It is both sad and funny that a Washington Post writer is so outraged by a bureaucratic system that works about as well as one ever will that he wrote not just this article exposing it but three others as well.

It is funny because of the things that disturb him like using an old mine to house and a rural population to staff it. That was actually a brilliant idea. He complains about its costs but how much higher would they be had the government built an underground bunker facility in DC and staffed that with Ivy League political cronies' relatives?. And while he concedes that paperwork reaches the mine overnight by FedEx, he gasps that it takes two whole days for USPS to deliver, lol. 

It is also funny how appalled he is that in this day and age they still use paper, PAPER!, for legal record keeping -- and in manila folders, too!  Does he seriously believe that totally keeping them digitally or arrayed across the cloud would be safer?  Imagine a disgruntled worker (like the former one who now works with explosives) walking through a digital archive with a powerful magnet or hackers corrupting them in the cloud or simply stealing identities from it.

It is sad because even though he notes the real causes of bureaucratic sluggishness, incomplete information and inside people to outside people interactions, he actually seems to think those would not be carried forward into a bright, shining new way of doing things.

Anyway, thanks for a really enjoyable read even though it did tend to confirm a hypothesis that I have that reporters need more real world experience in the subjects they write about before being given paper-of-record perches.