Because of another stupid thing, which is that U.S. depts & agencies have strong internal regs against employees soliciting and/or accepting gifts other than in carefully carved out exceptional cases. For more on this, see, e.g., 5 CFR § 2635.204, but this isn’t the only such reg. In practice U.S. government employees at all levels are broadly prohibited from accepting any gift with a market value above 20 USD for example. (As you’d expect this leads to a lot of weird outcomes, including occasional hilarious minor diplomatic incidents with inexperienced foreign counterparties who have different gift giving norms.)
Yeah, I was afraid that might apply here. It seems like you should still be able to do something like “government employee tier” subscriptions, not targeted at an individual but perhaps something like ‘GS-8 and up’, set low enough that it would appeal to such customers, perhaps? It is not a gift but a discount, it is not to an individual but to a class, it is part of a market, and it is not conditional on any government action or inaction, and such discounts are very common for ‘students’, ‘veterans’, ‘first responders’ etc, and I’ve never seen any fineprint warning government employees about it being >$20 despite many such discounts potentially crossing that threshold (eg. Sam’s Club offers $50 off a new membership, and that seems clearly >$20, and to be doing it through a whole company devoted to this sort of discount, ID.me).
But I suppose that might be too complex for SA to be interested in bothering with?
Yeah that could be doable. Dylan’s pretty natsec focused already so I would guess he’d take a broad view of the ROI from something like this. From what I hear he is already in touch with some of the folks who are in the mix, which helps, but the core goal is to get random leaf node action officers this access with minimum friction. I think an unconditional discount to all federal employees probably does pass muster with the regs, though of course folks would still be paying something out of pocket. I’ll bring this up to SA next time we talk to them though, it might move the needle. For all I know, they might even be doing it already.
Because of another stupid thing, which is that U.S. depts & agencies have strong internal regs against employees soliciting and/or accepting gifts other than in carefully carved out exceptional cases. For more on this, see, e.g., 5 CFR § 2635.204, but this isn’t the only such reg. In practice U.S. government employees at all levels are broadly prohibited from accepting any gift with a market value above 20 USD for example. (As you’d expect this leads to a lot of weird outcomes, including occasional hilarious minor diplomatic incidents with inexperienced foreign counterparties who have different gift giving norms.)
Yeah, I was afraid that might apply here. It seems like you should still be able to do something like “government employee tier” subscriptions, not targeted at an individual but perhaps something like ‘GS-8 and up’, set low enough that it would appeal to such customers, perhaps? It is not a gift but a discount, it is not to an individual but to a class, it is part of a market, and it is not conditional on any government action or inaction, and such discounts are very common for ‘students’, ‘veterans’, ‘first responders’ etc, and I’ve never seen any fineprint warning government employees about it being >$20 despite many such discounts potentially crossing that threshold (eg. Sam’s Club offers $50 off a new membership, and that seems clearly >$20, and to be doing it through a whole company devoted to this sort of discount, ID.me).
But I suppose that might be too complex for SA to be interested in bothering with?
Yeah that could be doable. Dylan’s pretty natsec focused already so I would guess he’d take a broad view of the ROI from something like this. From what I hear he is already in touch with some of the folks who are in the mix, which helps, but the core goal is to get random leaf node action officers this access with minimum friction. I think an unconditional discount to all federal employees probably does pass muster with the regs, though of course folks would still be paying something out of pocket. I’ll bring this up to SA next time we talk to them though, it might move the needle. For all I know, they might even be doing it already.
… I’m getting the takeaway that you can influence policy by just emailing good papers to your local policymaker.