It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops

It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops winning. It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink. Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become. Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone. The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy. The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is. I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing. That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.