a required task, legal cases being a less desirable budget spend than bureaucratic staffing.
Parents point is that there must be slack in a system in order to have a stable queue size.
But slack can also be perceived as waste, which can be cut.
And if your budget is cut, you are likely to see that slack as "first thing on the copping block" with the consequence that the queue begins to expand. But most systems have natural buffers which delay catastrophic failure. By that point there have been elections, you have retired, etc. and someone else is left holding the bag.
At that point you can blame the organisation for being "slow", or "inefficient", and then you can cut it's funding further, or destroy it outright or maybe outsource it to the private sector.
Then the private sector can drive profits by asset stripping and cutting safety or vital maintenance work, then when the whole system collapses, you can hold the taxpayer hostage by demanding a bailout of the, presumably vital, service (or you can renationalise it), and the whole cycle starts again.
Welcome to our planet, enjoy your stay, it's likely to be a brief one :)
Ah, if that was their only point, then I should have pointed out that a better operating department can achieve a lower waiting time with the same degree of slack. I understand the utilization rate tradeoff and that's not the issue.
I'm glad you've enjoyed writing your comments--like your style. :)
Ah sorry, slightly misinterpreted, my understanding was that without slack you cannot stabilize queue sizes which makes OP incorrect(?)
Yeah, more efficient nodes can delay that effect, but it seems that in real world system the existence of buffers means that consequences are delayed in ways that have significance (across careers, elections, etc) and those factors tend to dominate.
yw, nice that anyone reads it, without that i'd just be another mad shouty bloke on the internet, maybe i still am :)
(There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)