Every year, government agencies produce reports ordered by Congress that nobody ever bothers to read:
It started out with a good idea. Legislators wanted to know more about the bureaucracy working beneath them. So they turned to a tool as old as bureaucracy itself — the interoffice memo. They asked agencies to send in written reports about specific things they were doing.
Then, as happens in government, that good idea was overused until it became a bad one.
It started out with a good idea. Legislators wanted to know more about the bureaucracy working beneath them. So they turned to a tool as old as bureaucracy itself — the interoffice memo. They asked agencies to send in written reports about specific things they were doing.
Then, as happens in government, that good idea was overused until it became a bad one.
(…)
This is a modern problem, made out of a very old thing. As far back as 1792, when Congress was still meeting in Philadelphia, it ordered the U.S. Mint to produce an annual report, to “be laid before Congress for their information.”
Today, the process works like this: First, Congress passes a law with detailed instructions for a report and a timeline for when it ought to be turned in. Some reports are due every year. But not all of them. In fact, Congress has asked for reports on 1,307 distinct schedules. The due dates range from “monthly” to “within 60 days after close of the fiscal year” to “from time to time.”
When they are ready, the reports are sent to Capitol Hill. Some go on paper, by courier. Others are sent by e-mail. (Only a small number of the reports are classified as secret.)
The reports are not all useless. Many reports are quite valuable and well read, such as the ones on Medicare’s finances and on the Pentagon’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan.
The problem is that there is no system to sort the good ones from the useless ones. They all flow in together, which makes it hard for congressional staffers to spot any valuable information hidden in the flood.
(…)
For decades, legislators have complained that they get more reports than they can reasonably sort through. In 1928, for example, there were 303 reports. And Congress thought that was already too many.
“Why do you not abolish 300 of them and leave three?” Rep. Fiorello La Guardia (R-N.Y.) said on the House floor. That year, legislators wound up cutting 128 reports.
But their victory over paperwork did not last. As decades went on, the number of reports began to grow again. By 1960, there were 470 reports required. By 1970, there were 759.
The numbers grew for two main reasons. The first was entirely noble. In many cases, legislators were pursuing the goal of better oversight, keeping watch on the money they were spending. As government has expanded over the past 50 years, they have needed more reports to keep track.
The other reason was less noble. Congress ordered reports to shut somebody up.
In these cases, legislators allowed colleagues to order reports on pet problems as a way of pacifying them.
“Everyone can get a little bit of satisfaction [out of requesting a report], but the Senate’s not getting dragged into a drawn-out debate on whatever the issue is,” said Jim Manley, a former longtime aide to Senate Democrats. “Once you request a study, you don’t really have to pay attention to the details — such as how much it’s going to cost to put together a study.”
The problem was that, in many cases, Congress’s orders had no expiration date. Legally, these reports are immortal. They are due, forever, until somebody repeals the law requiring them. So new reports were added, old ones stayed on and the totof al number kept growing.
By 1980, there were 2,300 reports required. By 1990, there were 3,448.
Along the way, federal auditors warned Congress that it was losing oversight of its own oversight system. “There is no way of insuring that the agencies . . . submit reports when they are due,” auditors said in 1981.
Throughout the government, crafty bureaucrats began to notice the same thing. Nobody was checking the homework.\
There’s much more at the link, but the story should be a familiar one to anyone who’s experienced the workings of bureaucracy, especially at the government level. Since Congress is now ordering so many reports that it couldn’t keep track of them, bureaucrats quickly figured out that it didn’t necessarily matter if they missed deadline, submitted a report that didn’t really consist of anything substantive, or not didn’t even submit the report at all. Since there’s nobody out there actually checking the work, the incentive to actually do the work quickly disappears.
The linked article goes on to note that we don’t even know at this point how much it’s costing the government to produce these reports. The last estimate was made more than 20 years ago, and put the number at $100 million. In today’s dollars, that would be around $163 million, but that doesn’t take into account the additional costs that have been incurred due to yet more reports being required by Congress. A large part of that cost, of course, will be due to printing costs from the Government Printing Office, an expensive which just seems entirely unnecessary in an era where PDF files of documents can be emailed easily and stored on computer servers for a fraction of the cost of the paper, ink, and other costs related to printing. In addition, there’s simply the opportunity cost incurred by the fact that thousands of government employees must be involved in preparing these reports to begin with. Granted, these people are going to be paid in any event, but the time they take to compile the data for, and prepare, these mandated reports takes away from time they can devote to other, presumably more productive, projects. At the end of the day, it may not be possible to calculate the true costs that all of these seemingly unnecessary reports are imposing on the Federal Government.
As with many things that Congress does, this mess started out with a noble intention, in this case to aid Congress in its oversight responsibilities. However, ordering a report doesn’t really amount to oversight if nobody bothers to read it, or if so many reports are submitted that nobody has either the time or the energy to comprehend their contents. More often than not, then, these government reports seem to have turned into Congress’s way of saying that they are addressing an issue without actually addressing it. Of course, there probably is a rational solution to all of this, but given that government bureaucracy operates mostly on inertia, it seems unlikely that anything will actually be done about it. Instead, the reports, to the extent they are even being prepared, will continue to pile up in a room somewhere in the Capitol Building just waiting for someone to read them.
