> Form: Estimated Annual Cost to Public: $26,325,300.
> Website: Estimated Annual Cost to the Public: $265,020,000.
What a waste.
All legislation, regulations and bureaucratic procedures have negative externalities just by virtue of existing. Each little piece makes it just that much harder for someone to find what they're looking for, or makes a process take a little bit more time, or makes it take a little bit more effort to learn the entire thing.
Individually, the marginal cost of each little piece is small, and they're generally introduced for good reasons, but the end result of bloated legal codes, regulatory frameworks and "red tape" is undeniable. For example, "ignorance of the law is no defence", but how many people know the entire legal code? (Answer: nobody)
But what they're doing here is attempting to quantify the externalities, and crucially: taking into account that a tiny cost spread among a large number of people can produce a substantial cost in absolute terms. People are bad at doing this intuitively due to scope insensitivity, and the only real solution is to estimate actual numbers for the number of people affected, the amount of time it costs, and the value of their time, and then multiply them together to come up with a hard number.
And that's exactly what's been done here. You could perhaps quibble about the exact figures, and there are probably other more intangible and difficult to quantify externalities that haven't been taken into consideration, but other than that it's essentially a flawless application of utilitarian ethics.
Frankly, I find that utterly astonishing.
I am guessing that doing this sort of analysis is required by some sort of rules or regulation, and I would love to know when this was introduced, by whom it was introduced, and at what scope this requirement exists. Is this now a requirement for all changes to rules affecting the public by US Federal agencies?
While the fact that the paperwork Reduction Act created this new bureaucratic step is amusing, it served to rectify the earlier situation where a lot of federal paperwork was unreasonably complicated just because it was nobody's job to make it otherwise.
Form:
- The forms will have to be redesigned and reprinted. Not cheap. Don't forget, the 94W is in a variety of languages.
- Flight crew will have to be trained to answer this question. For 94W form.
- Agent console will have to be updated.
- Which means agents will have to be trained to handle this data.
- Embassies will have to be trained as well.
Website:
- Updates to the website. Don't forget different languages.
- Help documentation will have to be created for the web.
Other:
- Data will have to be aggregated from social site. Development costs.
- New console will have to be created to look at a user's streams.
- Staff will have to pull and review the data.
- New infrastructure (servers, software, upkeep) will have to be put in place to handle this.
Just thinking for a few minutes, it seems expensive. It is not just a field on a form or website, it is a whole staff, backend, ball of wax.
They are referring to the estimated burden in terms of the time spent by the people filling in the forms.
I think supoort for other languages cannot ever justify significant price in US governmental affairs.
It looks like 18 different languages are provided. I don't travel internationally often (and usually to English speaking countries), but I thought I'd heard that other languages were available on request.
This is not for citizens, only aliens.
Edit: actually, yes it does affect US citizen. Do you know who is likely to have connections on social networks with US citizens? Non-US citizens coming or leaving the US. Kind of shocking to think about huh.