I’m glad Jenn came to town and helped fix this policy proposal. I think her claim to 1-3% credit is an underestimate. I’m grateful for the first-hand account of how to fix policy that will not have the effects that the issuing body intends. Sometimes the best “technical correction” to a bad policy proposal is just start over.
The DC Policy Community is smaller than most people think. It’s smaller than many people who are in it think. This miscalibration causes problems. There’s a fundamental tension between performing your role to the best of your ability and taking on responsibility for the whole outcome. I think that tension, fiat justitia ruat caelum vs heroic responsibility, is key to understanding the bureaucratic soul. But that will need to be its own post someday.
Millions of people are employed in industries that export. The flaw in this policy proposal was easy to understand using only publicly-accessible data. Wikipedia gets you most of the way there. How is it possible that one small non-profit was the only organization to officially point out this basic flaw?
Jenn’s explanation is great and entirely correct, but I’d like to highlight one of the drivers: something like the bystander effect. Balsa was not the only group to notice this problem. Everyone knew that this problem was easy to spot, knew that it must have been easy for the authors of the policy to spot it. But pointing it out has costs, risking the relationship if you’re right, looking dumb if there’s something you missed. Once the obvious error is pointed out in the record, even once, that should be enough to prevent the worst version of the rule from going into effect (by threat of an Administrative Procedures Act action, if nothing else). So if the pool of public commenters is large, and you’re a prominent-but-not-overly-powerful group that has higher-priority problems on your plate, it’s entirely rational to want someone else to bear the cost of pointing out the problem.
The problem comes if you’re miscalibrated about how big the policy community is. If you expect an action to get thousands of well-informed public comments, it’s probably safe to assume most such flaws will be pointed out. If the action only gets 586 comments in total, and most of those are focused on a more headline-grabbing aspect of the proposal, that assumption is no longer safe.
There are hints of this in the record. The National Retail Federation’s analysis implies there were back-channel communications. Their written testimony makes clear that they spotted the problem, yet chose not to mention it directly. “Surely someone else will point out this problem so we don’t have to...”
This story has a moral: Do not assume what is obvious to you is obvious to the DC Policy Community. Even if you’re right and the issue is obvious, you might still be the only person to speak up about the issue.
I’m glad Jenn came to town and helped fix this policy proposal. I think her claim to 1-3% credit is an underestimate. I’m grateful for the first-hand account of how to fix policy that will not have the effects that the issuing body intends. Sometimes the best “technical correction” to a bad policy proposal is just start over.
The DC Policy Community is smaller than most people think. It’s smaller than many people who are in it think. This miscalibration causes problems. There’s a fundamental tension between performing your role to the best of your ability and taking on responsibility for the whole outcome. I think that tension, fiat justitia ruat caelum vs heroic responsibility, is key to understanding the bureaucratic soul. But that will need to be its own post someday.
Millions of people are employed in industries that export. The flaw in this policy proposal was easy to understand using only publicly-accessible data. Wikipedia gets you most of the way there. How is it possible that one small non-profit was the only organization to officially point out this basic flaw?
Jenn’s explanation is great and entirely correct, but I’d like to highlight one of the drivers: something like the bystander effect. Balsa was not the only group to notice this problem. Everyone knew that this problem was easy to spot, knew that it must have been easy for the authors of the policy to spot it. But pointing it out has costs, risking the relationship if you’re right, looking dumb if there’s something you missed. Once the obvious error is pointed out in the record, even once, that should be enough to prevent the worst version of the rule from going into effect (by threat of an Administrative Procedures Act action, if nothing else). So if the pool of public commenters is large, and you’re a prominent-but-not-overly-powerful group that has higher-priority problems on your plate, it’s entirely rational to want someone else to bear the cost of pointing out the problem.
The problem comes if you’re miscalibrated about how big the policy community is. If you expect an action to get thousands of well-informed public comments, it’s probably safe to assume most such flaws will be pointed out. If the action only gets 586 comments in total, and most of those are focused on a more headline-grabbing aspect of the proposal, that assumption is no longer safe.
There are hints of this in the record. The National Retail Federation’s analysis implies there were back-channel communications. Their written testimony makes clear that they spotted the problem, yet chose not to mention it directly. “Surely someone else will point out this problem so we don’t have to...”
This story has a moral: Do not assume what is obvious to you is obvious to the DC Policy Community. Even if you’re right and the issue is obvious, you might still be the only person to speak up about the issue.