A Window into the Bureaucracy
Rarely do Americans get so vivid a glimpse of their government at work as former Health and Human Services official David Wright offered in his resignation letter at the end of February. The letter, which the journal Science published on its website this week, is a detailed diatribe about just how dysfunctional the bureaucracy has become at every level.Until recently, David Wright was director of the Office of Research Integrity, a division of HHS that investigates misconduct in federally funded scientific research. Wright was a professor at Michigan State University before he took the post at HHS two years ago--a post in which he now describes his predominant responsibilities as “the very worst job I have ever had.”