On the American State

This article is interesting:

The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government by John J. Dilulio Jr. | The Washington Monthly: 



The federal civil service is overloaded, not bloated. The failed
Federal Emergency Management Agency response to Hurricane Katrina in
2005 hit when FEMA had only about 2,100 employees and had recently lost
many senior managers. The badly bollixed launch of Obamacare health
exchanges in 2013 involved scores of contractors and was overseen by the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal center with fewer
than 5,000 employees. The Internal Revenue Service fails to collect
more than $300 billion a year in taxes it knows are owed, in part
because it lacks the necessary personnel.



Fukuyama is correct that America has never had a fully “centralized,
bureaucratic, and autonomous state”; but he is wrong to imply that
America needs one. What America does need is a federal public
administration workforce that relies less on proxies and more on
full-time bureaucrats who are well selected, well trained, well
motivated, well rewarded financially, and well respected by one and all. American government is decaying mainly because it has too few federal
bureaucrats chasing after too many federal proxies, monitoring too many
federal grants and contracts, and handling too many dollars.



The way
forward is to de-leverage the federal government by defunding its
nonessential proxies and relying more on full-time federal civil
servants to directly administer federal policies, programs, and
regulations. Over time, hiring more federal bureaucrats while pruning
proxies would result in a federal government less beset by grant-seeking
and contract-mongering special interests, more “faithfully executed” by
the executive branch, and less bollixed by the Congress and its dozens
of massively dysfunctional administrative oversight committees and
subcommittees.

I don't have personal experience with the questions here, but it's true that in a college education where I focused on politics and policy, the only discussions of bureaucracy came about when discussing obvious corruption - the design of strong gov't systems is a different matter, and one I didn't hear about much in college. Perhaps a good topic for an MPA....