How Committees Work: Logrolling

Via Tom Ricks the Best Defense blog, I got to this Benjamin Wittes post on the recent NSA review panel.  A sentence:

The Review Group report often has the feel of a committee of very smart people getting together and amalgamating their particular obsessions without doing the work of prioritizing them

 This is, of course, how committees work, at least committees with a certain type of task.  I'm reminded of review efforts that occurred in ASCS after a change of administration: the new people would assemble a group of employees who had supported the "outs" to review agency operations.  The group would come up with a laundry list (why is it "a laundry list" I wonder) of recommendations, some of which were reasonable IMHO, some were not, but there wasn't any cohesive overall vision to it.  Maybe given the social and bureaucratic environment there couldn't and shouldn't be a cohesive overall vision.

I assume that the process which produces such reports is simple logrolling: everyone has a pet idea or two, because the committee is deliberately diverse no one has the knowledge or motive to fight against the idea, so to keep everyone happy everyone's idea is included in the report.