Bureaucracy vs Democracy

Steven Vincent has his own blog now, In The Red Zone, and he's published a fascinating article about the problems the CPA had with bureaucratic red tape when trying to reconstruct Iraq. It seems it's a lot easier to get Congress to promise money than it is to actually spend it.

Ironically, those appropriations are one reason with the CPA opened the DFI checkbook. Legislators placed so many guards against waste or misuse on the $18.4 billion Congress earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction, that administrators in Baghdad frequently found themselves ensnared in red tape. Moreover, the FT notes, those taxpayer funds evidently fell under the control of the Pentagon, which "was reluctant to let them spend the money." Indeed, CPA officials I spoke to in Iraq constantly complained that they couldn't move Congressional funds "into the field" because of oversight rules, such as demanding multiple bidders for even low-level projects. "How can we find more than one Iraqi construction firm to repair a school or a hospital?" one told me. "It's like the Pentagon has a 10,000-mile screwdriver and is trying to fine-tune everything we do with the money," another said. In the end, it simply proved more expeditious for the CPA to use the less-scrutinized DFI account.

Ain't bureaucracy wonderful?