I can kind of see why someone whose job it is to quarantine soil samples from other places on Earth would want to quarantine soil samples from another planet. Sort of.

Good thing corporations don’t have different divisions vying for relevancy by being super important to the new hotness (cough AI cough), and this is just the government being weird eh?

Bureaucracy is always corrupt, incompetent and self-serving to varying degrees. There is no way around it, it's a necessary evil for communication and organisation. At least governments in democracies have some form of oversight on them, there is less oversight in corporations or dictatorships.

Maybe an AI dictatorship would rid us of bureaucracy, but we'd both end up in a paperclip sweatshop.