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

The Orderly Chaos | Washington, D.C.

Somewhere in a beige federal building that smells faintly of printer toner and institutional defeat, a small team of civil servants spent four years producing a document that may represent the purest distillation of American bureaucracy ever committed to paper.

The report is titled Toward a Leaner Administrative Architecture: A Strategic Framework for the Reduction, Consolidation, and Phased Elimination of Redundant Strategic Planning Processes Across Federal Agencies (Volume I of IV). It runs to 412 pages, not counting appendices. Its central recommendation is that the federal government should have fewer reports like this one.

It was released last Tuesday to no fanfare, no press conference, and, according to three separate staffers contacted for this piece, no awareness whatsoever from their departments that it existed.

The Office Nobody Knew They Needed

The Office of Administrative Streamlining — known internally as OAS, externally as nothing, because no one outside the building has previously had reason to reference it — was established in 2019 with a mandate to "identify, assess, and ultimately reduce the proliferation of strategic planning documents across the executive branch."

This was, by all accounts, a reasonable goal. The federal government currently maintains somewhere between 300 and 600 active strategic plans, depending on how loosely you define the word "active" and how generously you define the word "plan." Many of these documents overlap. Several contradict each other. At least one, according to a footnote on page 287 of the new report, refers to an agency that was dissolved in 2004.

"The scope of redundancy we uncovered was, frankly, breathtaking," said OAS Deputy Director of Planning Coordination Gerald Fitch in a statement released alongside the report. "We identified 47 separate documents all claiming to be the definitive strategic framework for federal office supply procurement. Forty-seven. That's not a filing system. That's a philosophical crisis."

Mr. Fitch was not available for follow-up questions. His assistant explained that he was currently attending a two-day offsite to develop a strategic plan for the department's Q3 communications calendar.

The Solution: More Structure

The report's headline recommendation — the one buried on page 211 beneath a chart comparing "planning velocity" across twelve agencies — is the establishment of three new bodies:

• The Subcommittee on Strategic Plan Inventory and Classification
• The Subcommittee on Subcommittee Oversight and Sunset Review
• The Inter-Agency Coordinating Panel for the Transition Away from Inter-Agency Coordinating Panels

Each subcommittee will require a chairperson, a deputy chairperson, a secretariat, and a dedicated strategic plan outlining its objectives for the first 18 months of operation.

When asked whether the irony of this had been noted internally, an OAS spokesperson replied, via email, that the office was "committed to a process-driven approach to process reduction" and that any apparent paradox was "addressed in detail in Appendix F."

Appendix F is 63 pages long. It does not address the paradox.

The Experts Weigh In, For a Fee

No federal initiative of this magnitude would be complete without the involvement of a Washington think tank, and the OAS did not disappoint. The Meridian Institute for Government Efficiency — a nonprofit whose offices are located, without apparent self-awareness, in one of the most expensive buildings in Georgetown — was contracted in 2021 to conduct an independent assessment of the problem.

Their findings, delivered in a 90-page interim brief titled The Strategic Planning Burden: Toward a Preliminary Framework for Understanding the Scope of the Challenge, confirmed that yes, the federal government does in fact have too many strategic plans. This conclusion cost taxpayers $2.1 million.

"What we found," said Meridian Senior Fellow Dr. Patricia Holden at the time of the brief's release, "is that the problem is, in many respects, quite significant. It is also, in other respects, nuanced. And in several additional respects, it is both."

The Meridian Institute has since been contracted to review the OAS report. Their preliminary findings are expected in 2026. Estimated cost: $1.8 million, plus travel.

A Filing System for the Ages

The report itself — all 412 pages, plus four volumes of appendices, plus a two-page executive summary that bears almost no relation to the actual content — was formally submitted to the Office of Management and Budget on March 4th. It was then, according to standard procedure, forwarded to the relevant departmental liaisons for review and comment.

It is currently in a filing cabinet on the fourth floor of the OAS building. The cabinet is locked. The key was last seen in 2022 in the possession of a senior analyst who has since transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Efforts to contact her have produced one out-of-office reply and a voicemail that has not been returned.

A digital copy was uploaded to the OAS internal server. The server requires a password that was reset in January and the reset email went to a distribution list that includes eleven people who no longer work for the federal government.

"We are confident the report is accessible," said the OAS spokesperson, "to those with the appropriate clearance and login credentials."

At time of publication, no one with appropriate clearance and login credentials had read it.

The Orderly Chaos Assessment

There is, if you squint at it correctly, something almost admirable about the federal government's capacity to approach the problem of bureaucratic excess with the full, unflinching tools of bureaucratic excess. It is a bit like hiring a flood to fix a leak — bold, committed, and structurally bewildering.

The OAS has indicated that Volume II of the report — covering implementation timelines — will be released later this year, pending the completion of a strategic plan for the release of Volume II.

Volume III will address what to do if Volume II is delayed.

Volume IV has not yet been scoped, but early indications suggest it will be long.