Bureaucratic alienation is a big problem for most of the same reasons that Marx identified 150 years ago. Bureaucracies can be both inhumane and dehumanizing. Work rules are sometimes designed in such a way as to fail to account for the real needs of employees in terms of time, other parts of their lives, etc. In some bureaucratic organizations, especially government agencies, career ladders are too short, giving employees little opportunity for advancement. Rationality and efficiency are themselves often dehumanizing.
Bureaucratic ritualism is also a big problem.
Robert Merton first identified this problem and applied the term to organizational preoccupation with its rules and regulations to the point that managers keep the organization from meeting its goals. Another large problem is bureaucratic inertia , the tendency of bureaucratic organizations to resist changes in procedures, rules, or structure because it is used to doing certain things in certain ways. Government bureaucracies are not only subject to the same problems destroying efficiency and rationality that private bureaucratic organizations are subject to, but to politics as well. Politics is almost guaranteed to foul up the rationality of a bureaucratic system. One of the ways that happens is that Congress creates an agency to carry out a function and then interferes with the rational operation of the system.