Example Given

I don’t know that there’s a better example of the problems I noted in my earlier post today than the World Health Organization, as noted by Alex Berezow at the American Council on Science and Health:

According to the Washington Post, the WHO spends $200 million every year on travel and accommodations. Of course, WHO officials aren’t flying Ryanair and staying at the Motel 6. Instead, they are booking “business-class airplane tickets and rooms in five-star hotels.”

To put that figure into perspective, WaPo writes:

Last year, WHO spent about $71 million on AIDS and hepatitis. On malaria, it spent $61 million. And to slow tuberculosis, WHO invested $59 million. Still, some health programs do get exceptional funding — the agency spends about $450 million trying to wipe out polio every year.

In other words, WHO spent more on travel than on fighting AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. To make matters worse, back in 2011, WHO cut 300 jobs because of budget constraints. Assuming that WHO spent roughly the same amount on travel then as it does now, by eliminating its travel budget, it could not only have saved those 300 jobs, but could have paid each of those people a salary of $666,667.

Thinking of that as waste or corruption is to miss the point. It is more an instantiation of Pournelle’s Law.

Over time the purpose of the organization has transmogrified into a mechanism for continuing the out-sized lifestyles of its bureaucrats. who no longer know any other way of functioning. That’s much more basic than ordinary waste or corruption.