Government problem-solving is a peculiar art, perfected over decades by professional bureaucrats and fueled by one golden rule: always cover your butt. This involves the paradoxical art of wiping your butt even before you poop, a technique that, while counterintuitive, has become the hallmark of bureaucratic brilliance. The goal is simple—never be the one left holding the bag when things go awry. Leave that job to some lower ranking poor soul.
Take the classic government method of dealing with impending disaster: conducting a study before making any significant decisions. This move is a masterstroke of administrative acumen. By commissioning an exhaustive, year-long study, you effectively create a shield of plausible deniability. When the inevitable disaster strikes (because you waited) you can confidently point to the reams of paper and say, “See? We thought about it!” The study, of course, concludes just as the problem reaches critical mass, ensuring that action can be taken just in time to be too late. And thus you never let a crisis go to waste, although you are also secretly responsible for creating the crisis.
Consider the construction of a new bridge in a bustling city. The city planners, mindful of their posteriors, spend three years studying the project. Traffic patterns are analyzed, environmental impact assessments are conducted, and public consultations are held. Millions of dollars and pounds of paperwork spent. By the time they break ground, the population has doubled, the proposed location is now a historical landmark, and the initial budget is a distant memory. Now we need to raise taxes to afford this ambitious plan… But hey, they’ve got 6,000 pages of study to show they did their homework and it wouldn’t go over budget.
The brilliance of this approach is that it shifts the blame from decision-makers to the inexorable march of time and circumstance. No one can fault the government for being unprepared when there’s a thick binder full of charts and graphs to prove otherwise. The key is to ensure that any actionable insight emerges just a hair too late, allowing officials to claim due diligence while conveniently sidestepping all responsibility. A long-standing joke… it used to be an insult refer to some government workers as “government rockets.” It goes; “What is a government rocket? Answer; It’s a rocket that doesn’t work and you can’t fire it!
In the end, the art of backward thinking in government isn’t just about avoiding blame; it’s about mastering the delicate dance of appearing proactive while remaining comfortably reactive. It’s a strategy that ensures longevity in public service, where the primary objective isn’t solving problems, but ensuring survival of one’s own job security. After all, in the grand theater of government problem-solving, the only thing worse than being part of the problem is being part of the solution; but they both pay the same amount.
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