Regulatory Bodies

One thing you have to admit, Governments love to pass laws regulating the citizens behavior, environment, and limits to what they can do. The general method is for congress to set up an agency to define and enforce these regulations.  Thus we have the FDA, EPA, OSHA and a whole host of other bureaucracies that regulate what we eat, the drugs we are allowed to purchase, working conditions, the limits on land use to avoid impacting some species or other, the standards for the environment in which we live, the contents of materials that we use to make items for sale, the standards for education of our young people, relationship between independent companies and the labor unions, and a myriad of other limits on our choices and freedoms to act on our own.
Are all these agencies really necessary?  Likely not, but one must agree that a whole host of them perform a necessary function that would not be accomplished otherwise. Why?  Simply because private industry, for all it's positive virtues, has no motivation to increase their costs in order to implement procedures that will clean up the environment, assure that drugs should not be prematurely dumped on the open market before adequate testing to assure they are safe, assure that the food on your grocers shelves are not contaminated by deadly microorganisms and disease, and so forth. History has shown clearly that the private sector does contain companies that worship the bottom line to the extent of cheating their customers, putting unsafe products on the market and other nefariousness activities. Right now we are seeing examples of that following the financial meltdown, although the government shares some of the blame, and examples of  questionable  practices played out on the nightly news. Practices that could impact the health of the people on a large scale.
So what's the problem?  The problem is inherent in the workings of any bureaucracy.  That is true whether part of a private organization of one on the public payroll.   Eventually the main goal of any bureaucracy will be self preservation, whether it's function has anything meaningful to accomplish or not. In fact preservation and expansion of the agency will always be at the forefront of the agencies agenda from it's very inception.  This is due to a few factors that exist.

• The importance of a manager is largely determined by their budget and/or the number of people reporting to them. This encourages the manager to look diligently for tasks and additional scope within their charter to expand the influence of the bureaucracy, thus requiring bigger staffs to cover the work load. A perfect example of that is played out in the Endangered Species Act.  At first the emphasis was on the bigger animals (wolves, mountain lions, American bald eagle, etc.) that most people envisioned as the reason for the act to begin with.  But, now the scope is being enlarged to include such animals as rats, in spite of the economic impact of including them in the endangered list and that the species isn't really being impacted all, just in a particular region. There is no end to the number of species that will be found that need protection from "extinction" so that the bureaucracy can continue to live and even grow. You can see this syndrome being played out in the EPA mafia, and any number of government regulatory bodies. 
• Parkinson's Law applies.  "In any organization the work will expand to fit the funds available". The conclusion and "law" as reached by the titled study has been shown to be true, over and over again. This implies that even after all the goals of the agency have been completed, or no longer exist, internal procedures will generate work loads that will keep the personnel busy, even hiring new people, when there is no input or output.  Strange, but shown to be true. Studies have shown that the government is loaded with agencies that really have no function, or that their function is duplicated many times over by other agencies created by congress. And yet they continue to exist as independent agencies, with no motivation to combine their functions to reduce the burden on the taxpayers.  There is no one to step in and decide that the agency is no longer needed or at least should be combined with other agencies to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
• The typical bureaucrat knows that it safer to say NO to any request for change.  Having no responsibility for the bottom line they have no motivation to move anything along.  It is better to make the mistake of being overly cautious than to move things along by quick action and later to be proved wrong. Thus, they become a large bottle neck in accomplishing anything that requires speedy action, or is not following the manual developed by the bureaucracy.  Make sure all the i's a dotted and t's are crossed becomes the mantra. This characteristic is common in private industry, but much more pervasive in the public sector.  The private sector does have overall  leadership concerned with profit, which tends to keep the bureaucracies under control.  The public sector has no such motivations.  In the public sector the employee serves their time, keeps their nose clean,  is advanced up the line in management by seniority and finally to a very lucrative retirement package unmatched anywhere in the private sector.  And, you don't really want to tangle with a government agency to do anything out of the ordinary.  You will likely get stonewalled to death.  

It would be nice if the citizens could do something about all this.  But, unfortunately there really isn't. The bureaucracies are so entrenched in the government that rooting them out, once established, is next to impossible.  Every one of them have a legion of  supporters to jump to their defense at any hint that they should be dissolved or significantly modified.