I’m sure it has occurred to others that killing someone by missile from a drone is a bit like buying meat in plastic wrap in a supermarket.

Since you’ve mentioned meat it may be a good time to raise the subject of Sacred Cows. The reason mandarin China was so sterile was the implicit condition that all problems had to be solved by mandarins. In the modern age any solution to a problem can be put forward, so long as the solution involves Washington. This implicit condition means you are stuck with bureaucratic repertoire, which may play Rock Around the Clock on all occasions, both funerary and celebratory.

De Tocqueville observed that it was alright to have rich people in a democracy, so long as they were replaced by a different batch of rich people in the next generation. A certain amount of flux and mobility are necessary for creativity. The price of a practical solution is the acceptance of winners and losers alongside the promise there’ll be a next round. The ossification of public policy into a trajectory where new solutions are simply more grandiose versions of old failures is the result of a parallel ossification in political classes. If change were genuine then you could imagine a situation where a department might be there in one generation and gone the next.

In software the problem of dealing with objects which have served their purpose is solved by garbage collection routines. You write destructors in code to prevent your app from being overrun by all these zombie objects. Maybe the government ought have a similar destructor function built into the model. Perhaps Congress should devote a third of its session hours to simply taking laws off the books. But the tendency is to add more restrictions rather than to to create avenues for opportunity.