Associated Press, by Saul Pett

WASHINGTON — We begin with the sentiments of two Americans two centuries apart but joined in a symmetry of indignation.

One said this: "He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance." 

The other said this: "The government is driving me nuts. The forms are so complicated I have to call my accountant at $35 an hour or my lawyer at $125 an hour just to get a translation." 

The latter opinion belongs to Roger Gregory, a carpenter and small contractor of Sandy Springs, Md., a man of otherwise genial disposition.

The first statement was made by Thomas Jefferson of Monticello, Va., in the Declaration of Independence, in the bill of particulars against the king of England that launched the American Revolution. 

It is one of the ironies of history that a nation born out of a deep revulsion for large, overbearing government is now itself complaining, from sea to shining sea, about large, overbearing government. 

Somewhere between Jefferson and Gregory, something went awry in the American growth hormone. And now, in our 40th presidency, Ronald Reagan is trying to saddle and tame a brontosaurus of unimaginable size appetite, ubiquity and complexity. 

In designing a government, James Madison said, "The great difficulty is this: you must first enable the government to control the governed and, in the next place, oblige it to govern itself." Has it? 

One is often told that in a democracy the people get the government they deserve. In the process, do they also get more government than they want? Does anybody recall voting for the regulations which resulted in three years of litigation between the city of Los Angeles and the U.S. Department of Labor over whether the city was guilty of discrimination against the handicapped by refusing to hire an assistant tree-trimmer with emotional problems? 

The government of the United States is so big you can't say where it begins and where it ends. It is so shapeless you can’t diagram it with boxes because, after you put the president here and Congress there and the judiciary in a third place, where in the hell do you put the Ad Hoc Committee for the Implementation of PL89-306? Or the Interagency Bird Hazard Committee? Or the Interagency Task Force on Inadvertent Modifications of the Stratosphere? Or the Interdepartmental Screw Thread Committee? Or the Interglacial Panel on the Present? 

The government of the United States is so unstructured it is owned by everybody and owned by nobody and run by nobody. Presidents run only a part of it. Presidents can't even find and sort out the separate parts. 

Jimmy Carter tried. On the crest of promises to streamline and make sense out of the federal bureaucracy, he began by looking for the blueprint. He appointed a panel and the panel looked everywhere, in the drawers, in the closets, in the safe, but they couldn't find it. 

"We were unable," the panel concluded, "to obtain a single document containing a complete and current listing of government units which are part of the federal government. We could find no established criteria to determine whether an organizational unit should be included or excluded in such a list." 

Carter never did find out what he  was president of. As a candidate, he flayed the "horrible, bloated bureaucracy." As president, he managed to reduce one or two minor horrors but added to the bloat. 

Other presidents have found the bureaucracy an immovable feast Franklin D. Roosevelt ran into so much resistance from the old departments, he created a flock of new agencies around them to get action. Harry S. Truman complained the president can issue an order and "nothing happens." He tried to reorganize the bureaucracy with the help of Herbert Hoover, but not much changed. John F. Kennedy said it was like dealing with a foreign power.

It was all much easier when Jefferson was president. Then, the entire federal establishment throughout the nation, civilian and military, numbered fewer than 10,000. They wouldn't fill  half the Pentagon today. 

Since 1802, the population of the United States has multiplied 55 times while the population of government has grown 500 times. Since 1802, and most especially in the last 50 years, the government has been transformed, far beyond the ken of the men who started it, in size, power and function. The capital of capitalism now subsidises rich and poor, capital and labor. 

The number of civilian personnel (2.8 million) and military personnel (2.1 million) employed by the federal government has remained fairly constant in recent years. But federal programs have brought vast increases in state and municipal personnel. 

Thus, government in the United States on all levels now employs 18 million people. One out of six working Americans is on the public payroll. Government on all levels now costs more than $832 billion a year. Clearly, it is the nation's largest single business and the least businesslike.

None violates Polonius' advice to Laertes more severely than Uncle Sam. He is both a borrower and a lender. He borrows in cosmic amounts and lends on a celestial scale. He lends at less interest than he borrows. And every year, billions slip through his fingers and disappear into the sinkholes of waste, mismanagement and fraud. 

But governments are rarely designed for efficiency, especially democratic governments, and most especially this one. This one has grown spectacularly as people demanded more and more of it and as politicians and bureaucrats saw or stimulated those demands. This government was designed for accommodation and consensus. It began on the docks of Boston, not the other side of town, at the Harvard Business School. 

Poor old Uncle. He does many essential things that only government can do. He is capable of great change, a necessity for governments that would survive. He has held the place together 205 years in more freedom and com-ort than history ever knew. But he is a creature of diverse forces. He gets it on all sides and is perceived in many ways. 

A big, bumbling, generous, naive, inquisitive, acquisitive, intrusive, meddlesome giant with a heart of gold and holes in his pockets, an incredible hulk, a "10-ton marshmallow" lumbering long an uncertain road of good intentions somewhere between capitalism and socialism, an implausible giant who fights wars, sends men to the moon. explores the ends of the universe, feeds the hungry, heals the sick, helps the helpless, a thumping complex of guilt trying mightily to make up for past sins to the satisfaction of nobody, a split personality who most of his life thought God helps those who help themselves and only recently concluded God needed help, a malleable, vulnerable colossus pulled every which way by everybody who wants a piece of him, which is everybody. 

In one lifetime, the cost of all government in the United States has become the biggest single item in our family budgets, more than housing, food or health care. Before World War II, the average man worked a month a year to pay for it; now it takes four months. Now it consumes a third of our Gross National Product. In 1929, it took a tenth.

Our federal income tax began in 1913 but it didn't begin to bite until Pearl Harbor. At that, we have been spared the irony that befell Mother England Her income tax began as a "temporary war measure” in 1799, to fight Napoleon. 

It is in the nature of government measures to achieve immortality. Few die. Governments expand in war and contract slightly in peace. They never go back to their previous size. Peace-time emergencies also have a way of becoming permanent. The Rural Electrification Program was set up in 1935 to bring electricity to American farms. Today more than 99 percent of farms are electrified but the REA goes on, 740 people spending $29 million a year. 

When we were youngsters, the word trillion seemed a made-up word, like zillion. Now it's for real. Last year, the federal government owed $914.3 billion. Next year it will owe $1.06 trillion. It is owed $176 billion in direct loans. It has also guaranteed loans for $253 billion. If Chrysler and the others default, the government debt would rise to nearly $1.5 trillion. As the man said, it all mounts up. 

If you would begin to visualize the physical presence of the government, you must brace yourself for more statistics. The government of the United States now owns 413,042 buildings in the 50 states and abroad, excluding military installations abroad. That cost nearly $107 billion. It also leases 227,594,942 square feet of space at an annual rental near $870 million. It owns 775,895,133 acres of land, one-third the land mass of the United States. Uncle is big in real estate. 

The government of the United States is so big it takes more than 5,000 people and $210 million a year just to check part of its books. The government is the nation's largest user of energy. A check by a House committee found the government was saving less energy than much of the nation and the Department of Energy, itself, had an "abysmal" record of conservation. The government uses enough energy to heat 11 million homes. It owns 449,591 vehicles. It leases others. 

Among others, the government finds it needs the services of 67,235 clerk-typists, 65,281 secretaries, 28,069 air traffic controllers, 27,501 computer specialists, 13,501 internal revenue agents, 5,771 economists, 5,179 voucher examiners, 3,206 psychologists, 16,467 general attorneys, 34 undertakers, 519 non-military chaplains, 1,757 microbiologists, 656 landscape architects, 3,300 librarians, 62 greens-keepers, 16 glassblowers, 8,092 carpenters, 66 saw sharpeners, four bicycle repairers, six tree fellers, five swineherds and 15 horse wranglers. 

"The govetinment is driving me nuts," says Ruby Beha of "Ruby's Truck Stop" on U.S. Rt. 50 near Guysville, Ohio. "And the more you make, the more they take." 

She complains of high taxes and government forms which require half her waking life, she says, to fill out. She couldn't agree more with Alexis DeTocqueville, the 19th-century French observer of governments, who said, "The nature of despotic power In democratic ages is not to be fierce and cruel but minute and meddling." 

Unlike King George, King Sam sends hither swarms of officers with bundles of money and oodles of regulations. In his great urge to protect everybody from everything, from disaster and discrimination, from pestilence and pollution, he sends money with strings attached. 

In this, he is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't. If he sends money without regulation, he risks monumental larceny. If he sends It with regulations, he risks an outraged citizenry. 

He has an outraged citizenry. More than the size of bureaucracy, Americans who complain about government complain they are up to their esophagus in indecipherable forms, choking red tape, maddening detail and over-zealous bureaucrats. 

• In Janesville, Wis., an inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture cites a small meatpacking plant for allowing the grass to grow too high outside the plant. What, one cries to the heavens, does that have to do with the meal inside? "I guess," says Dan Wiedman, the man in charge of sanitation at the plant, "he feels that if the outside isn't neat, the inside isn't sanitized." 

• In New York, the president of Columbia University says that among the sums he must raise is $1 million a year for government paper work. 

• In Sheldon, Iowa (population 4,500), the mayor has to fill out 27 feet of government forms, in quadruplicate, every year, most of them concerning minority employment. Sheldon has no minorities. 

• In Cambridge, Mass., the president of Harvard says the federal government, with the strings it attaches to federal funds, tries to decide "who may teach, what may be taught, how it should be taught and who may be admitted to study." 

• In Hanover, Wis. (population 200), three men operate a small junk-yard called Hanover Auto Salvage. One man is the owner but all three work 60 hours a week and all three draw equal amounts of income from the business every week. The Department of Labor says the two non-owners should be paid overtime. They did not ask for the overtime. Why, they ask, should they be paid more than the owner for the same work?

• In Baltimore, Md., Stefan Graham, director of the zoo, is told by the U.S. Department of Agriculture he must do something about the high bacteria count in a pool occupied exclusively by three polar bears. The bears have been there a long time. They have lived longer than your average polar bear. They are in good health. The man from Agriculture agrees, but regulations are regulations. How, asks the zoo keeper, do you get bears to change their personal habits to keep the bacteria count down? Dunno, says Agriculture, but comply or get rid of the polar bears. 

• In New York, Mayor Edward I. Koch is told that, unless he installs elevators for the handicapped in subway stations, he risks losing federal funds for mass transit. The elevator system would be so expensive, Koch says, it would mean that each subway ride by each handicapped person would cost the city $50. It would be cheaper to transport them by limousine or cab. 

• In North Carolina and other places in the South where blacks can now attend white colleges, the Department of Education threatens to withhold federal funds unless black colleges are made more attractive to whites. 

• In Washington, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., complains that for the better part of a year his staff had to negotiate with the Senate Ethics Committee over whether the senator had used the letter "I” more times than the franking privilege rules allow. "Personally phrased references ... shall not appear more than five times on a page," according to Section 3210 (a) (5) (c) of the rules. "The essence of the argument," says the senator, "was whether the term we, as in ‘we New Yorkers,' implied the term I."

• In Janesville, Wis., a small banker complains that, since they ask the same questions every year, why can't federal and state bank examiners share the answer and eliminate one of the inspections? 

• In New York, along investment prospectus from Merill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith includes this cautious paragraph: "Section 13. Masculine Pronouns. Masculine pronouns, whenever used herein, shall be deemed to include the feminine, and the use of the masculine pronoun shall not be deemed to imply any preference for it or any subordination, disqualification or exclusion of the feminine." 

God forbid anybody should think that the mighty Wall Street firm was so male chauvinist, so illegally macho, it wouldn't accept money from female investors. 

The men (there were no sex discrimination laws then) who wrote the Constitution of the United States were deliberately imprecise. They left room for growth and change. Their descendants often are compulsively detailed. 

Somebody in Washington gets an idea. Wouldn't it be nice, especially since there is a lobby of the handi-apped, if street curbs had ramps for people in wheelchairs at intersections? Simple? No. 

The word goes forth from Washington across the land, wherever federal funds are involved in road construction, that ramps be installed at intersections, each to be a specific width, length, pitch and of non-slip material.

The first thing that happens is that, in a heavy rain, the water running along the gutter is diverted by the ramps and deposits its debris, not in sewers, but out in the street. The second thing that happens is that, in the winter, snow plows rip up the protruding grades. The third thing that happens in that blind people relying on canes complain that the ramps confuse their perception of where the curb ends and the street begins. 

Washington's passion for detailed regulation has its ironic inconsistencies. For example, the government asks fewer questions of a man buying a Saturday-night special than it does of a man importing a salami from Italy. And the man who buys a gun is allowed to leave with his purchase before his answers are verified. 

Washington was far more cautious when the city of Des Moines, Iowa, planned to build a viaduct over a railroad in 1971. The estimated cost then was $1.3 million and the feds would put up half in matching funds. But its took five years for the city to persuade Washington that its regulations about environment and noise would be satisfied. By then the viaduct cost $4.1 million. It would have been faster and cheaper if the city had built the viaduct itself, footing the entire bill. 

The federal government is easily ridiculed for its bureaucratic excesses, its stifling regulations, its intrusive Big Brotherism. But against that, one needs to recall it was the federal government, not the states or private industry or private charity or the free marketplace, that sustained the country in the Great Depression and saved it from revolution. It was the federal government that ended slavery in the South and had to come back 100 years later with "swarms of officers" to make that liberation real.

It is the federal government that insists management pay labor overtime for overtime work, that cushions the shock of dismissal and prevents child labor. It is the federal government that keeps the poor and the aged out of county poor farms and back attics. It is the federal government that keeps Wall Street honest, makes bank deposits safer, makes the air and the water cleaner, reduces deaths in the mine shafts of Pennsylvania, keeps horrors like thalidomide from disfiguring our babies, makes American airways the safest among the world's busiest and keeps chaos out of our airwaves by controlling shares to the small citizens band owner and the big television net-works. 

It is the federal government and its loans that keep many small and large business men in business, many farmers on the family farm, many students in college. It is the federal government that injected new life into many downtown areas of the dying cities, with money for new hotels, parking garages, civic centers and open plazas. It is the federal government that gave Detroit its Renaissance Center and Baltimore a revitalized harbor. 

"I have no apologies for the federal government being interested in people, in nutrition, education, health and transportation," Hubert H. Humphrey once said. "Who's going to take care of the environment and establish standards? You? Me? Who's going to work out our transportation problems? The B&O Railroad?" 

Others ask, who would do all this with better planning and greater efficiency? Chrysler? Lockheed? The New York Central Railroad? 

Elmer Staats, as head of the General Accounting Office, spent 15 years ferreting out waste, fraud and sloppy management in Washington. He found plenty. He is not naive about the bureaucracy. He says: 

"Americans have come to expect more and more from government while trusting it less. Many of the same individuals who bemoan the growth of government are the first to seek its help when their own interests are involved. 

"They decry the government bureaucrats but are unwilling to accept positions in government because the salaries are too low or the ethical requirements too high. They speak out at every opportunity against the encroachment of government but fail to speak up when asked to volunteer for community endeavors. They most often assert demands or speak of rights rather than duly, obligation or responsibility. They see nothing inconsistent with pleading for tax reduction yet expecting public services to remain the same. 

"The once-prized characteristic of American society of hard work and self-reliance too often has given way to the view that 'someone else should do it' or someone else should pay the bill, that someone else being government." 

The men who created our government were suspicious of government They feared any restrictions of individual liberty. They were more interested in preventing the accumulation of power than in promoting its efficient use. Thus, they gave us a government of checks and balances and separation of powers in a design that built in tension, competition, even mutual suspicion among branches of government. It was not a blueprint for a smoothly coordinated team. 

James Madison, the "father of the Constitution," said that, under that document, the states would be more powerful than the central government and the federal taxing powers would not be "resorted to except for supplemental purposes of revenue." He said federal powers were "few and defined" while state powers were “numerous and indefinite." Federal powers would be "exercised principally on external objects ... war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce." State powers would extend "to all the objects which ... concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people." 

When Jefferson was in the While House in 1802, the entire federal establishment in Washington numbered 291 officials; the entire executive branch, 132 people. Congress consisted of 32 senators and 106 representatives, all of whom had to get along with a total staff of 13 among them (Congress has 3,500 today). The Supreme Court had six justices, one clerk among them. 

The business of the national government then was defense, minting money, conducting foreign relations, collecting revenue, maintaining lighthouses for navigation and running the postal service, which in those days belonged to the Treasury Department and—would you believe?—turned a profit. 

Almost all the things governments do that affect the lives and fortunes of its citizens were done by the state and local governments, and that wasn't much. Then and for decades after, the national government got along on customs and excise taxes. 

The chief proponents of a strong central government then were business leaders, and they wanted it only strong enough to protect commerce, provide a nationwide free home market and a sound currency and banking system.

The public attitude toward the poor reflected the young country's sense of rugged individualism, reliance on family and a strong work ethic. The poor were thought to be poor because of personal failure. 

From the Revolution to the Great Depression a century and a half later, help for the needy came mostly from family, charity or local government. Local public relief bore a stigma. 

The federal government grew slowly in its first 150 years. On the expanding frontier, it was involved in territorial jurisdiction and land grants for public education, roads, flood control, drainage, canals and railroads. Until 1893, federal money largely went to pensions, public buildings and river and harbor improvements. There were short-term federal deficits because of the Civil War, the recession of 1890 and World War I, but nothing like what would come later. 

The first federal regulation of the private sector came in 1863 with the creation of the office of the comptroller of the currency as part of the national banking system. In the next 40 years, only two regulatory agencies were added—the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. 

Generally, the federal government remained aloof from most domestic affairs. Generally, it was a quiet time and presidents were not overworked. Grover Cleveland could take afternoons off, riding in his Victoria drawn by a matched pair while the citizenry tipped their hats and said, "Good afternoon, Mr. President." 

If it were possible to chart the American Dream, you would have a steadily climbing line from 1776 to 1860, a sharp drop for the Civil War and then again a rising line with minor dips, rising, rising, rising to a pinnacle in 1929. We were prosperous. We were buoyant. We were supremely confident.

Then the wheels fell off. 

Suddenly, 12 million Americans—one of every four of the country's bread-winners—were looking for jobs that didn't exist. More than 5,000 banks failed and 86,000 businesses went out of business and, in 1932 alone, 273,000 families were evicted from their homes. 

In the spreading hunger and deepening humiliation, middle-class neighbors knocked on back doors for handouts. Some people ate weeds and some people fought over leftovers in the alleys behind restaurants, and rioting farmers dumped cans of milk rather than sell for 2 cents a quart, and in many places people talked of revolution from the left or the right and across the land nobody seemed to be able to do anything about anything. With all the property foreclosures, with tax revenues way down, the state and city governments were virtually helpless to help, private charities dried up, and the whole blessed country seemed at a dead stop. 

Only the federal government had the resources to help and under Roosevelt, it did. This was the watershed, the great turn in history in which laissez-faire died and the basic philosophy of American government was profoundly altered: 

• Federal Emergency Relief. 

• Social Security.

• Unemployment compensation.

• The Civilian Conservation Corps 

• The National Labor Relations Act. 

• The Securities and Exchange Commission.

• The Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

• The Tennessee Valley Authority. 

• The Work Progress Administration.

The cartoons showed men leaning on shovels but it was WFA, or a form of it, that built 10 percent of the new roads, 35 percent of the new hospitals, 70 percent of the new schools. Denver was given a new water supply system; Brownville, Texas, a port; Key West, the roads and bridges that connect it to the Florida mainland. 

WPA built the Lincoln Tunnel between New York and New Jersey, the Camarillo Mental Hospital in California, the canals of San Antonio, the Fort Knox gold depository in Kentucky, Dealey Plaza in Dallas and Boulder Dam in the Colorado River. 

Roosevelt made the economic welfare of Americans a federal commitment. In his turn, Lyndon B. Johnson took the ball and ran with it — ran away with it, some say. 

The 1960s were a time of high employment and great economic growth. Every American, it was thought, could be assured a job, a minimum standard of living, adequate diet, decent housing and sufficient health care. 

Everything looked possible if you threw enough money and expertise at it — the moon, Vietnam, the policing of the world in our image, the end of poverty, racial injustice, decay of the cities and the sliding quality of life. Thus, we got: 

• More aid to the poor. 

• More foreign aid. 

• Supreme Court decisions to ensure the rights of minorities and the accused. 

• Food stamps. 

• Medicare.

• Affirmative action. 

• Job training.

• Child care. 

• School lunches. 

• Housing and rent subsidies. 

• Corporate subsidies. 

• Educational aid. 

• Urban renewal. 

• Consumer programs.

• Wars on poverty and cancer and pollution.

• Projects to combat heart disease, reduce mental illness, raise reading scores, reduce juvenile delinquency. 

All of was part of what seemed to be an unquestioning national momentum to take the risk and inequity out of life, in ghettos and board rooms, in factories and farms, in schools and homes. And people voted for the candidates who made government bigger, Republican as well as Democratic, and before long Washington was into everything from the number of Hispanic teachers in Waukegan to the number of prongs in the electric plugs of a bakery in West Warwick, R.I. 

The cost of domestic social programs rose from 17 percent to 25 percent of the Gross National Product between 1964 and 1974. Defense outlays grew, too, but as a slice of the federal budget domestic programs became twice as large as defense. 

Much was attempted, much was accomplished, much ended up a mess. Where failure resulted, it usually was attributed, in retrospect, to an excessive confidence in what government could do. The war on poverty fed and housed the poor but largely failed to make them self-sufficient. Subsidized housing provided better housing but no less crime in the disrupted neighborhoods. Federal efforts to improve student learning fell far short of their spectacular promises. 

Koch then was a congressman who voted with the flood tide of federal largesse, a fact he now regrets as the mayor of New York swamped in federal regulations. 

"The bills I voted for came to the floor in a form that compelled approval. After all, who can vote against clean air and water or better access and education for the handicapped? 

"As I look back, it is hard to believe that I could have been taken in by the simplicity of what Congress was doing and by the flimsy empirical support—often no more than a carefully orchestrated hearing record or a single consultant's report offered to persuade members that the proposed solution could work throughout the country." 

While the rapid growth of the federal government began in the 1930s, it is since 1960 that its restrictive effects have deepened profoundly on individuals, business and lesser governments. Between 1961 and 1973, Washington sprouted 141 new agencies, more than a third of the current total, and none disappeared. 

Twenty years ago, federal money going to the state and local governments was slightly more than $7 billion. Now there are nearly 500 programs that cost $88 billion. Then, there were few regulations tied to the money. Now there are 1,260 sets of rules. Then, federal aid went almost entirely to the 50 states. Now it also goes directly to 65,000 cities, towns and wide bends in the road. 

A commission appointed by Congress last year concluded that the constitutional system of shared and separate powers among federal, state and local governments is "in trouble." 

“The federal government's influence," the commission said, "has become more pervasive, more intrusive, more unmanageable, more ineffective, more costly and, above all, more unaccountable. The intergovernmental system today is a bewildered and bewildering maze of complex, overlapping and, often, conflicting relationships. 

Gov. Bruce Babbit of Arizona, a Democrat, aimed his shaft directly at Congress: 

"It is hard to see why a national Congress, responsible for governing a continental nation, should be involved in formulating programs for rat control, humanities grants for town hall debates on capital punishment, educating displaced homemakers, training for use of the metric system, jellyfish control, bike paths and police disability grants.

 "It is long past time for Congress to ask with the shades of Jefferson and Madison, 'Is this a truly national concern?' Congress ought to be worrying about arms control and defense instead of the potholes in the streets. We just might have both an increased chance of survival and better streets!” 

Almost since he yawned, stretched and left the cave to get organized, man has made bureaucracy part of his history. 

Julius Caesar levied a 1 percent general sales tax. He also levied an inheritance tax, which contained history's first and most picturesque tax loop-hole. Close relatives of the deceased were exempt. 

It is because of bureaucracy that we think of Bethlehem at Christmas: 

"And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed ... And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city. And Joseph went up to Bethlehem.. to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child." 

Long before Reagan, there was a Roman historian, Tacitus, who viewed bureaucracy with gloom and doom. "The closer a society is to ruin," he said, "the more laws there are." 

If true, we are not alone. In recent years, in most places of the world, small government has grown large and large government has grown larger. The rising tide of paternalism from national capitals has been nearly universal. 

Sweden, where someone calculated a new law or ordinance was passed every eight hours during the last decade, now spends more than half its national income on government Other countries which spend relatively more on government than we do include the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Canada, West Germany, Austria, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Italy. Among the major powers, only Japan spends less than we do; it has virtually no military establishment and meets welfare needs through the private business sector. 

We are not alone in our irritation.

•  In Italy, it took Giuseppe Grottadauria 2.5 years to get his residence papers switched from Messina to Rome, without which he couldn't vote, buy a car or register his son's birth.

• In Italy, it can take four hours in a line at the post office to pay a phone bill. It can take years to get a phone installed and months to register in a university, by which time the new student is taking final exams. 

• In Sweden, the government intruded on a national pastime. It decreed that people picking and selling wild berries must be registered for income tax. The result was that for two years Sweden had to import berries while thousands of tons rotted in the forests. 

• In Nanking, China, the requisitioning of 1.3 acres of land took three months and the signatures of 144 officials in 17 different organizations on 46 documents.  

• In Japan, Mihoko Yokota returned from eight years in the United States and applied for a driver's license. She was asked for proof of residence. She tried to register her new address in Kamakura but was told she needed a form from her last address in Japan. She asked her mother in Hiroshima to send the form by special delivery but when she went to the Kamakura post office to register her new address in order to receive the mail she was told she needed proof of residence, which she could not get from the Kamakura city office until her mother in Hiroshima sent the form, which could not be delivered until the post office had the form from the Kamakura city hall, which finally meant that the form from Mihoko's mother had to be hand-carried by a friend traveling between the two cities. And it you're wondering what yamemasho means, it is the closest the Japanese come to saying, to hell with it 

Students of sanity know there are two ways to react to the Catch-22 situations, the claustrophobic red tape, the sins, excesses and sheer idiocy of big government. One way is to react with indignation; the other, with humor. A carefully calibrated combination of both comes highly recommended for dealing with the following: 

• The Pentagon's XMI tank program, costing $13 billion, produces a tank which can't run in any but dust-free conditions like those in the lab. 

• The National Aeronautic and Space Administration asks Congress for $1.1 billion for a new telescope. Turns out NASA made a small bookkeeping error. It will cost $2.2 billion. 

• The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) estimates that, in fiscal 1979, it blew $2 billion in overpayments or payments to ineligibles in three major welfare programs. Ideally, it says, it hopes to reduce this slippage to 4 percent. That's still $1.1 billion.

Various federal agencies do nothing about $2.5 billion to $3 billion owed the government by contractors and grantees for questionable payments. Nobody knows the complete total because of poor bookkeeping. One tiny part of HEW blew $1.5 million by letting the statute of limitations expire before trying to recover improper charges. 

The government has 12,000 computers. The General Accounting Office spot-checks the payroll computer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It feeds the computer fictitious names. Turns out the infernal machine would have paid Donald Duck. 

By one estimate, the government spends $9 billion a year on outside consultants. Two-thirds of the contracts are reportedly let without competing bids. Many of the consultants are former officials of the agency seeking the consultation. Many of the resulting studies end up in drawers and never are used. 

• One consultant is paid $440 for working Sept. 31, 1978. (Thirty days hath September.) The Environmental Protection Agency pays $360,000 for a study that shows, among other things, that the average speed of trucks in Manhattan is 63 mph. (!)

• The new Department of Education pays $1,500 a week for six weeks to a consultant (a former Education official) to design an office layout for its top executives. 

• The Energy Department consults outsiders to explain an act of Congress (the Civil Service Reform Act). Another department hires a consultant to find out how many consultants it has.

• A bureaucrat in the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes one mistake in compiling used-car prices nationally, which pushes up the Consumer Price Index by two-tenths of 1 percent, which increases benefits for millions of people getting regular checks based on the Index. 

The General Accounting Office estimates that in the last five years it saved taxpayers nearly $21 billion that otherwise would have gone down the drain became of waste, bad management and uncollected bills. Since the GAO makes only special checks at the behest of Congress, that figure has to be regarded as the lip of an iceberg colored red. 

Horrendous as that is, there are those who suspect that private industry is in no position to look down its corporate nose at government.

Clark Clifford, the Washington attorney who has dealt with both for years, says he has also seen "scandalous waste" in the private sector. Paul O'Neill, a former high official of the Office of Management and Budget and now a senior vice president of International Paper Co., adds, "The steel and auto industry made huge mistakes. If you put the Washington press corps on the back of industry you’d find equal stupidity."

With a couple of differences. Private industry has a bottom line: profit. A widget that saves money is highly prized and rewarded. 

Government has no bottom line and money becomes an abstraction, as if it belonged to nobody. In government, if your department spends less this year, you're apt to get less from Congress next year. A bureaucrat who finds he can get by with fewer people may find his own grade and salary reduced. 

Also, private industry generally can still fire people. The government of the United States generally can't. Once in, federal employees are tough to get out, like headless nails. 

• An agency fired an employee for beating his supervisor with a baseball bat. The Federal Employees Appeals Authority ordered the culprit reinstated in the same job under the same supervisar with eight months back pay. Reason: the employee was given insufficient notice of dismissal. 

• It took a Commerce Department manager 21 months and mounds of paper work to fire a secretary who consistently failed to show up for work for health reasons that proved phony. The manager had to devote so much time to the case his own work suffered and he received a reprimand. 

• In New York, a postal worker was fired for shooting another man in the stomach during a difference of opinion. The attacker went to jail but appealed his dismissal. He won reinstatement and $5,000 in back pay on the grounds that the papers were filled out incorrectly. So they filled them out right and this time the firing stuck but the postal gunslinger kept the 95,000.

Nearly all federal employees are protected by Civil Service or other rigid umbrellas. They are also represented by 78 labor unions and associations. Civil Service was begun in 1883 to replace the old spoils system by which all federal workers could be fired every four years. Merit replaced politics as a condition of employment. 

But by 1919, a congressman was complaining on the floor of the House about all the "clinkers" in government who couldn't be purged: "They are in all departments, killing time, writing answers to letters that do not answer, stupidly pretending to do work that live employes must do over again." 

Fifty-nine years later, Carter complained to Congress: "It is easier to promote and transfer incompetent employees than to get rid of them. It may take as long as three years to fire someone for just cause. ... You cannot run a farm that way, you cannot run a factory that way, and you certainly cannot run a government that way.”

Added to the Civil Service complications were the difficulties created by equal opportunity legislation. An administrator would have to think hard about firing a member of a minority for incompetence. If the incompetent countered with a discrimination suit, the administrator would have to hire his own lawyers to defend himself. If the decision went against him, he could lose pay or position. 

In 1978, out of 2.8 million people on his payroll, Uncle Sam managed to fire 119 for "inefficiency." Later that year, Carter got some Civil Service reform out of Congress and in the next go-round 214 employees were sacked for the same reason. Not exactly a spectacular leap forward. There remained a huge permanent core entrenched in concrete and beyond the reach of presidents to touch. 

Low-level federal workers are said to be paid somewhat more than their counterparts in the private sector. Many higher levels are paid much less than they could earn on the outside. 

Federal pensions are generally better than private ones and in recent years, along with cost of living increases, 99 percent of federal employees were given annual merit raises. Were there really that many that good?

In the Carter administration, Carol Foreman headed food inspection and consumer services in the Agriculture Department. "I have a staff of 10,000," she once said. "A few are very dedicated, a few are very talented, and then there are the others." 

The goof-offs and foul-ups in government obviously get more attention than the people doing their job. Few Americans were aware of the caliber of Foreign Service officers until the hostages came back from Iran. Few are aware of the young lawyers who pass up golden offers from big firms to work in legal aid for the poor. The doctors in public health get no attention every day they prevent epidemics until the day they fail. The men and women who leave fat corporate jobs to work much harder for much less in government get no space in the papers until one of their number is caught with his hand in the till. 

Most students of government agree that the trouble with government is not the bureaucrats, good, bad or indifferent, but the chaotic system that incubates and nourishes them. 

What we have is a big, implausible, ramshackle house, distorted by random additions, by corridors that go nowhere and rooms that don't connect, a home loosely expanded through the years for numberless children, most of them unexpected. There was no family planning. There was no architect.

"Congress has the power but not the incentive for coordinated control of the bureaucracy while the president has the incentive but not the power," said Morris P. Fiorina, a political scientist, speaking generically. 

Congress can create, change or kill an agency through its funding power. Presidents can only hope to mobilize public opinion. Presidents seek re-election and a place in history. Members of Congress seek re-election but, each being one of 535, cannot count on immortality. Congressmen get re-elected, not for the broad strokes of history, but for the post offices or sewage systems or dams they bring their constituents.

And back there, everybody is for saving money in general but not in particular. The taxpayer in Colorado may not shed a tear over cuts in urban renewal funds for New York, but don't touch his water projects. And vice versa, the taxpayer in New York. And the rural congressman, who couldn't care less about a Model Cities program, votes for Model Cities in a trade for a vote for farm subsidies from the urban congressman. "A billion here, a billion there," said Everett McKinley Dirksen."Pretty soon, you're talking about real money."

Even the pure in heart can't escape the swelling effect of politics. Two powerful Republican senators (Jesse A. Helms and Robert J. Dole) had candidates for the job of assistant agriculture secretary for governmental and public affairs. The Reagan administration solved the dilemma by splitting the job between the two choices, but not the salary. Each will be paid $52,750 a year. 

There is, we are told, a constituency for every dollar in the federal budget. Everyone seems to have a compelling reason and consistency is not always the rule of the day. 

• The American Medical Association, which once opposed Medicare as socialized medicine, now opposes cuts in Medicare on which many doctors depend heavily for their income. 

• In 1978, the snow was so heavy that cities in Michigan asked for federal money to help with the snow removal. In 1979, the snow was so light that ski areas in Michigan asked for federal aid. Rain or shine, Uncle Sam often finds himself in a no-win situation. 

If he insists on taking more time to examine the eligibility of people asking for welfare, does he risk causing some of them to starve or freeze? If he doesn't guarantee a loan for Chrysler, will he be responsible for throwing thousands of auto workers out on the street? If he sends a mother to jail for food stamp fraud, won't he have to feed her children in a foster home at greater cost? If he cuts subsidies for the merchant marine and airlines, will he have enough ships and planes in the next war? 

Presidents come, presidents go, but in Washington there remains a permanent bureaucracy with its own ideas, momentum, inner resources, cozy ties with key members of Congress and ingenious ploys for survival. Nothing evokes the fancy footwork of a bureaucrat so much as a presidential attempt to cut his budget. 

Ask Amtrak to cut the fat out of its operation and it comes back with a dandy plan to eliminate railroad routes going through the home districts of powerful committee chairmen in Congress, who would never tolerate it. Ask Interior to save money and it proposes to close the national parks earlier or shut down the elevators in the Washington Monument, neither of which the public would take lying down. 

Generals are very good at this, although lately they haven't had to be. Ask a general in the Pentagon to cut and he goes dutifully before an appropriations committee, with whose chairman he is secretly wired, and he says, loyally, yes, he can oblige the president. But on further questioning, his expression grows more pained until finally, in all candor, he lets it be known, in hushed tones, that the proposed reduction would leave the entire East Coast of the United States defenseless.

E Pluribus Unum is in trouble. If ever we were one out of many, we are now many out of one. John Gardner, founder of Common Cause, calls the centrifugal forces of special interest groups a "war of the parts against the whole."

The parts multiply like the denizens of a rabbit warren on New Year's Eve.