All true. However, in addition to possibly well meaning but often maladroit efforts to do what they, sometimes uniquely, consider to be in the public interest, bureaucrats have another motivation.
There is no effective way to measure the economic output of federal agencies, and economic output is in any event rarely their purpose. However, one measure of bureaucratic effectiveness lies in finding new things to do, and this often leads to the hiring of additional bureaucrats and to the promotion of existing bureaucrats to supervise them.
To the extent that these things cannot be accomplished within agency functions as currently defined, they can often be accomplished by asking the Congress to amend the laws which authorize agencies or by getting the agencies themselves to modify their own rules to encompass the new stuff. Rule modifications are subject to challenge in court, but before the challenges are heard and decided much damage can be done. The FCC is trying to promote what it calls “Network Neutrality,” despite the absence of any congressional mandate to do so. It seems very unlikely that both houses of the Congress would agree to amendments to existing law to provide such a mandate. The EPA seems to be traveling a similar path in a similar forest.
Increases in power lead to increases in money and prestige, whether through promotion within an agency or through the enhancement of resumes for later employment in the private sector. There is usually a high demand for bureaucrats intimately familiar with how their agencies function, and with the appropriate contacts to exploit that familiarity.
