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Comment by stormfather | Hacker News Reader

I've never stopped to question the absurdity of the gov data shopping cart thing. WHY!?!? Is there some justification for that?

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I can almost assure you it was an explicit requirement in an RFP that was copied from some master template. So not a good justification - but a justification in the eyes of the bureaucracy.

The book Recoding America has a lot of anecdotes to this effect; most of these situations reduce to a Congressional mandate that got misinterpreted along the way. My favorite was for an update to Social Security. The department in charge of the implementation swore that Congress was forcing them to build a facebook for doctors (literally where doctors could friend other doctors and message them). Congress had no such intention; it was actually 3rd party lobbying that wanted the requirement so they could build their own solution outside of government. Really crazy stuff.

> Congress had no such intention; it was actually 3rd party lobbying

Right, but 3rd party lobbying can't force anyone to do anything, whereas Congress can (and did) give this mandate the force of law. The fact that lobbyists got Congress to do something that they had "no such intention" to do is its own problem, but let's not lose sight of who is responsible for laws.

That's the interesting part of this story; Congress didn't think this requirement existed, neither did the lobbyists. But the language that congress adopted (with the consultation of this lobbying group) made the agencies _think_ it was what congress wanted. So the agency was left holding the bag for something no one actually wanted in the first place. Like a big game of telephone.

I agree with your broader point however. Congress needs to do a better job of owning outcomes.

I for one was tickled the first time I paid an NYC parking ticket online and had to add it to my cart, as if they might upsell me on some other more serious violation. Act now before it's too late!

When you're paying for things, and can pay for several things at the same time, it makes sense. I helped my mother pay her property taxes this year, and for two properties we had to make four payments. Without the shopping cart (or a functional equivalent) I would have had to enter my payment information four times instead of once.

And if you don't like the service you have free returns for 14 days no questions asked

I assume it's a vestige from the old days when you ordered actual tapes or printouts from government agencies. The notion of an order that had to be prepared is baked into how they think about the service and product.

All sorts of strange things happen with accessing US government data. But most agencies have a lot of excellent data available for free and motivated data scientists who want to make it available to you.

Some records are only released for a fee, so I always assumed implementing a standard interface to handle commercial transactions and making select items free was easier than maintaining separate commercial/noncommercial sites.

Which in itself is fairly antidemocratic.

Probably because it’s the out-of-the-box functionality on ServiceNow or whatever tool they’re using.

My guess would be to gather information about who is using the data - and present it to the stakeholders.

Sometimes they send questionnaires to data consumers.

Probably made by the same people who made https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pacer-pricing-how-fees-work ...

(As a side note, I can understand why in years past it would cost multiple cents per page to physically photocopy a federal document - but it is absolutely absurd that already-digitized documents, documents which are fundamentally part of the precedent that decides whether our behavior does or doesn't cause civil or criminal liability, are behind a paywall for a digital download!)

Pacer physically hurts to use. They should have to pay us for having to use it.

I’d go further and say that government websites and services in general are weird and often feel outdated, especially the more local you get.

Some of them look like they’re straight from the early 2000s.

Another thing is that privacy is dead and almost everything is deemed public information. Your address, mugshot, voter rolls, you name it, it’s all deemed public information.

But once you actually want to access information that is useful to society as whole, more often than not it’s behind a paywall. Despite this, they still call it “public” information because theoretically anyone can pay for it and get access.

It’s one of the first things I noticed when I moved to the US.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that, if possible, there always needs to be a middle man inserted, a private corporation that can make a profit out of it.

You want to identify yourself to the government? Well you’re gonna need an ID.me account or complete a quiz provided to you by LexisNexis or one of the credit reporting agencies.

Why? How is it that the government of all entities, isn’t capable of verifying me themselves?

Zooming out even further you’ll start to recognize even more ancient processes you interact with in daily life.

The whole banking situation and the backbone that’s running it is a great example. The concept of pending transactions, checks and expensive and slow transfers is baffling to me.

It’s so weird, like ooh, aah this country is the pinnacle of technological innovation, yet in daily life there’s so much that hinges on ancient and suboptimal processes that you don’t see in, say, Western Europe.

My best guess is that’s this is because of a mix of lack of funding and politicians that wanting to placate profit seeking corporations.

Ironically, and I have no hard evidence for this because I’m too lazy to look into it, I suspect that on the long term it costs more to outsource it than it does to do it themselves.

/rant

I feel like the USA was probably ahead of the curve on things like the banking system in the 90s but removing all of that cruft and replacing with a v2 is not an easy thing to do. Especially when the population are generally skeptical of government and outsourcing to a private corporation is seen as the cheaper option. Short term it's potentially cheaper/quicker to outsource but long term maintenance contracts and lobbying to keep things as they are is much more expensive.

In the USA you find these whole industries that exist due to the inadequacies of the old systems. E.g. venmo doesnt need to exist in Western Europe (and probably rest of world?) because person-to-person bank transactions are free and easy.

Bureaucracy = $$$

Who is making money with shopping cart-style downloads?

The web development companies that are subcontracted by the government agencies to repurpose their silly shopping cart software.

I will decline to share my personal anecdote's about these companies because I am like 10+ years out of date, but I can tell you that most of these companies seemed to have certain very specific non-technical things in common.

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