Paperwork Writers

There's more paperwork than ever:

The PRA was last updated in 1995. Websites back then were extremely basic: mostly text with the occasional grainy image that took a full minute to load. There was no concept of online forms or accessing government services over the internet. The Clinton administration had launched whitehouse.gov a mere seven months earlier, and the federal government did not even begin managing the .gov top-level domain until 1997. The world has changed. Most forms are filled out online—increasingly, on mobile devices. A typical form is not a static set of fields but rather dynamic, showing or hiding questions based on prior responses, enforcing required elements, and ensuring your response meets criteria. Forms are often rigorously tested and tweaked to increase submission rates, with improvements like removing extraneous fields, swapping jargon for plain language, and prefilling known data. Mainstream analytics tools can measure exactly at which field users are pausing or abandoning the page altogether, and many organizations hire user researchers to watch and collect feedback about a form's usability among its target audience. What hasn't changed is the PRA. Still lumbering under a definition of "information technology" from 1949, it forces government agencies to frame information collection as individual static (paper) forms. It threatens employees who want to get feedback from the public. It forces every proposed change, however small, through a rigid process that can take years and adds no value. The PRA even causes the government to break its own laws by making it impossible to meet congressionally mandated deadlines.

Bureaucracy means never having to change...