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Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits In Frustration With Bureaucracy
sandbagger writes "The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the 'remarkably dysfunctional' federal bureaucracy. Officials at the Office of Scientific Integrity spent 'exorbitant amounts of time' in meetings and generating data and reports to make their divisions look productive, David Wright writes. He huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI 'the very worst job I have ever had.'"
and its a large corporation in the private sector. Its hard for very large organizations to be efficient.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
The sickness is endemic, and not just in government either; pretty much all big business suffers from this once it reaches critical mass. Basically, when you have a hierarchy of people who are so separated by degrees of management tier that the bulk of them no longer care about the actual stated goal or task of the organization and don't interact socially or even actually know anyone high enough up in the organization who does, and then you let them self-schedule their time in business meetings, every business meeting will become an elaborate excuse to not do any work. The meetings themselves look like work from a distance though, so this type of dysfunctional situation can persist for decades without anyone who cares actually noticing.
I spent a lost year of my life working for a similar agency. The systematic fear and redundant covering of asses made for endless meetings.
The only thing worse than busywork is busywork with a profound sense of importance attached to it.
In a system where your rewards are based on the look of powerpoint presentations that are delivered to directors, you end up spending all your time optimizing the data on the slides. The same principle is applied all over the place, in almost every human endeavor. Using the wrong measure of progress means we waste time and effort. It also has a side effect of making everyone miserable, like the guy in this story. See health care, prison system, etc.
By the way, this isn't a problem unique to the government. His gripes sound very similar to my reality. I work in a large aerospace company.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
This reminds me of what Richard Feynman went through while investigating the Shuttle Discovery disaster.
They made a movie about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt24...
Why is Fox News politics on Slashdot?
Add to this the lack of incentive to save money and you've got a right good mess. After spending time and effort to save funds on a program (government in this case), we ended the year with a surplus of funds (in the 10x of 1,000's range, I know it's a drop in the bucket but, we were quite proud at the time). When next year rolled around we were suddenly "poor estimators" and had "poor financial management", so our budget was cut by several times over our savings from last year.
That was many years ago but, since then I experienced a similar mentality in the private sector, especially when dealing with government contracts.
Also, our parent company recently took over management of our capital purchases. We have the money, we have the need, we have reviewed the data but, now it takes and extra 4-6 months to purchase something (e.g. a upgraded SAN). It seems that another subsidiary had some issue with their purchasing process, so rather than deal with the problem, Mother (our loving term for our parent company), created several more.
Oh the irony.
Office of Research Integrity
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
If true he could get another job where there's no paperwork.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I spent a few years as a public servant before doing what I do now. It was, to say the least, an eye opening experience. If you want to learn exactly how NOT to run a business go work for the government for a while.
The procurement system is completely whacked. Everyone seems to know it but nobody wants to do anything to fix it. Democrats and Republicans alike have both had ample opportunity to fix it and both have shied away from it.
It is nearly impossible to fire an incompetent federal employee. The best management can do is put the person in a crummy job and hope they quit. Likewise, management is forbidden from giving bonuses to top performing employees. It doesn't take long before people realize that they get paid the same whether they put in an honest days work or sit there with their feet up on the desk.
Efficiency in government is punished, not rewarded. If you find a way to save money your reward is a reduced budget for next year. No raise, no promotion, no bonus, no thanks. So you end up with year end spending sprees to ensure that you spend every penny allocated to your department.
It's very difficult to measure success in government. If you are selling a product you can say we sold X last year and this year we sold X+2. Therefore, this year was better than last. In public service how do you measure it? We had fewer complaints this year than last?
It seemed to me that if you worked in government you had one of two choices. You could either suck it up and wait for your pension or leave and do something else. I chose to leave. I did find a lot of good, hard working people in government. I also found a lot of lazy, good for nothing doorstops. Such is life.
Government exemplifies Parkinson's Law. With essentially unlimited resources (just raise taxes) the bureaucracy can expand indefinitely until all "work" being done is perpetuating the bureaucracy and nothing useful is accomplished.
What good is it to be director of the agency if he couldn't streamline their processes? Don't like frivilous reports? Give bad performance reviews to people who write them. Don't like meetings? Remove all the chairs from meeting rooms. Etc.
I know of a large telecom operator that's been offering virtual datacenter services to its (also large) enterprise customers. There's this rumor that it takes the tech guy around 5 to 15 minutes to create a virtual machine for a customer...which is always preceded by 20 days of paperwork and approvals.
ymmv
I'd say that you're buying into the whole "governments are bad, mkay..." syndrome that affects a large swath of the population these days. In my experience, I've had great government work experiences and ultra-crappy private sector experiences and vice-versa. Perhaps the reason that government project failures get more attention is a combination of a very active propaganda machine always on the lookout for any government failure so that they can hype it mercilessly and that - overall - government projects tend to be larger. Just a thought....
That may not be a bad idea, even if you are doing the same work twice. A project that Google or Apple would spend $100M on could pay $75M to the loser and $130M to the winner and still come out better than the current system.
However, to make it worth doing for $150M, you'd need to seriously reduce the government paperwork and delays, the layers of approvals for little minor stuff. Where I work, a government agency, the budget specificity is maddening. The state approves $X million for new computers, I had to spend $4,800 on a new workstation even though the old one has 16GB of RAM, four monitors, etc. A few months later, my UPS battery went bad and needed a $25 replacement. It's been weeks and I'm still waiting for approval to replace the battery.
My colleague saved $30,000 on a project by pointing out we had already purchased the thing we were supposed to spend $30,000 on. This is a big problem, trying to figure out how to send that $30,000 to /dev/null. We can't spend it on things we need, like batteries, because it's not approved for that use.
Yes, biomedical misconduct is against the law, especially when it's funded with federal dollars. ORI only investigates (when bureaucracy allows them to) alleged incidents that are reported to them which only applies to HHS funded research, which is mostly NIH funded research. So it's 100% the business of the federal government. A typical investigation doesn't cost the government that much, anyway, since a lot of it involves making the institution that was awarded the grant (typically a university) conduct most of the investigation and report back, and most will because they want to continue having their other investigators receive NIH funding. Not to mention the university doesn't want to have the reputation of having faculty who misrepresent their research.
Now, if you want to argue that the government shouldn't be funding this research in the first place in which case this office wouldn't be necessary, that's a different story (although I personally disagree with that).
I agree, it is a waste of time to investigate fraud. Every study should be independently replicated to catch all types of false results.
It would be much more expensive to replicate each study than to investigate fraud; in some fields independent replication would be almost as expensive as the original. If we are going to flash anywhere near that amount of cash around I'd rather see grant proposals graded a bit more on bigger sample sizes and internal replication (reviewers could look at applicants' prior publications to see if they follow through on those promises) with funds increased accordingly. NIH could also have requirements for training in experimental design and data analysis for any grad students or postdocs that its grant money pays.