Washington Commission Formed to Investigate Why Things Take So Long Has Been Investigating for 14 Years

By The Rt. Hon. Gerald Pembrook-Ash (Ret.)

In the spring of 2011, with the optimism that only a freshly convened federal commission can muster, the Federal Commission on Bureaucratic Efficiency and Timely Governmental Output — known internally as FCBETGO, and externally as nothing, because nobody outside of a single sub-basement in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building had heard of it — held its inaugural meeting.

The agenda, according to minutes obtained through a Freedom of Information request that itself took eleven months to process, consisted of three items: introductions, a discussion of parking validation, and the formal adoption of a mission statement describing the commission's intent to determine, once and for all, why federal agencies take so unconscionably long to produce results.

That was 2011. The report is not ready.

A Commission in Full Flourish

To be fair to FCBETGO — and this publication is nothing if not scrupulously fair to fictional government bodies — the intervening fourteen years have not been idle ones. The commission has held 340 scheduled meetings, of which 211 were quorate. It has produced 47 internal memos, 12 preliminary frameworks, 3 draft executive summaries, and one laminated wall chart depicting the "Efficiency Assessment Lifecycle," which hangs in the second-floor breakroom beside a motivational poster featuring a bald eagle and the word PERSEVERANCE.

What it has not produced is a final report.

"We are very close," said Deputy Associate Director for Preliminary Findings, Marlene Houck, speaking to Officially Absurd from what she described as a "pre-briefing corridor conversation" rather than an official interview, which would require scheduling. "The draft report is essentially complete. However, before it can be released, it needs to be reviewed by the Sub-Panel on Contextual Framing, which is itself awaiting input from the Working Group on Terminology Standardization."

Ms. Houck paused.

"The Working Group on Terminology Standardization," she added, "is still defining 'working group.'"

The Report That Requires Three Reports to Explain Itself

The commission's communications director, a gentleman named Brett Fallows who has held that position since 2019 and describes his role as "proactive in a structural sense," provided Officially Absurd with a written statement explaining the release timeline.

The statement, which ran to four pages and included two footnotes directing the reader to appendices that were not attached, explained that the final report — tentatively titled Toward a Framework for Understanding Delays in Federal Output: A Comprehensive Assessment — cannot be released until three subsidiary documents are completed.

These are:

• Sub-Report A: A methodological annex clarifying how the commission measured efficiency, including a caveat section addressing why some measurements may not be directly comparable due to "definitional drift across fiscal years."
• Sub-Report B: A dissenting appendix from two commissioners who believe the main report "overreaches" in its conclusion that delays are, in some cases, "suboptimal."
• Sub-Report C: An accessibility summary written at a sixth-grade reading level, which the commission's legal team has advised must itself be reviewed for compliance with federal plain-language guidelines — a review process that typically takes between eight and fourteen months.

Fallows noted that once all three sub-reports are finalized, the package will be submitted to the Office of Management and Budget for a standard interagency review, after which a bipartisan task force — yet to be formally constituted — will conduct a thirty-day comment period open to the public, federal agencies, and, in a gesture Fallows described as "symbolically important," the commission itself.

"We want to make sure the agency has an opportunity to respond to findings about the agency," he said. "That's just good governance."

A Ribbon-Cutting, Naturally

Perhaps the most striking element of the commission's release plan — and competition for that title is fierce — is the proposed commemorative ribbon-cutting ceremony, which FCBETGO has been quietly planning since at least 2022, according to internal procurement documents showing an approved budget line of $4,200 for "ceremonial materials and light refreshments."

The ceremony, to be held at a venue in Washington D.C. that has not yet been booked, will mark the official public release of the report. Invitations will be sent to members of Congress, relevant agency heads, and, according to one planning document, "prominent stakeholders in the efficiency space."

When asked what constitutes a prominent stakeholder in the efficiency space, Fallows said the question was "outside the scope" of his role and suggested directing it to the Sub-Committee on Stakeholder Identification, which he acknowledged had not yet met.

The Budget, Which Has Tripled, Is Not the Point

Experts — and here we deploy that word in the loosest permissible sense — have noted that FCBETGO's annual budget of $4.3 million at inception has grown, through a series of entirely routine reauthorizations, to $13.1 million in the current fiscal year.

Dr. Pamela Schreier, a public administration researcher at a mid-tier university that prefers not to be named in satirical publications, observed that this trajectory is "not unusual for commissions of this type."

"What tends to happen," she explained, "is that the commission becomes institutionally invested in the complexity of the problem. Solving it would, in a very real sense, eliminate the commission. So there is a structural incentive to find the problem more complicated than initially understood."

She paused to consider whether she had said something career-limiting.

"That is not to say," she added carefully, "that anyone is acting in bad faith."

The commission, for its part, disputes the characterization that budget growth reflects mission creep. In a statement, it noted that the additional funding has gone toward "essential capacity-building, staff development, and the digitization of approximately 6,000 pages of meeting minutes, which are now fully searchable and available upon request."

Officially Absurd submitted a request for the digitized minutes.

That was six weeks ago. The request is, we are told, being processed.

Conclusion: Forthcoming

At a press availability in 2023 — one of two the commission has held in fourteen years — then-Acting Chair Douglas Pemwell told reporters that he was "genuinely excited" about the report's imminent release and that the American people "deserve answers about why their government moves slowly."

Pemwell has since retired. His replacement has not been confirmed. The confirmation process, a spokesperson noted, has been slightly delayed.

The report, meanwhile, sits in various states of near-completion across seventeen shared drives, two filing cabinets, and one binder that a junior analyst described, in an unguarded moment, as "the binder we don't open."

Its conclusions, when they arrive, are expected to be significant, actionable, and — pending sub-reports, task force review, interagency comment period, and ribbon-cutting — available to the public sometime before the end of the decade.

Possibly.

FCBETGO did not respond to a request for comment submitted via their official public inquiry portal. The portal returned an automated message noting that response times may vary and that the commission is "committed to timely communication."

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