Tech & Culture

America's Mayors Gather to Formally Declare That They Will Stop Formally Declaring Things

The National Convening of Municipal Leadership Excellence — an annual summit of US mayors that has itself been held annually since 2009 — produced this week a landmark joint declaration calling for a significant reduction in non-binding joint declarations. The declaration, which is non-binding, was adopted unanimously following a three-hour panel on the importance of shorter panels. Next year's summit has already been booked.

Jun 26, 2026

White House Unveils 97-Step Plan to Explain Things Simply, Clarifies That It Will Take Eleven Pages to Define the Word 'Clear'

The Office of Strategic Public Communications has released its landmark Federal Plain Language and Accessibility Framework, a 340-page document designed to make government messaging easier for ordinary Americans to understand. The plain-language summary is expected in twelve to eighteen months.

Jun 26, 2026

Ohio Retiree Discovers He Has Been Advising the Federal Government for Three Years, Would Prefer Not To

Dennis Hargrove, 67, of Perrysburg, Ohio, recently learned that he sits on three separate federal advisory boards covering telecommunications infrastructure, coastal erosion policy, and artisanal cheese export standards. He has not responded to a single email. Federal records indicate this places him in the top quarter of advisory board participants nationally.

Jun 26, 2026

Archaeologists Unearth Perfectly Functional 1974 Statute That Could Have Solved Everything This Whole Time

The Comprehensive Problem-Solving and General Fix-It Act of 1974 has been sitting in the Federal Register for fifty years, unused and apparently forgotten by everyone including the people who wrote it. Congressional leaders are calling for new legislation to address this oversight.

Jun 2, 2026

Revolutionary Government Portal Achieves Perfect Digital Simulation of Standing in Line at the DMV

The Department of Digital Transformation proudly announces its $127 million online platform that successfully recreates every inconvenience of in-person bureaucracy while adding several innovative new obstacles. Citizens can now experience the frustration of government services from the comfort of their own homes.

Apr 3, 2026

Senate Technology Committee Prepares Comprehensive Internet Regulation After Discovering Computers Can Connect to Each Other

Following extensive hearings in which senators expressed genuine surprise that social media platforms operate using electricity, Congress has produced a landmark 847-page bill that accidentally regulates everything except social media. The legislation includes helpful definitions such as 'algorithm: a mathematical process that does math' and requires all digital content to be approved by a committee that meets twice yearly.

Mar 20, 2026

Revolutionary Transparency Act Creates Infinite Loop of Summaries, Congressional Staffers Report Existential Crisis

In a groundbreaking move toward government transparency, Congress has mandated that all legislation include plain-language summaries, which must themselves be summarized. The 1,400-page bill establishing this requirement notably lacks any summary whatsoever.

Mar 16, 2026

Revolutionary Bureaucratic Breakthrough: Agency Creates Manual for Creating Manuals That Create Other Manuals

The Federal Bureau of Administrative Standardization has achieved what experts are calling 'peak bureaucracy' with the release of their new Meta-Strategic Framework Development Protocol. After three years of intensive committee work, they've successfully created a system for creating systems that will create future systems.

Mar 16, 2026

Department of Tomorrow Proudly Presents Yesterday's Blueprint for Next Week

The Bureau of Strategic Foresight has finally released its comprehensive 2022-2025 Vision Statement, arriving fashionably late in December 2025 with all the timeliness of a sundial at midnight. Officials remain confident the document accurately predicts what should have happened eighteen months ago.

Mar 16, 2026

Circle Emerges as Peak Achievement After $2.4 Million Logo Development Initiative

The Office of Streamlined Operations has successfully concluded a three-year logo design process, producing what officials describe as 'a revolutionary circular representation of bureaucratic excellence.' The geometric breakthrough required only fourteen committees and two design firms to achieve.

Mar 16, 2026

America Has 137 Offices Dedicated to Cutting Government Waste, and They Are Thriving

Somewhere in a federal building in Washington, a task force is meeting to discuss the elimination of redundant task forces. Across town, a separate task force is meeting to discuss the same thing, unaware the first one exists. A third is preparing a report on both of them, though it has not yet been told about either. This is, experts say, the system working.

Mar 13, 2026

Forty-Seven Million Dollars Later, the Agency's Website Still Has a Broken Link to Its Own Mission Statement

The Bureau of Interagency Coordination and Regulatory Alignment has spent three years, eighteen contractor bids, and the GDP of a small Caribbean nation redesigning its public-facing website. The homepage now loads in under four seconds. The PDF explaining what the Bureau actually does has been unavailable since Tuesday, February 2022, and is expected to remain so.

Mar 13, 2026

Senate Clarifies What 'Infrastructure' Means on Page 841, Retroactive to Events That Have Already Happened

Buried inside the Consolidated American Infrastructure Investment and Renewal Act — between a provision extending tax credits for certain categories of gravel and a sub-clause exempting a specific bridge in western Pennsylvania from the definition of 'bridge' — is a 900-word rider formally defining what the word 'infrastructure' means. The definition is effective retroactively. Experts say this raises questions. The experts have not agreed on what those questions are.

Mar 13, 2026

Wisconsin Man Who Stopped Reading Political Emails in 2008 Is Quietly Winning at Life

By every available metric — financial stability, sleep quality, blood pressure, and general outlook — a 47-year-old accountant from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, has outperformed the combined legislative output of the 118th Congress simply by unsubscribing from everything and going to bed at ten. Political consultants are reportedly furious. He has since been asked to run for Senate.

Mar 13, 2026

The Government Has a 400-Page Plan to Have Fewer Plans, and It Is Going Exactly as You'd Expect

The Office of Administrative Streamlining has released its landmark Strategic Reduction of Strategic Planning Initiatives report, a 400-page document recommending the immediate formation of three new subcommittees to oversee the elimination of subcommittees. The report took four years, cost $14 million, and has been filed in a cabinet for which no one appears to own a key.

Mar 13, 2026

Bold New Plan to Save American Democracy Requires, Quite Coincidentally, Several Million Dollars Paid to the People Who Wrote It

The Brookings-Adjacent Center for Sensible Discourse has released what it is calling the most comprehensive roadmap for democratic renewal in a generation, a 14-point framework that its authors describe as both urgent and, in a development they stress is entirely coincidental, exclusively implementable by the Center itself at a cost of $4.7 million per phase. The Center's executive director has called for immediate action, beginning with a funded feasibility study to determine the feasibility of funding the feasibility study.

Mar 13, 2026

The Agency That Watches the Agency That Watches the Agency Has Finally Watched Something

After thirty-seven years of careful preparation, the Federal Office of Interagency Review Coordination has published its long-awaited assessment of an agency most of its own staff believed to be fictional. The report runs to 847 pages, 612 of which are appendices explaining why the other 235 pages should not be taken as definitive. Nothing will change.

Mar 13, 2026

After Years Of Careful Deliberation, Congress Agrees To Carefully Deliberate On Whether To Carefully Deliberate

In a historic display of legislative momentum, the United States Congress has unveiled an ambitious new working group tasked with determining whether conditions are right to explore the possibility of forming a committee. Experts describe it as 'the boldest act of structured inaction in modern American governance.' The group meets quarterly, pending availability.

Mar 13, 2026

The DMV Is Now America's Best-Run Government Agency, And Nobody Is More Alarmed By This Than The DMV

The Department of Motor Vehicles, for generations a reliable shorthand for governmental incompetence, has quietly ascended to the top of the Federal Agency Competency Index — not because it got dramatically better, but because everything else got dramatically worse. A regional supervisor in Akron, Ohio, has asked not to be quoted and then said several very quotable things.

Mar 13, 2026

Digg, Reddit, and the Greatest Rivalry the Internet Ever Had (And Then Forgot About)

Before Reddit was the front page of the internet, there was Digg — a scrappy, user-powered news aggregator that once ruled the web with an iron fist and a comment section full of flame wars. This is the story of how it rose, how it fell, and how it keeps refusing to stay dead.

Mar 12, 2026