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On Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:20:40 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 21 Feb 2011 11:08:32 -0800, wrote:

On Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:29:35 -0500, wrote:

On Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:46:06 -0800, wrote:

On Sun, 20 Feb 2011 23:17:11 -0500, wrote:

DoE was a Carter invention. Nobody said ERDA was a good idea either
but it was not the same huge bureaucracy DoE became.
I was in DC at the time, working in those buildings. I saw what
happened. Each time they changed the name, another office was started
up and the existing office just got a new sign. The joke at GSA was
they were going to hang the signs with thumb screws.

Sure... DoE... created by a Dem, therefore it's horrible. What total
nonsense. You just want to eliminate anything that doesn't directly
involved profit.

No it was bad because it was an extra layer of bureaucracy on top of
an already redundant layer on an agency that was working well.

According to you. So, no coordination among the disparate groups is
needed?? That's what you're claiming...

Make up your mind, you started out saying we needed this omnibus
bureaucracy to regulate a small sector of the energy business that
runs nuclear reactors and now you are talking about disparate groups?
What groups?

There were two agencies that were disbanded. They, along with several
others were combined. For some reason you think that represents
terrible bloat.

That may be what you learned in your civics class but I was there. The
AEC was still there (in a big building in Germantown Md). ERDA was a
new office with a bunch of new bureaucrats in Rockville Md that sat
over AEC. When DoE was started it was yet ANOTHER office in DC that
sat over both previous bureaucracies. The difference was the old AEC
people now had two more levels of management above them who knew very
little about what they did and chipped away at their allocation of the
pot of money.

Come on. I made a statement of fact. Published fact. You can claim you
know more, but it doesn't mean much when compared to the published
facts.

What "fact"? Disbanded only meant they got different stationary. I
guarantee you the building and all the people in it were still there.
They just lost some of their autonomy to decide what they should be
regulating.

You sure are an expert in so many things! Esp. when the published
facts don't match your view.

A cynical person might say that confusion actually disrupted the AEC
oversight and allowed TMI ... but I don't think there was that much
oversight in the first place.

So, there should be less?

There was less

Things are a bit more complicated now. Perhaps we should go back to
the regulations in place before the 1920s.

Why should the agency that regulates the safety of our nukes have to
live under the same bloated bureaucracy that is promoting the
collection of methane from cow farts?

So, therefore, remove it. No way to fix something right? That's your
argument?

I don't think you fix anything by increasing complexity. Keep it
simple.

?? Making it more simple doesn't not equate to removing something.

It also does not equate to putting more management overhead on top of
an agency that was working just fine.

It's not clear it was "working fine." That's your interpretation
that's unsupported.

They have nothing to do with each other. IMHO putting AEC in ERDA was
a dumb idea. (a feeling shared by the AEC people I knew at the time)
Rolling that up in another larger agency was a dumb idea squared.
You can't even say they were "developing" atomic energy (the D in
ERDA). We haven't built a nuke plant since they created these
boondoggles.

Ever hear of the power grid in the US? It's got to be under some
agency. Perhaps you'd prefer it to be under the DoJ or the military?

The power grid has been controlled by the power producers quite
successfully over the years. The government has a regulatory function
but that function does not require a cabinet level department. In fact
a smaller organization would be able to react faster in an industry
that is changing like this one.

And, it's been regulated by the over-all agency. You want no
regulation, basically putting it in the hands of corporations. I think
I'll pass on that. They have such an excellent record, e.g., Big Oil.

Smaller agencies regulate better than big ones. The bigger an agency
becomes the more political it becomes and politics hurts effective
regulation.

Maybe. There needs to be standards. Bigger agencies tend to impose
standards across smaller agencies. I totally dispute the political
nature of the argument. Perfect example.. Texas school boards.

It is simple to explain that. As soon as you become a cabinet level
office, the top 5 or 6 levels of management become political
appointees, not professional managers.

"Brownie" was a political appointee and he did a heckuva job didn't
he? That is the kind of thing that happens when you take a civil
defense "agency" and make it a political "administration".
It even gets worse when it is a cabinet level "department".

This was done by the Bush administration. It shouldn't have been done.
I agree. However, just because Bush did something poorly, does not
mean that all agencies are in the same situation.

I'd call your argument a genetic fallacy but it may be another kind
that escapes me at the moment. (Not an insult. Look it up.)