Could this be Said of the US Federal Bureaucrat

Could this be Said of the US Federal Bureaucrat
http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/02/russias-leader-is-neither-a-realist-nor-a-nationalist/

""Men like Putin are not brilliant, but they are cunning. (The Soviet system excelled at weeding out genuinely creative people while rewarding excessively clever people. There's a difference.) Seeing the writing on the wall in the late 1980s, Putin did what many older and less able Soviet men could not do: he jumped from the crumbling Soviet state to the new democratic movement. Better to be on the train than standing in front of it.""

Men in the federal government of the US and those of the Russian government may share a trait of all isolated bureaucrats, one first seen in ancient Persia. Cunning men who game the system. As the the creative are forced out by the cunning, the bureaucracy fails to function. With total control however, there is no consequence for failure. Not until the rot progresses to the whole nation does the whole nation crumble

The US system, anticipating this, is broken into coequal branches. It is hoped when the rot consumes one, consequences can be enacted by the functioning portions.  There is further division into federal and state governments which can survive the general rot.

Today the coequal branches are in collusion, which is allowing the rot to effect the whole federal government. What is needed is an association of surviving states and citizens to down size the clever in the federal government. The creative of the nation can  bring the new structures into place replacing  dysfunctional parts.