Found this article and was wondering... if one replaced 'New Delhi' with 'Washington, D.C.' and 'rat-catching department' with some of our programs like 'war on poverty' would the story change?

"A story about New Delhi's rat-catchers has been widely reported by news services including ABC and the Independent. They quote the Hindustan Times as source, but I couldn't find the original story myself on their website. It does fall within the bounds of the plausible, though.

New Delhi's government has a rat-catching department that has not caught a single rodent in more than a decade… The Rat Surveillance Department employs 97 rat catchers, who each earn about 3,500 rupees (US$83) a month. But there are no records of any rodents having been caught in the past 10 years.

You may think this a splendid record of success. Obviously the Rat Surveillance Department has done its job so well that rats are now a rarity. Better hang on to the RSD, though, just in case.

Except that rats are actually pretty common in Delhi, and many people set their own traps for them. But then the fact that everyone knows there are rats around is all the more reason to hang on to the RSD.

Of course, it might just be that the RSD does actually catch lots of rats, but its record-keeping is poor and there is no paperwork to show that. In which case, of course, the Department clearly deserves a large increase in budget to put in new systems. Or it might be that Delhi would be no worse off if 97 of its employees were sent home on full pay. Or that if rats are indeed a problem, the whole business should be done by some private company who might actually do what they are paid for. I thought India was good at outsourcing?"

(H.T. Dissecting Leftism.)