Thursday, March 20, 2008

The curse of bureaucracy...

I fully understand the need for certain bureaucracy. It’s essential to operating a lawful society despite it's seeming uselessness and the often headache inducing frustrations it inspires whether it’s responding to a manufacturer's multi-million dollar Request For Proposal, or simply applying for a drivers license.

I am a professional bureaucrat by trade (an awesome one at that!) and am more than a little familiar with Six Sigma, TQM, and other quality related programs, but for the life of me I cannot understand why this process has to take so long. If ever there was a group more worthy to cut to the head of the line it is the immigrant who lawfully comes to this country, enlists in our armed services, and serves in combat. Considering the scrutiny and level of paperwork required to join the armed services in this day and age, I can't believe that it takes more than a couple of months to clear a soldier for citizenship especially one who has followed our already onerous immigration process to the satisfaction of INS let alone the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines.

My admiration for this special group of soldier is beyond words and we absolutely owe them an expedited path to citizenship. Lance Cpl. Mario Ramos-Villalta has served two tours in Iraq, was wounded, received a Purple Heart, and is heading over to Afghanistan for a third combat tour. This guy and all the others in the same predicament deserve our absolute best. For christ sakes let’s fix this and avoid anymore posthumous citizenship grants.

3 Comments:

At 4:59 PM, March 20, 2008, Blogger Ginormous Boobs said...

I agree 110%.

 
At 12:32 AM, March 21, 2008, Blogger Jackson said...

Vote for Jackson, I'll make this guy a citizen pronto. I'm all about immediate action. Basically I want to fix everything in my first week, and then coast....

 
At 12:26 PM, March 24, 2008, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is probably tied up on someone's desk half the time because there isn't a template form to fill out being that this is such a non-standard situation. We joke about the security of an IRS/DMV/USPS job and how employees move like slugs because, fuck you they can. You won't believe what I go through to get a lousy 5k purchase order for a government customer. The document "contract" alone is half a tree - and this is for a standard published rate, order-off-the-web kind of service. Try to push something non-standard and you become the government's "fair price justification" bitch. One year later, you get the order for this cutting technological approach that no longer is because of the delay. These people who control the strings know nothing except their forms, and that if you don't fit into box 23, you aint getting your approval without 17 forms to figure out how to calculate box 23 and this is for work done at a US company! (Now here's my rant - this is a blog, right?) It's this kind of crap, not the often-cited "fact" that kids don't like math/science anymore, that allows the other countries to get the leg up in engineering and innovation.

 

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