I have to admit that while I'd say many problems with my job and in this office are the result of modern American politics, the American political system, or human nature in general, others are simply most likely due to errors by individual people after all. (For example, I'm lazy. But that's not news.)
The recent thing that prompted this post is that while the doomed project had a deadline of one year (actually, more like 14 months, but anyways), my supervisor pointed out to me a week ago that that's only counting from when the Congressional mandate was made. We had unofficial hints and informal warnings that it would be coming for several months before that. It was foreseeable. If this organization had acted on those hints and created a new team or took the team assigned to the general revision and put their feet to the fire, we might actually have made the deadline.
Why didn't we? I'm sure there are lots of reasons. Even if intergovernment cooperation was as good as it could possibly be, it would still take a certain amount of time for information from unofficial backroom channels of Congress to percolate to decision-makers in this agency and for them to make and implement their decision. There's a finite number of people with a finite amount of time to work, so putting them on this project would take them away from another. And maybe someone in this agency tried to prevent the mandate from happening and simply failed. And maybe the people in charge just didn't think the deadline would be a big problem at the time.
Given the state of the project right now and hindsight being 20/20, though, we should have started working on it earlier than we did. I'm sure there's some reason we didn't, but I have a hard time imagining a good one.
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