The biggest reason for taking fed money even if you have to put up the match is the Hell you’ll catch from the sponsors in Congress and the constituency the money would go to. In the case of welfare, that is Democrats, poverty pimps, non-profits, and the slackers that live off welfare. I don’t have a problem with welfare for widows, orphans, and the lame, blind, and halt, but that doesn’t describe most people on welfare, especially those who’ve been on it for generations.

Doc and others like to blame it on “bureaucrats,” but it isn’t bureaucrats that accept and appropriate the federal money, it is legislators, often in Republican controlled legislatures. Gov. Palin made a show of not accepting some DHHS “stimulus” money, but I’ll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that the Alaska Legislature accepts and appropriates the money. We’ll see if she’ll veto it; it’s peanuts relatively, so she might.

Those evil bureaucrats, and I used to be one, will take whatever their Legislature will give them because they know that they’ll always be held to account by somebody for somebody not getting what they wanted. The faceless nameless bureaucrats at the delivery of service level may never get fired but policy level managers sure do and get endless ridiculed by the people who make the actual decisions when they go wrong. If some pet program of an elected or appointed offical goes off the rails altogether because it was a stupid idea to begin with; if you’re the manager, you’d best start figuring out what you did wrong because that officeholder is never going to accept any responsibility for it.

The director or commissioner of widgetmaking usually makes the same as every other director or commissioner. You don’t get paid any more for having more employees or a bigger budget or more power. Way down in the production level bureaucracy a Widgetmaker III makes more than a Widgetmaker II because s/he is responsible for more widgets, but people like that don’t get to set budgets. Unless you’re a political appointee the only time you’ll ever see the inside of a Finance Committee meeting room is if the appointee needs some special expertise and needs somebody to blame something on.

Anybody with a brain would rather make their $100 – $150K by supervising less employees and having less hassles. Big agencies have all sorts of subdivisions headed by high level merit system managers or by political appointees who want the agency head’s job and who are usually more than happy to stab the agency head in the back to get it. Smart political managers have small agencies that perform politically vital functions. If you have an agency like that, you can get all the money you want if you’re trusted by the legislature but the money you have pales in comparison to the money a slothful giant like a DOT or a DHSS would have.

The big agencies have big budgets because they have big constituencies that demand more and more of government and demand the head of the agency head if they don’t get what they want. Even in a Republican administration, if too many people are howling at the head of a Health and So-called Services Department, the head of that department better start thinking about spending more time with his/her family. Likewise, Labor, Environmental, Education, and all the other departments of a government that feed Democrat constituencies. Gov. Palin and a Republican legislature, for example, have spent an enormous amount of money on Education and Social Services increases even though there isn’t a single vote to be had for any Republican from the constituency for either department. Both the appointees and the elected officials just respond to the howling from the interest groups, the lobbyists, and the media. The managers in those agencies don’t make any more money or have any more power because their agencies have bigger and bigger budgets, they’re just throwing money at the people who are howling in the hope that it will buy them some peace and quiet.

As for me, by the time I was an appointee, I did like having money for the sake of having it. I’d spent my whole career in a general fund department where we were always the first to take any cut, especially the stupid unallocated general decrements that Governors who don’t know what they’re doing like to impose. We’d always had to beg for every dime for every thing while we sat and watched the federally funded departments throw money around. I had spent some time working for the Finance Committees and could pretty much get what I wanted, so I gilded the lilly pretty well because I figured after I left, they’d never get a new piece of equipment or any training again. And I was right.

answer, which answer is the reason that it is the rarest Republican officeholder who has a clue how to run a government, see e.g., George W. Bush, POTUS.

The typical Republican activist and candidate/officeholder hates government and the bureaucracy so much and has such a solidly formed mythology about how things (don’t) work and why, that they know nothing about the actual workings of government, won’t learn anything, and then wonder why they get their head handed to them by the bureaucrats. See, e.g. the Plame Affair, Hurricane Katrina.