Bureaucratic delay doubles as a rationing tool agencies have no incentive to remove

Evidence

Time costs are often assessed by street-level bureaucrats as delay; they are often experienced by clients as waiting. Bureaucracies can reward clients by expediting service, punish them by delaying service. Court postponements can function in this way, as can an increase in the time between intake interviews and placement on the welfare rolls. Importantly, bureaucracies often have little interest in reducing delay, since more expeditious processing would simply strain available resources. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 662

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that agencies lack incentive to reduce delay is a structural driver of routinized discretion — delay persists because it serves the agency, an institutional mechanism relevant to the reader’s speed-differential thesis.