In private industry, the owner(s) takes on the losses of such people who get paid doing nothing. With enough losses, the owners will run out of capital and go bust.
In public service (and academia i guess, which is often funded publicly), the "owners" don't get a choice and have to eat a loss - it's not as if i can stop paying my taxes. A gov't does not go bust.
Yes, environmental bureaucracy like the article is focusing on is only one of many which have continuously strengthened as they circled the wagons around the status quo more and more in so many other areas besides just public works projects.
But public works projects in particular are handled by government bureaucracies, one of the least accountable kind.
Environmental is just one of the obvious bureaucracies that was not there for the older ones of us who remember what life was like before the EPA was formed.
Lots of other little bureaucracies had already been established decades before anyone living at the time had been born. People were just expected to accept those because no remaining person could say whether things were better or worse beforehand. It could often be seen that they were still in the relatively flat portion of a multigenerational exponential growth curve, and so it goes.
Remember people have to build things and after the mid-1970's there was no more money to do that with inflation.
Before then people who worked manufacturing or construction jobs in the US had never been getting ahead at all very often unless they were unionized, but this was the straw that broke that by driving manufacturing to other countries and construction to unskilled workers from other countries.
It was strong enough to break the unions so you can imagine the devastating effect it had on everyone else.
At this time it was still accepted that an American manufacturing worker, maybe with overtime, would be earning more than an average office worker since it was just plain harder work. University education was not yet common enough to be structured into the systems as very much of a ticket to higher pay.
And government office workers had always had to accept lower pay than their counterparts in the private sector, since less skill & work was actually required and these were the candidates who couldn't quite get hired by bureaucracies like Sears or big insurance companies.
Either way the need for people sitting in offices accomplishing nothing can spiral out of control, even without the occasional effort to consume increasing yearly budgets or risk losing the yearly increases. And government workers got the upper hand with earlier formalization of university requirements for so many positions, at the same time the private sector had so many challenges to survival of its revenue streams that the governments did not face.
By now this trend has government workers making more money than their counterparts in the private sector, plus having more institutional power dedicated to preservation of the institution itself rather than what the institution should actually stand for. Much less what the institution should accomplish if that means physically building something.
Stagnation became the acceptable foundation on which to instead build virtual structures ever more resilient to change.
At one time the people who built stuff had generations of bulding legacy and knew how to do it already, they were the backbone of society, and got paid more than the people in the offices who shuffled the papers which expedited the process.
Now the people in the offices who don't know how to build stuff get paid more than the unskilled workers who try to do it anyway, after the bureaucrats finally finish shuffling the papers needed to delay or derail the project according to somebody's agenda in a chain of command that didn't previously exist when things could actually get done only a few decades ago. Bureaucrats can be most skilled at building more bureaucracy, and they are good at it after making multigenerational efforts, so that's what they more often build.
