Conclusion

The changes described above are ambitious. They will take enormous effort and enormous will. It will be many years before all of them take root. But if they succeed, the American people will have a government capable of attacking their problems with far more energy, and far less waste, than they can today imagine.

We must move quickly because the bureaucracy, by its nature, resists change. As Tom Peters wrote in Thriving on Chaos, "Good intentions and brilliant proposals will be dead-ended, delayed, sabotaged, massaged to death, or reversed beyond recognition or usefulness by the overlayered structures...." See Note 54

But the changes we propose will produce their own momentum to overcome bureaucratic resistance. As the red tape is being cut, federal workers will become more and more impatient with the red tape that remains. They will resist any reversal of the process. And they will be strengthened in their resistance by the steps we propose in the next chapters.