Bravo.. If you read between the lines they basically ignored outdated/inappropriate processes/bueracracy to provide a service to the end user. And by not adhering to those rules they indeed saved taxpayer dollars. Glad they pushed through and delivered... All they gotta do now is circle back and get the waivers. The epitome of a broken/meaningless process. Quite typical, unfortunately, in our gov....
Of course there are lots of examples where rules or regulations weren't followed and bad things happened: BP oil spill, Enron and many other accounting fiascos, endless number of stories on HN about software being developed with basic security flaws, numerous stories regarding lost laptops with unencrypted private information and so on.
Each time this happens you can't count to ten before the Google bot indexes another GB of punditry arguing for more regulations.
If it were easy to know when bureaucratic controls or official regulations were appropriate and when they were superfluous the world would be a simpler place.
I'm not sure what general princple applies here other than KISS. Reducing complexity is probably a good rule of thumb for any endeavor. Complex rules and meta-rules create their own second, third, or n-th order problems.
