My job requires regular interaction with Federal agencies, and the administrators who run these things are a special kind of fucked up. I'll give one example but the same principle is repeated over and fucking over.
I wrote a 15 page research proposal, and in the eyes of the federal government is perfectly fucking A-OK to require an additional 35 pages of paperwork accompany this. Note that I've written literally the simplest kind of proposal here (single individual, single institution, no cost sharing); this is an absolute bare minimum.
Included in these 50 total pages that they require you to send in: an email. An email that *they* sent to me. They want me to PDF the fucking email and include it as an attachment back them, so it can now exist in both their inbox and their sent mail.
These people handle >7.5 BILLION dollars of taxpayer money annually and cant manage to either (a) check their fucking sent mail or (b) associate email invitations with proposals using the proposal ID number that is explicitly assigned to both file names and subject headers. An utterly fucking arbitrary item on the checklist that is included ONLY in order to exclude applications that failed to include it.
Administrators are the worst people in the world.
