Lucille
05-08-2014, 02:12 PM
I think we should ban massive government reports. I feel sure that the hard copies of said reports consume enough trees to consume thirty-seven trillion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
No one reads the bulk of them anyway. It's just more paper-pushing, to pretend that a majority of government jobs aren't middle class shadow welfare (http://www.barnhardt.biz/2014/02/08/the-one-about-defense-spending-and-shadow-welfare/).
Unrequired reading
Many of the thousands of reports mandated by Congress will only gather dust.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/05/03/unrequired-reading/
Every year, as required by law, the U.S. government prepares an official report to Congress on Dog and Cat Fur Protection. The task requires at least 15 employees in at least six different federal offices.
First, workers have to gather data about the enforcement of a law banning imports of fur coats, furry toys or other items made from the pelts of pets. How many shipments were checked? How many illegal furs were found?
The data are written into a report, passed up the chain of command and sent to Capitol Hill.
And then nothing happens.
Although it was Congress that demanded this report in a 2000 law, the legislators who pushed for it are gone. The debate over imported pet fur has waned. Congress lost interest. Of the seven committees that still get copies of the report, none reported finding it useful.
Still, the law lives on, requiring a bureaucratic ritual that has become a complete waste of time.
[...]
This is a story about how Congress built a black hole.
[...]
This Congress is officially expecting 4,291 written reports, from 466 federal agencies and nonprofit groups. Legislators have demanded reports on things as big as Social Security, as small as the House’s employee hair salon and as far afield as the state of Little League baseball.
But as the numbers got bigger, Congress started to lose track. It overwhelmed itself. Today, Congress is not even sure how many of those 4,291 reports are actually turned in. And it does not try to save copies of all the ones that are.
So some agencies cheat and send in nothing. And others waste time and money sending in reports — such as the one on dog and cat fur — that simply disappear into the void.
“Remember the original movie ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ where the ark got put away in that government storeroom?” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who has pushed to cut down on unnecessary reports. “Probably next to the lost ark are all the reports that have never been reviewed.”
[...]
From 300 to thousands
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.
[...]
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 total 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.
[...]
Over time, such congressional reports were becoming a Washington parable about why some big government systems break down.
In cases such as this, the cause is not too little funding or too much corruption or failed technology. It is Congress’s tendency to pile new solutions on top of outdated ones, and to try to make all of them work at once. As a result, funding and energy are spread too thin. Bad ideas live on — sucking in resources — because nobody bothers to kill them.
[...]
Today, nobody in Washington can say how many reports are actually done every year, or how much money is spent to prepare them. The last good estimate comes from 1993, when they were believed to cost more than $100 million — $163 million in today’s dollars.
This year, the only thing that Congress could say for sure was how many reports it was expecting to get. In early April, the House administration committee said that official total was 4,637.
But even that was wrong. The Washington Post counted the entries on the House’s list, and the number was more than 300 less than the House said it was. After that, the House administration committee changed its official total to 4,291.
That figure is also probably misleading, since the House’s list of expected reports seems riddled with errors. For one thing, it says Congress is still expecting two annual reports about the Soviet Union, a country that dissolved in 1991. And it still asks for two reports from the association of veterans of the Spanish-American War. The last member of that group died in 1992.
Lots more on this disgusting waste of time, money, and trees at the link.
No one reads the bulk of them anyway. It's just more paper-pushing, to pretend that a majority of government jobs aren't middle class shadow welfare (http://www.barnhardt.biz/2014/02/08/the-one-about-defense-spending-and-shadow-welfare/).
Unrequired reading
Many of the thousands of reports mandated by Congress will only gather dust.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/05/03/unrequired-reading/
Every year, as required by law, the U.S. government prepares an official report to Congress on Dog and Cat Fur Protection. The task requires at least 15 employees in at least six different federal offices.
First, workers have to gather data about the enforcement of a law banning imports of fur coats, furry toys or other items made from the pelts of pets. How many shipments were checked? How many illegal furs were found?
The data are written into a report, passed up the chain of command and sent to Capitol Hill.
And then nothing happens.
Although it was Congress that demanded this report in a 2000 law, the legislators who pushed for it are gone. The debate over imported pet fur has waned. Congress lost interest. Of the seven committees that still get copies of the report, none reported finding it useful.
Still, the law lives on, requiring a bureaucratic ritual that has become a complete waste of time.
[...]
This is a story about how Congress built a black hole.
[...]
This Congress is officially expecting 4,291 written reports, from 466 federal agencies and nonprofit groups. Legislators have demanded reports on things as big as Social Security, as small as the House’s employee hair salon and as far afield as the state of Little League baseball.
But as the numbers got bigger, Congress started to lose track. It overwhelmed itself. Today, Congress is not even sure how many of those 4,291 reports are actually turned in. And it does not try to save copies of all the ones that are.
So some agencies cheat and send in nothing. And others waste time and money sending in reports — such as the one on dog and cat fur — that simply disappear into the void.
“Remember the original movie ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ where the ark got put away in that government storeroom?” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who has pushed to cut down on unnecessary reports. “Probably next to the lost ark are all the reports that have never been reviewed.”
[...]
From 300 to thousands
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.
[...]
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 total 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.
[...]
Over time, such congressional reports were becoming a Washington parable about why some big government systems break down.
In cases such as this, the cause is not too little funding or too much corruption or failed technology. It is Congress’s tendency to pile new solutions on top of outdated ones, and to try to make all of them work at once. As a result, funding and energy are spread too thin. Bad ideas live on — sucking in resources — because nobody bothers to kill them.
[...]
Today, nobody in Washington can say how many reports are actually done every year, or how much money is spent to prepare them. The last good estimate comes from 1993, when they were believed to cost more than $100 million — $163 million in today’s dollars.
This year, the only thing that Congress could say for sure was how many reports it was expecting to get. In early April, the House administration committee said that official total was 4,637.
But even that was wrong. The Washington Post counted the entries on the House’s list, and the number was more than 300 less than the House said it was. After that, the House administration committee changed its official total to 4,291.
That figure is also probably misleading, since the House’s list of expected reports seems riddled with errors. For one thing, it says Congress is still expecting two annual reports about the Soviet Union, a country that dissolved in 1991. And it still asks for two reports from the association of veterans of the Spanish-American War. The last member of that group died in 1992.
Lots more on this disgusting waste of time, money, and trees at the link.