[GFischer]

Have you read Frank Herbert's Jorj McKie series of books?

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/mckie.html

"The main theme of the two principal Jorj X. McKie stories, Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment, is the Bureau of Sabotage, an interesting concept in government that is kind of like a ninja GAO.

The idea is that all governments and other bureaucracies tend to snowball over time, finally becoming juggernauts that crush mere humans unthinkingly. So the Bureau of Sabotage was founded with a legal right to throw wrenches into the gears of bureaucracies. No agency can sabotage the BuSab itself.

So what keeps the BuSab from turning into a juggernaut? Their promotion policy. The way you get promoted is to sabotage your boss."

[chimeracoder]

> So what keeps the BuSab from turning into a juggernaut? Their promotion policy. The way you get promoted is to sabotage your boss."

That sounds like a fascinating set of stories and I'd love to read them.

That said, I have full faith in the corruptibility of human beings to assume that they would find some way to capture that agency too.