Great post! One little clarification: zoning is generally in the purview of local governments, not states (which makes it worse - capacity is a *huge* issue at the local level). There’s a great project underway to digitize these regulations: https://www.zoningatlas.org/. Hopefully the first step in the sort of process you describe here.
I'd love to see some state introduce a zoning simplification, where they simply stop letting localities do _whatever_. Offer a much more limited menu of zone types, and then tell cities that they need to update their maps to conform in the next five years. (This would look more like what Japan does.)
A big source of this is how hard it is to enact legislation that ACTUALLY does something. So lawmakers find it much easier to pass performative legislation that directs agencies to do "virtue signalling" (and I say the term in a bipartisan manner, Trump's EO on plastic straws is as much virtue signalling as liberals banning travel to states that have bathroom bans. Red state bans on vendors refusing to do business with Israel is another example on the right). So we end up with a lot of boxes to check for agencies that don't do anything but add paperwork, and additional Congressional studies that no one reads.
Good piece. The one that jumps out to me lately is Conference policies. Like a lot of agencies after the GSA Conference Scandal (https://www.govexec.com/management/2015/01/where-are-they-now-where-players-gsa-scandal-have-landed/103743/) we instituted a conference policy which required a bunch of approvals for conferences. Now, I don't think that was necessary, what should have happened was everyone went 'yep, that was waste/fraud, the people who did it need to be disciplined/fired' but whatever. The main problem is that rather than limiting it to conference hosting, which was the problem, they stuck attendance on there too, then stole a definition from the DOD's Joint Travel Regulation that meant basically anything you travel for and pay a registration fee for is a conference...
So many trainings are conferences and require SES signature. Finally, after about 13 years, they're trying to roll that back, no approval required to attend non-Agency conferences, so long as the cost and attendees are below a specific threshold...which I'm sure made sense to folks, but now means that I've got people who are trying to rebuild the entire thing we're trying to shut down (tracking everyone's attendance at random trainings through a weird, ad hoc third system rather than either the training or travel systems) on the basis that 'well, we can't know if we blow those limits unless we track all attendees and costs, right?'
Great post! One little clarification: zoning is generally in the purview of local governments, not states (which makes it worse - capacity is a *huge* issue at the local level). There’s a great project underway to digitize these regulations: https://www.zoningatlas.org/. Hopefully the first step in the sort of process you describe here.
I'd love to see some state introduce a zoning simplification, where they simply stop letting localities do _whatever_. Offer a much more limited menu of zone types, and then tell cities that they need to update their maps to conform in the next five years. (This would look more like what Japan does.)
Wow, very eye-opening!
A big source of this is how hard it is to enact legislation that ACTUALLY does something. So lawmakers find it much easier to pass performative legislation that directs agencies to do "virtue signalling" (and I say the term in a bipartisan manner, Trump's EO on plastic straws is as much virtue signalling as liberals banning travel to states that have bathroom bans. Red state bans on vendors refusing to do business with Israel is another example on the right). So we end up with a lot of boxes to check for agencies that don't do anything but add paperwork, and additional Congressional studies that no one reads.
Good piece. The one that jumps out to me lately is Conference policies. Like a lot of agencies after the GSA Conference Scandal (https://www.govexec.com/management/2015/01/where-are-they-now-where-players-gsa-scandal-have-landed/103743/) we instituted a conference policy which required a bunch of approvals for conferences. Now, I don't think that was necessary, what should have happened was everyone went 'yep, that was waste/fraud, the people who did it need to be disciplined/fired' but whatever. The main problem is that rather than limiting it to conference hosting, which was the problem, they stuck attendance on there too, then stole a definition from the DOD's Joint Travel Regulation that meant basically anything you travel for and pay a registration fee for is a conference...
So many trainings are conferences and require SES signature. Finally, after about 13 years, they're trying to roll that back, no approval required to attend non-Agency conferences, so long as the cost and attendees are below a specific threshold...which I'm sure made sense to folks, but now means that I've got people who are trying to rebuild the entire thing we're trying to shut down (tracking everyone's attendance at random trainings through a weird, ad hoc third system rather than either the training or travel systems) on the basis that 'well, we can't know if we blow those limits unless we track all attendees and costs, right?'