I'm a big believer that the reason for the level of government bureaucracy and busywork described in this article is not a bug, it's a feature.

Government's job within a capitalist country in a lot of ways is to ensure stability, a stable populace and stable society leads to stable markets theoretically. But what do you do if there is not enough jobs to go around to ensure that stability?

Simple: you just make jobs up, you make busywork up, you increase the bureaucracy to subsidize people who would otherwise be destitute and rioting on the streets. Technical innovation has driven out so many people from jobs at this point that we're reaching a true crisis against the cultural expectation that everyone that's "useful" works a job.

You also have to ramp up the propaganda, because you need people to believe that things are fine, and that working hard can improve their lives just as much as it could in their grandparents' day. That becomes a harder sell all the time.

See I suspect that the problem is not taking any sort of capitalist return concept when implementing a socialist policy... Even if you assume that the government needs to create jobs, it's like nobody has ever done a cost benefit, at any stage. You see hundreds of thousands being spent on one individuals care needs, something that is essentially never going to have a positive return, while productive initiatives either lack funding, or have triple thier cost added by pointless additional steps (that nobody has ever done a cost benefit of either).