[joshuahedlund]

My favorite part is how the Patent Office director approached Stack Exchange about doing this. As someone who leans libertarian, it's easy to learn about the bad ways government restricts innovation, such as the current patent system, and assume that all government agents involved are either bumbling bureaucrats inadvertently screwing up the system or corrupted cronies deliberately screwing up the system. Of course, those kinds of people exist, but it's encouraging to see that the director is taking intelligent and thoughtful steps to improve his office's work, as well as a pleasant reminder that my default stereotypes about government employees are often wrong. Not a panacea for the patent debacle, of course, but an awesome step in the right direction.

[sophacles]

A large part of the problem isn't the bureaucrats bumbling up the system, it's the "government is always corrupt under all circumstances" crowd passing "accountability" laws requiring 17 redundant forms in triplicate being filled out and sent around to a dozen different independent oversight offices thereby using $100 of resources (in the form of man hours, paper and so on) to spend every $.01. The ones who make these rules do so out a mixture of some absurd fear that that $.01 might be spend incorrectly so we must at all costs prevent such a travesty (damn the costs) and a cynical attempt to prove how awful it must be by their own sabotage (a mentality of "I believe there can be no good here, so I will prove it by injecting as much bad as I can in the system")

Huge numbers of government employees would love to, and regularly do, suggest ways of improving efficiency and outcome, only to be told "it is illegal to be efficient". I've seen it happen over an over.

[rprasad]

Most of the problems in government stem from the horribly written legislation. Bureaucrats are tasked with bringing sanity and order to the chaos that lawmakers provide them. You never hear about the vast majority of bureaucrats, because they do their jobs like they're supposed to. It's only on those (relatively) rate occasions when they screw up that it becomes news.