Recently, the Daily Beast reported that the Obama administration (at least some of the administration lackeys) had been cooking the intelligence gathered by lower level agents. Or at least cooking the analysis of lower level analysts.
I think this is a pure illustration of Gordon Tullock’s brilliant analysis of Bureaucracy. Tullock argues that the larger the bureaucracy the less correspondence exists between the knowledge of the lowest level persons who are applying the policies and the administrators who are overseeing them.
I don’t think Tullock’s analysis directly captures this situation because in this story, people at the top are actively incentivizing, or communicating in some way that the actual information should not reach the top of the bureaucracy, which is of course President Obama himself. A different story should be casted and promoted.
Who are these people and why would they think such a policy would help secure the United States? Sounds like an instance of the Ostrich Effect (h/t Tom Thrasher).