https://www.commerce.gov/bureaus-and-offices
I worked at NIST and this department which has since been abolished.
I agree that I am committing a fallacy in appealing to authority. But you asked why I believe what I do and all I can do is tell you. Working inside the civilian bureaucracy gave me an appreciation of just how bad things are and how little actual problems are addressed. I have tons of anecdotes that I don't really have time to ennumerate but trust me, it's a LOT.
If you want a good long read on how the federal bureaucracy is breaking down and why you can read Fukuyama's 'Political Order and Political Decay'. here His thesis is that the bureaucracy has become a 'vetocracy' and has become not corrupt, but instead ineffective and inefficient. The case study of the US forest service is pretty convincing. I didn't work with the UN directly, but knew people who did and it sounded like they had all our problems plus some.
In Francis Fukuyuma's book "Political Order and Political Decay", Fukyuma goes on to describe the elements created which establish the political decay of a country's environment.
What is surprising about the book considering it is written by a man associated with American triumphalism is that some of Fukuyama's sternest criticisms are reserved for his own country. Fukuyama charges his fellow countrymen with being so preoccupied with the second and third part of what constitutes a successfull liberal democracy in their constant criticisms of 'big government' that they have forgotten that the first part is equally important. This is reflected, Fukuyama states, by the polarisation currently evident in American politics which he posits as being rooted within its much vaunted constitution as it makes it near impossible to achieve bipartisanship and political consensus to mobilise real change due to the seperation of powers embedded and multiple checks and balances throughout. Provision of universal healthcare being one clear example of this. Fukuyama categorises the American political system as a 'vetocracy.' Fukuyama outlines how this blind spot on the part of many Americans to recognise that the first component is as equally as important as the other two has lead to political decay at home and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. 'State building and democracy building are not the same thing, and in the short run they often exist in a great deal of tension with one another.'
This blind spot on the part of the American political system to recognise the importance of having a strong state is also reflected, Fukuyama explains, via a key point outlined in in the first volume and extended further in the second volume that what we refer to today as 'corruption' in politics has its roots in a part of human nature that is unlikely to go away, what biologists would refer to as 'inclusive fitness' and 'reciprocal altruism' or what a layman would describe as the everyday tendency to favour family and friends. In the first volume Fukuyama examined political development from pre-history onwards as humans progressed from bands to tribes ultimately to states. Fukuyama's insight is that while we may have moved away from living in bands and tribes, in many ways, it is unnatural for us to do so and that the 'social contract' which any state represents is always inherently fragile, a reality forgotten by many Americans Fukuyama claims. The 'social contract' upon which all successfull states are based have to overcome these instincts if they are to avoid political decay is the message. Fukuyama states that this 'social contract' is being undermined in American via the corrupting effect of professional lobbyists.
The book concludes without giving conclusions, only that the glaring realities of bureaucratic conflict lead to the existence of 'vetocracy', a dysfunctional system of governance whereby no single entity can acquire enough power to make decisions and take effective charge.
In Francis Fukuyuma's book "Political Order and Political Decay", Fukyuma goes on to describe the elements created which establish the political decay of a country's environment.
The industrial revolution in Europe and the then nascent United States changed everything. Up until that point technological innovation was slow. Every advance in the production of more food and other goods was absorbed by expanding population that prevented any serious accumulation of wealth other than in and to very small classes of political elites. The industrial revolution changed all of this by generating increased food production, goods, and technological change faster than expanding populations could absorb them, leading to surplus wealth. In turn, surplus wealth led to a large scale differentiation in types of labor, specialization, which in turn led to the multiplication of political classes whose members, economic drivers who did not exist in earlier times (or existed in very small numbers), demanded and eventually achieved access to the political process.
Fukuyama's general conclusion is that every state must solve similar though not identical kinds of social and political problems and the solutions evolved are often similar but never the same. A combination that works in one place normally cannot be transplanted to another and what can be transplanted depends on what was there before. Furthermore at the present time everyone of these states is experiencing political decay in some of their institutions. The United States invented the political form he calls 'clientalism', the mass-oriented impersonal version of earlier 'patrimonialism', in the early 19th century. Italy and Greece are clientalistic states even today. America broke free of clientalism by the mid 20th century and built an efficient state which, since the late 20th century has fallen back through a process Fukuyama calls 'repatrimonialization' in which the state's apparatus become captured by special interests.
The book concludes without giving conclusions, only that the glaring realities of bureaucratic conflict lead to the existence of 'vetocracy', a dysfunctional system of governance whereby no single entity can acquire enough power to make decisions and take effective charge.