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

AKRON, OH — On a Tuesday morning in late October, a man named Gerald walked into the Akron Regional Department of Motor Vehicles, took a number, waited twenty-three minutes, renewed his license, and left. The entire transaction was completed without a system crash, a form being misfiled, or anyone weeping.

This is, by current federal standards, extraordinary.

"We try not to draw attention to it," said Sharon Kowalczyk, Regional Operations Supervisor for the Akron DMV, speaking from behind a desk that contained, in plain view, a laminated motivational poster reading PROCESS IS EVERYTHING and a handwritten note that said DO NOT CELEBRATE. "The last time things were going well here, somebody from Washington came to do a case study and we were dysfunctional again within a fiscal quarter. I'm not saying there's a connection. I'm just saying I notice things."

Kowalczyk, 54, has managed the Akron facility for eleven years. She was not aware, until this reporter informed her, that her office had been ranked first in the inaugural Federal Agency Competency Index, a performance benchmarking exercise conducted by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office and released quietly last month, on a Friday afternoon, presumably in the hope that no one would notice.

She was quiet for a long moment.

"First out of how many?" she asked.

Two hundred and fourteen agencies.

Another long pause.

"That's a trap," she said. "I need you to leave."

She did not actually make this reporter leave. But she did spend the next forty minutes explaining, with the careful precision of someone who has learned not to want things, exactly why the ranking meant nothing, would lead to nothing good, and should under no circumstances be repeated in print.

This article is being printed.

How The Rankings Work, And Why They Produced This Result

The Federal Agency Competency Index measures government bodies across five dimensions: service delivery speed, error rate, public satisfaction, budget adherence, and what the GAO report calls "operational coherence" — a metric defined, in footnote 12, as "the degree to which an agency's stated purpose and actual activities resemble each other."

The DMV — or more precisely, the network of state-level DMV operations that the GAO aggregated for comparison purposes — scored highest on three of the five dimensions, middling on one, and did not finish last on any of them. In the context of the current federal landscape, this represents a performance gap roughly equivalent to a Little League team being drafted by the Yankees because every professional franchise has disbanded.

For contrast, here is how several other agencies fared:

The Department of Homeland Security scored in the bottom quartile on operational coherence, which the report's authors noted was "particularly striking given that the department's core mandate is, at its most basic, to be coherent about threats." A DHS spokesperson said the agency was "reviewing the methodology" and would respond "in due course." The response has not arrived.

The Small Business Administration achieved a 34% error rate on loan processing documentation — a figure the report described as "notable" and which a senior SBA official, in a statement, described as "a reflection of the complexity of the small business lending environment" and not, the official emphasized, "a reflection of anything else."

The Federal Aviation Administration scored well on technical competency but received the index's lowest mark for public satisfaction, a result the GAO attributed to "a series of high-profile service disruptions" and the FAA attributed to "unrealistic public expectations regarding the inherent complexity of managing 45,000 daily flights." Both things may be true. The ranking stands.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, which has been the subject of more congressional reform initiatives than any other federal body in the past two decades, scored 41st. It has, to its credit, improved substantially from its 2019 position of 187th, which is either a testament to the reform process or a testament to how badly 146 other agencies have deteriorated in the interim.

The DMV: A Brief History Of Managed Expectations

To understand why the DMV's ascent is both statistically defensible and cosmically absurd, it helps to understand what the DMV actually is.

The Department of Motor Vehicles — known by various names across different states, including the Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and, in South Carolina, simply "the office" — is not a federal agency. It is a state-level institution, replicated fifty times over with fifty different systems, fifty different funding models, and fifty different interpretations of what constitutes an acceptable wait time. It is, by design, unglamorous. Its job is to issue licenses, register vehicles, and collect fees. It does not regulate markets, conduct foreign policy, or manage the money supply. It has, historically, done its unglamorous job with the enthusiasm of an institution that knows it is the butt of the joke and has made its peace with that.

What changed is not the DMV. What changed is the context around it.

"We didn't get better," said Kowalczyk, who has clearly thought about this. "Or — we got a little better. We went to online appointments. We redid the queue system in 2021. But mostly, we just kept doing what we do, and then we looked up and apparently everyone else had stopped doing what they do, and now we're number one, and I genuinely cannot tell if I'm supposed to be proud or terrified."

She looked at the DO NOT CELEBRATE note on her desk.

"Terrified," she decided. "Definitely terrified."

The Public Reacts, Mostly With Confusion

News of the DMV's ranking, once it escaped its quiet Friday afternoon release and began circulating on social media, produced a reaction best described as collective cognitive dissonance.

"I waited two hours at the DMV last year to get a replacement ID and they printed my name wrong," tweeted one user in Phoenix, who had clearly not read the report's methodology section, which notes that the index measures aggregate performance across facilities and that individual experience may vary substantially.

"If the DMV is our best agency we are cooked," tweeted another, which was, in fairness, a reasonable reading of the situation.

A third user, whose account is dedicated to posting photographs of their cat, simply replied "lol" to a news link and received 14,000 likes, which suggests the tweet captured something real about the national mood.

More considered responses came from governance scholars, several of whom noted that the DMV's relative success illustrates a principle that public administration researchers have long argued: that agencies with clear, bounded, measurable mandates tend to outperform agencies tasked with solving complex, diffuse, or politically contested problems.

"The DMV knows exactly what it's supposed to do," said Professor Amara Singh of the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. "It's supposed to give you a card that says you can drive. That's it. The mandate doesn't change based on who wins an election. The metrics don't shift. The goalposts don't move. In the current federal environment, that kind of clarity is genuinely rare, and it turns out it's also genuinely valuable."

She paused. "Please don't tell Congress I said that. They'll try to fix it."

Congress Announces An Inquiry

Congress announced an inquiry on Thursday.

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability will convene a series of hearings to examine "the factors underlying the DMV's unexpected performance profile" and "whether lessons can be extracted and applied across the broader federal apparatus," according to a press release that also noted the committee would be establishing a working group to determine the scope of the inquiry before the inquiry formally begins.

Kowalczyk, informed of this development by phone, was silent for four seconds.

"Tell them we're closed," she said.

The Akron Regional DMV is open Tuesday through Saturday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Appointments are recommended. Walk-ins are accepted. The wait time, as of publication, is approximately twenty minutes.

By federal standards, this is a miracle. Sharon Kowalczyk would prefer you not say that out loud.

The Orderly Chaos will continue monitoring the congressional working group's determination of the scope of the inquiry into the DMV's performance. We anticipate a preliminary report by 2026, at which point the DMV will have probably moved back down the rankings anyway and the whole thing will be moot.