[glup]

> Who says government projects and agencies have to be poorly run?

I'm not sure how to test this empirically, but it's always seemed to me that these are the inefficiencies that emerge with scale and incredibly broad objectives—and that the federal gov't actually does a decent job considering. Remind which company has 320m consumers, annual revenue of 6.7 trillion, and 2.8m (non-uniformed) employees? The federal government is 10x the size of IBM—it can't be agile. That said, tech is in general not a strong suit for gov't agencies—and it needs to be both 1) for planning, analysis, logistics and 2) for dissemination of information to citizens about what the agency does.

[PKop]

This is an argument for refactoring into smaller modules. Decentralization. Local and state government taking on more responsibilities, with the added benefit of forcing competition and choice among citizens vs. one-size-fits-all policy.

[leg]

Except that state and local governments are mostly more corrupt, more poorly run, and less well supervised by the voters.

[stvswn]

Care to provide evidence for such a claim?

[Bartweiss]

Well, I'll do a bit of it.

Voting rates for local/state elections are awful, and only rise when they share a ballot with national elections. 'Special districts' are a legal fiction helpful for organizing things like sensible fire department jurisdictions, but they've become a way to ensure that there are few or even no voters for a specific issue, and to minimize state oversight of a given budget. Lobbying groups and special interests may influence national bills, but they write state and local bills, often getting their "sample texts" passed completely unchanged. John Oliver has covered all three of those topics, but I could dig up real sources if you actually doubt them.

I wouldn't care to speak to the fraud claim, but surely it isn't controversial that voter engagement is lower - and N dollars of corporate spending buy more influence - when the stakes are lower?