When the EPA says that property owners, farmers, and livestock producers must stomach higher costs, longer delays, and bigger headaches, it's up to Congress to put up a roadblock.
Unfortunately, we are finding the bureaucratic inefficiencies and red tape have a tendency to slow the efforts of individuals and communities working to rebuild.
I think that for anybody who has worked in the civil society, government bureaucracy moves very very slowly.
Looking at U.N. staff and budgetary rules and regulations, one might think some of them were designed to prevent, rather than enable, the effective delivery of our mandates. It benefits no one if it takes nine months to deploy a staff member to the field.
Our own bureaucracy should not and cannot get in the way of our efforts to get people sheltered.
The velocity of decision making in government was extraordinary slow. It took 18 to 24 months and 15 to 20 trips to Delhi to get a license to import computers.
What most surprises me about Brazil is the extent of the difficulties that we create for ourselves. We create a lot of legislation to control the Brazilian state itself, that this ends up meaning that things don't go with the speed any head of government would like.
Government technology processes are mind-boggling long and complicated. A procurement process alone is typically two years, and that doesn't account for the time required to actually build the product.
Too often, researchers on the cusp of a new discovery are held back by needless red tape and paperwork, meaning their innovative work cannot be capitalised on.
It takes our government an awful lot of time to do most things competently, and that's part of the problem here.
