In addition to the doomed project, another project of mine is kind of dysfunctional as well. It's an odd problem: no one here cares about it. And no, I don't mean "this project is low on the agency's agenda" or even "everyone on the project team is as disaffected as me", I mean that this project literally has no benefits to this agency or the general public.
So why are we doing it? Because somebody agreed to it. As I've mentioned, every regulation we come up with goes through several other agencies for review. There's a standard set that every rulemaking by this agency goes through, and as far as I know every rulemaking by any agency in DC goes through for that matter. In addition, lots of rulemakings might need to be reviewed by or need approval from another depending on the details of it. Well, in one recent rulemaking, one reviewing body apparently asked for a quid pro quo. They'd sign off on our thing only if we'd do something for them. Basically, a survey. This rulemaking is an attempt at that.
There are several problems with this, which I'll go over in more detail later, but this post is late enough already. The most basic problem is the simple fact that no one here cares about this. Someone in this agency agreed to do it, and that agreement included a deadline, but no one actually cares about it. The survey is intended to give that other agency very general information about the state of a potential hazardous situation, nothing more specific than that, and any benefit to that agency or the general public is nebulous and indirect. Our agency got what we wanted out of this rulemaking project by promising to start it. Mission accomplished!
The word "blackmail" was used in a meeting a couple weeks ago to describe how the project got started, so you can tell just how much we care about it. We're trying, as duly ordered, but from our point of view it's almost objectively dumb.
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