The final chapter of the Spanish-American War is about to close, as the US Treasury Department
prepares to eliminate a tax on telephone calls imposed to fund the war back in 1898 (back when telephones were a luxury item). It only took the bureaucracy 108 years, two world wars and the rise and fall of the Soviet bloc (not to mention the Spanish Civil War, the rise and fall of Franco's Fascism and Spain's accession into the US-allied NATO alliance, a mere 24 years earlier) to acknowledge that they are no longer at war with Spain.
The bureaucrats are slow these days very slow. I think it might be somehow related to the overall efficiency of the system or to a secret policy of united bureaucrats.