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 — known to its 340 employees as BICRA, and to the general public as nothing, because no member of the general public has ever visited its website voluntarily — announced last Thursday that Phase Three of its Digital Modernization Initiative is now complete.

Phase One, launched in 2019, was intended to fix the website built during Phase Zero, which had been launched in 2016 to fix the original website, which had been built in 2009 by a contractor whose company no longer exists and whose code, according to an internal audit, was "written in a language that we believe is PHP, or possibly grief."

Phase Three has delivered a homepage that loads in under four seconds on broadband connections, features a color palette described by the project lead as "accessible, modern, and technically compliant with federal standards as they existed in 2021," and includes a prominent banner linking to BICRA's official mission statement PDF.

The PDF returns a 404 error. It has done so since February 2022. No one is certain why.

The Procurement Process: A Love Story

The journey to Phase Three began in earnest in early 2021, when BICRA's Office of Digital Services — itself created in 2018 to oversee the website project that had already been running since 2016 — issued a Request for Proposals to redesign the agency's online presence.

Eighteen firms submitted bids. The evaluation committee, comprising eleven people across four subcommittees, spent seven months reviewing them. Three firms were disqualified for failing to include a required supplemental form. Two were disqualified because the supplemental form they had included was the wrong version. One submitted an otherwise excellent proposal but listed their primary point of contact as someone who had left the firm in 2019.

The contract was ultimately awarded to a firm called Nexbridge Digital Collaborative Solutions Group LLC, which had been incorporated four months before submitting the bid and whose principal listed experience included "multiple federal-adjacent digital engagements" and a website for a regional orthodontics practice in suburban Maryland.

"We ran a rigorous, competitive process," said BICRA's Deputy Director of Operational Communications, Sandra Fells, in a statement released to no one in particular. "The selected vendor demonstrated a clear understanding of our needs, our users, and the federal digital experience landscape."

Nexbridge did not respond to a request for comment, as BICRA's press contact email also returns a 404 error.

What the Website Is For

This is, admittedly, a reasonable question.

BICRA was established by executive order in 2003 to coordinate interagency regulatory alignment in sectors where existing coordination mechanisms had proven insufficient. Its mandate was later expanded by a 2009 appropriations rider, narrowed by a 2013 executive memorandum, and then expanded again by a 2017 directive that congressional staff have described as "probably fine."

The agency's primary deliverable is an annual report on regulatory coordination activity, which is submitted to four oversight committees, read by an estimated nine people, and available for download on the website in a format last updated in 2018.

The annual report has not been submitted on time since 2015. The 2023 edition is currently in internal review.

"We're very close," said Project Manager Dennis Hoult, who has been with BICRA since 2011 and describes his job, when pressed, as "making sure the right people know about the right things at the right time, generally."

Congressional Interest, Briefly

The website project attracted the attention of the House Subcommittee on Government Efficiency and Digital Services in 2022, when a staffer noticed that BICRA's site still listed George W. Bush as the sitting president in its "About the Administration" section.

A hearing was convened. BICRA's acting director testified for approximately ninety minutes, during which time three members of the subcommittee asked variants of the question "so what does your agency actually do," and one member asked whether BICRA could be consolidated with the Office of Regulatory Affairs, apparently unaware that BICRA had been created specifically because the Office of Regulatory Affairs was considered insufficiently coordinated.

The subcommittee issued a report recommending "continued progress" and "increased accountability metrics." BICRA acknowledged the report, noted that it would be posted to the website once the content management system migration was complete, and thanked the subcommittee for its engagement.

The content management system migration was completed in March of this year. The report has not been posted.

Phase Four

In its announcement of Phase Three's completion, BICRA noted that planning for Phase Four — a "comprehensive accessibility and search optimization enhancement initiative" — is already underway.

A Request for Information is expected to be published in the coming months. The RFP will follow approximately six months after that, pending internal review. A contract is anticipated to be awarded before the end of the fiscal year, assuming the fiscal year in question is not specified too precisely.

"We are committed to continuous improvement," said Deputy Director Fells. "The American people deserve a digital presence that reflects the Bureau's mission, values, and commitment to transparent, accessible, user-centered government communication."

The broken PDF link, she confirmed, is "a known issue" and is "being tracked."

It is being tracked in a spreadsheet maintained by one contractor, shared with two others, and reviewed quarterly by a working group that last met in November.

The mission statement, for those curious, is apparently available in hard copy by written request. Response time is estimated at six to eight weeks. The mailing address on the website is from the agency's previous office, which it vacated in 2020.

BICRA is expected to be fully operational online sometime before its next scheduled reauthorization review, which is projected for 2027, assuming Congress remembers to schedule it.