Quote Originally Posted by Aliquid View Post
Most of the time, sure. Sometimes the reason is that an elected official wants to personally brand an initiative for ego reasons, and they aren't experts in the field... at all. Sometimes it is high-level bureaucrats putting processes in place that helps their preferred department/agency/area, but it ends up shafting your team. You can't stop it, there isn't much point in complaining, but you do need to accept that it is dumb so you can do damage control.
That would be the "CYOA" part. ;).

Regardless of whether something is dumb or not, for government work saying "that's dumb" outright probably isn't going to be the best approach. "Because we'll get fired if we don't" is an acceptable answer but "it's dumb, but we gotta" is something that can be a huge problem if you get overheard by the people that really don't take kindly to that kind of active dissent in the workplace. IME government workers who have nothing better to do at any given time (which is a lot of the time, if my experience with the DOT is any indication of other branches) spend a lot of time looking like they're busy collaborating with other people, but really just shooting the **** in the office, and talk like that gets around.

There will almost always be a better way to say the same thing than "it's dumb" in a job where that can often be taking as synonymous with "because my own boss is incompetent".