I don't have any insight in my local branch (I've only lived here for two years, but from the little contact I did have, it doesn't look different from where I'

I don't have any insight in my local branch (I've only lived here for two years, but from the little contact I did have, it doesn't look different from where I've previously lived). I've done some consulting for a trade union that covers parts of public administrations and what I learned from helping them organize files surrounding the labor environment in ministries and local agencies looked like it could've well been the inspiration for that Asterix comic dealing with Roman bureaucracy. I have a friend who works on a large federal digitalization project and he's ready to quit because it drains the life out of you for those same reasons (rules abound, nobody wants to make a decision, and expensive consultants and lawyers who are brought in to take the blame -- only they don't care for taking the blame, they want to bill as much as possible, and so everything takes forever). Yet he won't, because he believes that it's important work and will help make things better, and so he'll suffer and probably snap in a few years down the line. To me, it looks like a culture issue. I'm a freelancer and have worked with quite a few teams over the past 20 years and some teams are just broken because of culture. They're places where nobody cooperates willingly and nobody takes ownership of anything, where fear stalks the offices and ideas go to die. And then you have places where people are proactive, and will handle a task and when an additional thing pops up a week later, they'll say "I've anticipated that and made sure it's easy to add" and things just work, because everybody works so that the team's future version has an easy time. I'm sure a broken culture can be fixed somehow, but I don't know if you can do it gradually because new members will adapt to the existing culture and perpetuate it.