How to deal with a dead horse? America’s top spy has ideas | McClatchy Washington Bureau

America’s top spy, James Clapper, Thursday offered a little humble humor to address perceptions that Washington teems with bungling bureaucrats and idiotic solutions.

Indeed it does, Clapper said in a speech, noting that bureaucrats think differently, ignoring tribal wisdom says that it is best to dismount when one is astride a dead horse.

“Here in Washington we often try other strategies that are somewhat less successful, such as we’ll buy a stronger whip for the dead horse. We’ll change riders. We’ll say things like, ‘This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse,’” Clapper told a joint gathering of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance and Business Executives for National Security.

“We’ll appoint a committee to study the horse. We’ll lower standards so that more dead horses can be included. We’ll appoint a tiger team to revive the dead horse. We’ll hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse,” Clapper continued.

“We’ll harness several dead horses together to increase speed. We’ll attempt to mount multiple dead horses in the hopes that one of them will spring to life.

“We’ll provide additional funding and training to increase the dead horse’s performance. We’ll do a productivity study to see if lighter riders improve the dead horse’s performance. We’ll declare that since a dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes more to the mission than live horses,” Clapper said.

And lastly, he said, government leaders “can promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.”