The EPA process to finalize the grant agreements is complicated and depends upon a federal bureaucracy that isn’t renowned for speed

See Ports Race Against the Political Calendar to Secure $3 Billion in Clean-Energy Grants: The federal support could be rescinded by a new administration if projects aren’t finalized soon by Paul Berger of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Ports around the U.S. are rushing to nail down green-energy projects to ensure they receive their portions of $3 billion in new federal grants, funding that faces tight government deadlines and potential disruption from the presidential election.

The Environmental Protection Agency awarded the money this week to dozens of ports for investments such as new solar arrays, upgrades to electric shore power and purchases of thousands of new electric- and hydrogen-powered heavy-duty lifting equipment and trucks.  

The agency aims to finalize most of the 55 awards by the end of December so that the federal government is legally bound to make the payouts, said Ian Gansler, director of government relations at the American Association of Port Authorities. 

The process is playing out against the backdrop of an election next week that will usher in a new administration and amid Democratic concerns that a Republican White House might roll back green spending.

The EPA process to finalize the grant agreements is complicated and depends upon a federal bureaucracy that isn’t renowned for speed. “Our ports have had complicated and difficult experiences with grant obligations on just about every grant program at federal level,” the AAPA’s Gansler said. “It’s not a given.”"

"The awards aren’t guaranteed until the EPA formally obligates the money for each project, a senior EPA official said. 

To reach that stage, the ports and the EPA must sign off on a work plan, a budget and compliance with federal rules and regulations."

"California is moving to mandate the purchase of heavy-duty trucks powered by batteries or hydrogen. But adoption of the new technologies has been slow. Clean technology trucks can cost three times more than conventional diesel vehicles and access to charging and refueling infrastructure is scarce."

The Federal Government Spent $3.3 Billion on Office Furniture as Employees Worked From Home

The Department of Defense spent $1.2 billion on furniture between 2020 and 2022, although it only uses 23 percent of its office space.

By Joe Lancaster of Reason. 

"More than three years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that working from home is here to stay. A March 2023 Pew Research survey noted that of all Americans who have the option, more than one-third work entirely remotely—a fivefold increase from pre-pandemic levels. Another 41 percent work a hybrid schedule of both remote and in-person work, an increase from 35 percent in January 2022.

Federal employees are no different: According to a November 2022 survey, one-third of federal employees work entirely remotely while 60 percent work a hybrid schedule; most of the hybrid group go into the office one day per week and work remotely the other four days.

So why, then, is the federal government still spending billions of dollars on office furniture?

According to a new report by the government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com, the federal government has spent $3.3 billion on office furniture since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report found "no material difference in the amount federal agencies collectively spent on office furniture between the years 2018 and 2022." In fact, the government spent considerably less in 2018 than in any of the subsequent four years.

A July 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed the 24 federal agencies that occupy most of the federal government's buildings. It found that 17 out of the 24 agencies "used an estimated average 25 percent or less of their headquarters buildings' capacity in a three-week sample period across January, February, and March of 2023."

In fact, none of the agencies surveyed—which included the Departments of Defense, Commerce, State, Justice, Homeland Security, and the Treasury, among others—used more than 49 percent of their capacity in an average week.

The GAO report notes that none of the surveyed agencies have returned to pre-pandemic staffing levels and have instead embraced the hybrid model. The situation presents a cost-saving opportunity, according to the report, as "the federal government retains more space than it needs" and did so even prior to the pandemic.

Not that the government seems to be paying attention. Using the GAO report's ranges, OpenTheBooks.com compared expenditures on office furniture with the agencies' respective levels of in-person staffing. In one example, despite only using around 9 percent of its office space, OpenTheBooks.com found that the Department of Agriculture spent almost $57 million on furniture between 2020–22. The General Services Administration—which manages federally owned buildings, including the purchase of office furniture—also uses only around 9 percent of its total office space, and yet it spent $308 million on furniture.

The biggest pandemic purchaser was the Department of Defense, which spent $1.2 billion on furniture although it only uses 23 percent of the space at its administrative headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, according to OpenTheBooks.com.

"Most federal headquarters are barely a quarter full on a given workday, and no major agency is at more than half capacity," OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement. "Yet for some reason we've bankrolled [billions of] dollars in desks, chairs, couches and more – while employees clock in from their own living rooms."

Government furniture scandals are nothing new: In 2017, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spent over $31,000 on a dining room set for Secretary Ben Carson's office. The HUD inspector general later reported that it "did not find sufficient evidence to substantiate allegations of misconduct" as Carson canceled the expenditure once it was reported in the media.

In 2018, the West Virginia House of Delegates impeached members of the state's Supreme Court of Appeals over lavish spending of state funds. The justices reportedly spent more than $3 million on furnishings and renovations as the struggling state made tens of millions of dollars in budget cuts. One justice in particular spent over $500,000, including $28,000 on rugs; another spent $32,000 on a blue suede sectional sofa."

Biden Takes On Nightmare Government Paperwork

Past presidents have largely failed to make federal services more user-friendly

By Andrew Restuccia of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Government forms have gotten so awful that the administration is overhauling applications for a range of federal benefits and services—a bid to remake a notoriously stubborn bureaucratic system that has exasperated Americans for generations. The effort faces considerable hurdles, given previous administrations have tried and failed to cut red tape from federal services.

Paperwork can run more than a dozen pages, contain confusing and repetitive questions and include documentation requests that take days to complete. The complex system makes it difficult for tens of millions of Americans to access disability benefits, secure farm loans, obtain passports and tap in to other government programs. At least $142 billion in potential aid goes unclaimed every year across food stamps, welfare and other programs, in part because of the burdens associated with applying, according to Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University."

"“It can feel demeaning and degrading to have to fill out a form for the 80th time and all you want is access to this benefit program that’s necessary to put food on the table for your kids, to provide money you need for rent or a car payment,” said Sam Berger, one of the White House officials who is overseeing the effort.

The effort carries risks that the government makes it so easy to apply for public benefits that Americans who aren’t qualified could gain access to the programs. The White House said it will remain vigilant to prevent abuse."

"For disability recipients, the Social Security Administration earlier this year released a new version of form SSA-454-BK that is a few pages shorter, asks for less detailed information and eliminates redundant questions. 

"The old form, at 15 pages, required beneficiaries, many with serious physical and mental disabilities, to provide information about doctors’ visits, hospital stays, medications, medical tests and procedures, including the dates they occurred. Legal aid workers said beneficiaries sometimes spend days collecting information from medical providers, some of which the SSA already has.

“When people are given these massive forms, it has a deterrent effect,” said Jen Burdick, who helps people fill out the form as a lawyer at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia."

Bureaucrats impeded by bureaucracy

By Scott Sumner.

"In a recent podcast, David Beckworth asked Bill Nelson about the difficulties involved in shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet. In recent years, bank examiners have begun pressuring banks to hold high levels of reserves.  Nelson suggested that the Fed needs to educate bank examiners on the fact that bloated reserves are not necessary in order to insure adequate liquidity:

Beckworth:  Maybe just off the bat, how are examiners getting in the way of monetary policy?

Nelson: Even before doing that, I do want to make it clear that everyone here is operating with good intent. I don’t want to cast bank examiners as somehow, deliberately, as obstructionist. It’s just a matter of entrenched practices and experience that ends up having that effect. . . .

Nelson: I think there’s a few things that need to be done that could really help a lot. One is just public communication by the leadership of the Federal Reserve that borrowing is normal. Borrowing is a business decision on the part of banks. That’s especially true for the standing repo facility that they’ve just created, that they intend to look differently than the discount window and be perceived as a normal business decision. Leadership of the Fed needs to explain that to the public and they need to explain it to Congress, and they need to explain it to their supervisors.

This problem has been going on for years.  So why hasn’t the Fed already told bank supervisors to clean up their act?  There is no good reason to require banks to hold large quantities of reserves—they serve no useful purpose and make monetary policy more difficult.

It seems to me that this is just one example of a much broader problem, one part of a bureaucracy sabotaging another.  For instance, in China the government just announced an initiative to encourage more births.  At the same time, the Chinese bureaucracy does not allow Chinese couples to have more than three children.  One part of the Chinese bureaucracy is sabotaging another.

In New York City, the government banned the construction of new single room occupancy apartment buildings, even as their housing bureaucracy desperately tried to create housing for the homeless.

Bureaucrats at the EPA try to encourage the switch to cleaner forms of energy, even as the requirement for environmental impact statements makes it difficult to build new clean energy infrastructure. Indeed the regulations on drilling for clean energy such as geothermal are actually stricter than for dirtier types of energy such as petroleum.

Progressives often focus on what the government should be doing to advance their goals.  They focus far too little on what government is already doing to stymie their objectives."

The Saturday I Spent Five-and-a-Half Hours in Line Waiting for the IRS

There has to be a better way to help taxpayers with their problems 

By Laura Saunders of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"On Saturday, May 14, I waited 5 ½ hours for a meeting with a courteous and helpful IRS employee. I was at the agency’s Taxpayer Assistance Center in Harlem, one of two New York City IRS offices open that day—along with three dozen others across the country—for walk-in visits. No more walk-in days at any IRS office are scheduled for the rest of 2022."

"Several, like me, needed to verify their identities so the IRS would release 2021 refunds. The agency wants taxpayers to verify IDs online, but that involves turning over personal records to an outside contractor that holds them for several years or longer, which bothers some people.

I also learned that as different as we were, our problems shared a common feature: None of us, despite mighty efforts, had been able to reach the IRS by phone.

“The letters tell you to call on the phone, but then you can’t get through. They don’t want to talk to us on the phone!” said an angry woman, as others agreed.

National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins, who heads an independent group within the IRS that safeguards taxpayer rights, confirms that recently only about one in 10 callers to the agency has gotten through. Many others aren’t even put on hold but are cut off in a “courtesy disconnect.” That’s what happened with my many calls to the IRS before my in-person visit.

Two people in line complained that they had gone to that IRS office during the week and—although the waiting room was empty—were turned away because they didn’t have appointments. But when they called for appointments, they couldn’t get through. There’s no online option for making an appointment."

How can we improve the NIH?

From Tyler Cowen.

"The NIH’s extramural research is systematically biased in favor of conservative research. This conservatism is a result of both institutional inertia, concerns by the NIH leadership that the organization could lose the support of Congress, and efforts by NIH beneficiaries to maintain the status quo.

The extramural grant distribution process, which is run through peer review “study sections,” is badly in need of reform. Though there is considerable variability among study sections, many are beset by groupthink, arbitrary evaluation factors, and political gamesmanship. The NIH may be hamstringing bioscience progress, despite the huge amount of funds it distributes, because its sheer hegemony steers the entire industry by setting standards for scientific work and priorities.

Most problematic, the NIH is highly resistant to reform. Many proposals have been shot down during discussion phases, or scaled back before implementation. The NIH’s own internal review board has been inactive since 2015, as mentioned at the start of this report section. Still, many of the NIH’s problems are likely a natural product of being a $40 billion+ per year government bureaucracy.

That is from Matt Faherty, and here is 33,000 or so words more on why the NIH is a good idea, what is wrong with the NIH, and how to improve it.  It is by far the best piece written on the NIH, and if it were to count as a book would be on the year’s “best of” list.

The piece is based on extensive interviews, and here is one reflection of that:

An anonymous comment on an NIH article reflected the sentiments of the most negative interviewees: 

“It is well known that NIH ‘confidentiality’ [of the primary reviewer to the grant applicant] is anything but, and a young PI (Principal Investigator) risks career and reputation if they shoot down big names (not all, but there is a mafia of sorts). I’ve sat on panels, I’ve seen the influence from afar. Young PIs fall over themselves to get it good with the power brokers. I’ve seen young PIs threatened when they mentioned quietly that Big Boss X has data that is wrong. Some fields are worse than others, but it is overall a LOT uglier than most would believe.”

As for two meta-points, a) it is striking how little quality analysis of the NIH has been done, and b) how many of the respondents to this current work feared consequences for their careers, some responding only on an off the record basis.  I am proud to have supported this work through Emergent Ventures."

Even the New York Times Just Admitted the CDC May Be Broken Beyond Repair

The resources wasted and misinformation spread by the CDC throughout the COVID-19 pandemic make it difficult to imagine how the agency could ever be fixed

By Saul Zimet of FEE. Saul Zimet is a Hazlitt Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and a graduate student in economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

"As the COVID-19 pandemic seems in many ways to be winding down, journalists and academics are reflecting on the performance of our official institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in handling this global health disaster.

The New York Times Magazine recently published an article titled “Can the C.D.C. Be Fixed?” by Times staff writer and editorial board member Jeneen Interlandi. As her analysis shows, the actions of the nation's health protection agency throughout its COVID-19 response does not bode well for its ability to steward the nation through future catastrophes, or even more ordinary public health issues.

A Labyrinth of Ignorance

After investigating the agency, Interlandi reports that, “The C.D.C. maintains more than 100 separate disease-specific computer systems (a byproduct of the agency’s funding silos), and many of those can’t interface with one another.” As a result, she observes, “Crucial data is often shepherded from health care facilities to health departments through a tortured process that can involve handwritten notes, manual spreadsheets, fax machines and snail mail.”

Bill Hanage, public health scientist at Harvard University, is quoted as saying that the CDC has “no rational plan behind it,” and its “random patchwork collaborations were initiated and transformed and now have an outsize impact on our understanding of public health.”

“It’s not uncommon for basic information like race, ethnicity, age or address to be missing from clinical reports,” Interlandi writes. “It’s also not uncommon for those reports to languish at the state or local level without ever making their way to federal officials. Even the most serious diseases, which are supposed to be logged within 24 hours of detection and reported to the C.D.C. in a timely way, are not necessarily sent up that chain in any systematic manner.”

According to the Times, the agency was unable to keep reliable track of testing or case rates across the country throughout the pandemic. It also consistently failed to update hospital data such as ventilator supply and bed availability. “And when multiple vaccines were finally deployed, the agency was not able to monitor supplies or accurately keep tabs on waste,” Interlandi notes.

Misinformation from on High

Many negative consequences have resulted from the CDC’s disastrous data management practices. One such consequence has been the release of misinformation.

According to a New York Times article published in March of 2020, for example, CDC officials “provided conflicting accounts of when a significant increase in tests would be available.”

Even worse, in May of 2020, the agency was revealed by The Atlantic to have been conflating multiple different and incomparable datasets. Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer write, “We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19.”

The CDC confirmed to The Atlantic that it had been “mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.” As Madrigal and Meyer note, “This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.”

Ashish Jha, Harvard University Professor of Global Health and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said about the CDC’s conflation of these two datasets, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

These are just a few of countless deadly errors made by the CDC throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency also developed their own test that was redundant with the one already approved by the World Health Organization, sent out flawed test kits which forced many states to limit test access, and regulated testing based on irrationally narrow criteria. All at the expense of precious time and resources during crucial stages of the crisis.

The Nature of Bureaucracy

The dangerous sloppiness, inefficiency, and wastefulness of the CDC, which has these traits in common with other comparable agencies such as the FDA, are no fluke. They are predictable outcomes of virtually all publicly-funded bureaucracies, because such institutions lack any robust mechanism of accountability.

Accountable institutions, such as the for-profit companies of the private sector, cannot afford to leave their faulty processes unaltered because they will risk losing their supporters and being outcompeted into non-existence. When a policy isn’t working or an employee is underperforming, the price-signals of profits and losses give an unmistakable indication that something needs to be corrected.

By contrast, the bureaucrats of organizations like the CDC are disincentivized from correcting their mistakes. Without the profit motive as an objective metric of success or failure, they profit not from the consequences of their actions being beneficial to others, but rather from obfuscating responsibility by following protocol.

The 20th century economist Ludwig Von Mises understood this fundamental truth about the nature of bureaucracy. As he wrote in his 1944 book Bureaucracy, “No reform can remove the bureaucratic features of the government’s bureaus. It is useless to blame them for their slowness and slackness. It is vain to lament over the fact that the assiduity, carefulness, and painstaking work of the average bureau clerk are, as a rule, below those of the average worker in private business.”

As Mises explains, “In the absence of an unquestionable yardstick of success and failure it is almost impossible for the vast majority of men to find that incentive to utmost exertion that the money calculus of profit-seeking business easily provides.”

So, Jeneen Interlandi and the New York Times Magazine are right to notice that the CDC may simply be unfixable."

Too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency

See From Weber to Kafka: Political Instability and the Overproduction of Laws. From the American Economic Review (Forthcoming). 

• Gabriele Gratton
• Luigi Guiso
• Claudio Michelacci
• Massimo Morelli
American Economic Review (Forthcoming)

• Article Information

Abstract

With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency, this mechanism can generate a steady state with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Temporary surges in political instability heighten the incentives to overproduce laws and can shift the economy towards the Kafkaesque state. Consistent with the theory, after a surge in political instability in the early 1990s, Italy experienced a significant increase in the amount of poor-quality legislation and a decrease in bureaucratic efficiency.

Forthcoming Article Downloads

• Preview (AEA members only) (1.51 MB)

 

More Bureaucracy Is Not the Answer to COVID-19

By Veronique de Rugy. 

"In times of crisis like the one we are now going through, calls to grow an already-bloated bureaucracy abound. Whether it's through more centralization, more powers to the federal government, or the creation of new bureaucracy to address the pandemic, the hope is that next time around, a new arrangement will allow for a better and faster response. Not likely.

Yet, it happens each time there's a crisis. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the federal government created the Department of Homeland Security and a centralized airport security agency, the Transportation Security Administration. Oh, and don't forget about the Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, which expanded many other government powers.

Similar growth in government occurred after the Great Recession. For instance, the federal government created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the Federal Insurance Office, and many other bureaucracies and programs meant to prevent the next financial crisis. Uncle Sam also accumulated more control over the extension of credit, both mortgage and personal.

This crisis is no different. For instance, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently called for the creation of another program or cabinet-level department to prepare for, and fight, the next pandemic.
Please don't.

First, even if one assumes that the problem with our lack of preparedness was excessive government decentralization, I'm curious as to whether Emanuel would agree to get rid of the many agencies and programs that already exist, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that would become redundant under his plan. The only thing this new growth would do is add another agency to interfere with the others already charged with doing the same tasks.

Second, a lack of preparation for the COVID-19 pandemic is a government failure of epic proportions and has nothing to do with an inadequate budget or a lack of programs and agencies supposedly charged with preparing for such a risk. This failure is the product of the well-documented and terrible incentives that exist in government. These disincentives spring from the absence of market discipline that each private-sector business faces if it doesn't perform. And these perverse incentives within government are enhanced by the fact that bureaucrats and politicians carelessly spend other people's money. The product is a slew of dysfunctional agencies and programs that often focus on goals that have nothing to do with what the agencies and programs were created for.

Consider the CDC. Preparing for a pandemic like COVID-19 should have been at the forefront of what it does. But instead, bureaucrats there waste most of their resources on fighting things like teen vaping. Create a new department and we'll soon see its original intent buried underneath many other new and politically shiny priorities. And like all bureaucracies, it would find a way to continually expand its purpose and budget.

So, the creation of a new agency would not make us more prepared for the next pandemic. Any new bureaucracy would be part of the same unwieldy government that failed us during this pandemic, botched the launch of the Affordable Care Act website, and pushed us into a 17-year war in Iraq under the notion that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. Why would we believe that a government that fails repeatedly will somehow suddenly perform better if only we add another agency?

A better alternative is to continue the deregulatory trend that is helping combat this pandemic. The private sector has proven to be more resilient and flexible than the government. The private sector is far better at delivering solutions for this crisis.

My Mercatus Center colleagues Matthew Mitchell, Adam Thierer, and Patrick McLaughlin have proposed what they call the "Fresh Start Initiative," modeled after the Department of Defense's Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, Commission. Their proposed commission would identify and study all the rules revised or suspended during the current crisis and then make recommendations for each rule to be terminated or reformed, thereby crafting "a plan and timetable for automatically sunsetting or comprehensively reforming those policies or programs as part of a single reform package."

If it works as well as BRAC did, many of these useless rules will be permanently terminated. That beats creating more bureaucracies."

Pentagon suppressed study that revealed $125B in waste: report

By Mallory Shelbourne of The Hill.

"The Department of Defense suppressed one of its own studies that revealed $125 billion in wasteful spending, according to an investigation published by the The Washington Post.

The newspaper found that the study, commissioned by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, was hidden because of fears Congress would cut defense spending.

The Defense Business Board, along with McKinsey & Company consultants, conducted the study, which produced a the 2015 report titled, “Transforming DoD’s Core Business Processes for Revolutionary Change.”

In an interview with the Post, Work said the report proposal was “unrealistic.”
“There is this meme that we’re some bloated, giant organization,” Work told the newspaper. “Although there is a little bit of truth in that ... I think it vastly overstates what’s really going on."
“We’re the largest bureaucracy in the world. There’s going to be some inherent inefficiencies in that,” he said.

In the course of its investigation into the business operations of the Pentagon McKinsey place the various operations into five groups: supply chain and logistics; financial-flow management; human resources; acquisition and procurement; and health-care management. A sixth category was later added for real property management.

A confidential memo issued by the consulting firm put the spending on these categories at anywhere from $75 billion to $100 billion.

The report ultimately found that the Defense Department was spending more than $134 billion on business operations each year. The board putting the study together decided to propose that the Pentagon try to save $125 billion over a five-year period.

But the report received backlash from top Pentagon officials, including the chief weapons-buyer Frank Kendall III.

“If the impression that’s created is that we’ve got a bunch of money lying around and we’re being lazy and we’re not doing anything to save money, then it’s harder to justify getting budgets that we need,” he told the newspaper in an interview.

Robert “Bobby” L. Stein, the chairman of the board who commissioned the study, alleged that Secretary of Defense Ash Carter suppressed the study on purpose.

“Unfortunately, Ash — for reasons of his own — stopped this,” Stein told the Post.

Peter Cook, a spokesman for the Defense Secretary, told the newspaper that Carter had “a long list of national security challenges” to handle. Cook also said that Work and other Pentagon officials “concluded that the report, while well-intentioned, had limited value.”"

The Soviet internet of the 1970s failed because of “entrenched bureaucratic corruption and conflicts of interest at the heart of the system”

From Tyler Cowen.

"There is a new and intriguing book out by Benjamin Peters called How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, which outlines exactly what it claims to.  Here is one introductory excerpt:

In late September 1970, a year after the ARPANET went online, the Soviet cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov boarded a train from Kiev to Moscow to attend what proved to be a fateful meeting for the future of what we might call the Soviet Internet.  On the windy morning of October 1, 1970, he met with members of the Politburo, the governing body of the Soviet state, around the long rectangular table on a red carpet in Stalin’s former office in the Kremlin.  The Politburo convened that day to hear Glushkov’s proposal and decide whether to build a massive nationwide computer network for citizen use — or what Glushkov called the All-State Automated System (OGAS, obshche-gosudarstvennyi avtomatizirovannaya system), the most ambitious computer network of its kind in the world at the time.  OGAS was to connect tens of thousands of computer centers and to manage and optimize in real time the communications between hundreds of thousands of workers, factory managers, and regional and national administrators.  The purpose of the OGAS Project was simple to state and grandiose to imagine: Glushkov sought to network and automatically manage the nation’s struggling command economy.

They failed!  The author blames this not on backward technology, but rather “entrenched bureaucratic corruption and conflicts of interest at the heart of the system…”

Anyone interested in the history of the internet, comparative systems, or the history of the Soviet Union should read this book."