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Just to be clear, you are excoriating only the managers who do (or claim to do) nothing but coordination, and not the engineers, scientists, planners, etc. who do the actual work? Because some would include those engineers/scientists/planners in the "bureaucrat" category as well.
Doesn't the federal government contract out almost all of that actual wrench-turning work? E.g., NASA doesn't build rockets (Boeing/ULA/SpaceX), satellites (Lockmart, Northrup) or probes (JPL, Northrup). But they do a shit-ton of paperwork.
I can offer some insight into that. That's the perception but the reality is more complicated and it depends.
A little over half of NASA's government workforce of ~18,000 are engineers of some kind according to data from OPM's FedScope. While you're correct that most (not all) hands on hardware are from contractors, NASA-proper is heavily involved in the design and engineering.
Man, I've got stories to tell about my experience with "NASA Engineers", but I'm afraid they'd be too specific and out myself in my relatively small industry.
Let's just say this. Every now and again when I'm shooting the shit and people are talking about their work, I start griping about the NASA people I have to work with. And normies undoubtedly go "Oh wow, NASA?!" And I have to remind them, this isn't the NASA that put a man on the moon. This is the NASA that wasted a billion dollars because they didn't convert feet to meters correctly.
Jesus... even just this last week....
But like I said, I can't risk outing myself.
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Presumably. But all the contracts I've worked on with three letter agencies have had probably a 5:1 ratio of managers to productive people. It's truly incredible. I'll be in an explicitly technical meeting, with explicitly planned technical goals (test connectivity, simulate some activity across systems, etc), and there will be literally 10 project managers hobnobbing for the entirety of the planned time, and myself and one other sad overworked engineer on the other side. Eventually the meeting reaches it's planned end time, all the project managers excuse themselves to attend other meetings, and myself and my technical counterpart finally get to do the work the meeting was planned around in the first place, an hour or two after the start of the meeting, eating into time we were supposed to be doing other shit.
But these fucking asshole project managers just invite themselves from meeting to meeting, destroying productivity, and treating it like a social function. It's been like this for the last 5-8 years I've been on contracts with federal government agencies. At least when this first started, if I had technical questions 8 of the project managers would look around scared and one grizzled old white guy project manager who'd been cowed into silence would finally speak up and show that not everyone there was a sinecure. That hasn't happened in the last 4 years. You just get shouted down by the PMs for asking technical questions in an explicitly technical meeting. They're utterly shameless now.
He retired last year at our company. We only have the other sort now. The outcomes are shit but we still get challenge coins for the great 'success' of projects.
They have to account for their time to tenths of hours against relevant charge codes, that's near 90% of their job.
So much of current year feels like managed decline.
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