"USG craves mechanical processes for decision-making. If a decision is made mechanically, no one is responsible for any bad results. Since mechanical management

"USG craves mechanical processes for decision-making. If a decision is made mechanically, no one is responsible for any bad results. Since mechanical management tends to produce bad results, this ass-covering imperative perpetuates itself. Of course, everyone in USG wants to be "in the loop" on everything - even the disasters. Better to be in on a fiasco than twiddling your thumbs around a success. Who needs responsibility? And mechanical decision models have another benefit. Obviously, USG makes real decisions all the time. Somewhere inside the great machine, there are real people with real power. But, since they exert that power by massaging a mechanical decision process - by disguising their personal whims, which are just as personal as anyone's, in the trackless bureaucratic wastes of law or science or the like - they get to rule in secret. Power without responsibility. What fun! Mechanical decision processes perform a kind of power laundering. Because all these processes can be gamed and hacked and massaged, they are not truly mechanical at all. But since the machine is so complex as to be incomprehensible to outsiders, no one can see the true power structures of the Beltway."