PERRYSBURG, OHIO — Dennis Hargrove retired from his position as a regional sales manager for an HVAC supply company in 2019, at which point his ambitions became, by his own description, "modest." He wanted to finish the deck he had been building since 2016. He wanted to watch more baseball. He wanted, above all, to receive fewer emails.
The federal government had other plans.
Hargrove, 67, learned in March that he is currently a sitting member of three separate federal advisory boards: the Federal Communications Commission's Advisory Committee on Rural Broadband Access, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Resilience Stakeholder Panel, and the Department of Agriculture's Export Promotion Working Group on Specialty and Artisanal Dairy Products.
He has attended zero meetings. He has submitted zero written comments. He has responded to zero of the forty-seven emails sent to an address he checks, at best, biweekly.
According to internal engagement metrics obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, this places him in the 74th percentile of advisory board participation nationwide.
"I don't know anything about cheese exports," Hargrove said, from a lawn chair on the deck he has now mostly finished. "I don't know anything about coastal erosion. We're in Ohio. We're not near a coast."
He paused to consider this.
"I know a little about broadband, I guess. We had trouble with it for a while."
How This Happened: A Cascade of Completely Ordinary Errors
The story of Hargrove's accidental ascent to federal advisory prominence is not, officials familiar with the appointment process say, particularly unusual. It is, if anything, a reasonably clean example of the system functioning as designed.
The sequence began in 2021, when Hargrove signed an online petition about rural internet access that included, in its terms and conditions — which he did not read, as no one does — an opt-in for "civic engagement opportunities with relevant federal bodies." This generated an automated referral to a nominations database maintained by a contractor whose contract was subsequently transferred to a different contractor, at which point the database was migrated to a new platform and approximately 40% of its fields were mapped incorrectly.
In the migration, Hargrove's name was matched to a record for a Dennis R. Hargrove who had served on an FCC advisory subcommittee during the Clinton administration and was listed in the legacy database as "available for reappointment." The Clinton-era Hargrove died in 2009. This information was not in the database because updating records for deceased former advisors requires a form that, as of the date of this article, three agencies believe is the responsibility of one of the other two.
Hargrove's appointment to the FCC panel was confirmed via an automated email in September 2021. He did not see it because it went to his spam folder, where it was joined, over the following eighteen months, by confirmation emails for the NOAA and USDA panels, which were added through a separate but structurally identical series of errors involving a name-matching algorithm and a shared nominations portal that, per procurement documents, cost $2.3 million to build and has a known bug that its developer has described in support tickets as "low priority."
"I thought they were spam," Hargrove said. "They looked like spam. They had a lot of official seals, which is what spam looks like now."
The Engagement Problem, Quantified
Federal advisory boards are, in theory, mechanisms through which the government solicits expert input from outside stakeholders to inform policy decisions. There are currently 1,073 active federal advisory boards, committees, and panels operating across the executive branch, with a combined membership of approximately 68,000 individuals.
The Government Accountability Office has, on three separate occasions, published reports noting that advisory board participation rates are low, that a significant proportion of members are appointed through processes that lack meaningful vetting, and that the policy impact of advisory board recommendations is, at best, difficult to trace. Each report recommended improvements. Each set of recommendations was referred to the relevant agencies. Each agency noted the recommendations and continued operating as before.
"The honest answer," said one former federal official who worked on advisory board reform efforts during the Obama administration and who now works for a think tank that has published its own advisory board reform recommendations, "is that these boards exist in a space between 'genuinely useful' and 'technically required by statute,' and a lot of them are closer to the second category than anyone wants to say publicly."
In this context, Hargrove's non-participation is, statistically, unremarkable. The FCC's rural broadband panel, records show, held four meetings in 2023. Attendance averaged 61% of members. Of those who attended, approximately a third submitted written comments in advance. Of those comments, agency staff summarized the key themes in a document that was distributed to senior officials who, calendar records suggest, had scheduling conflicts during the relevant review period.
"Dennis is, in a technical sense, underperforming," said one federal employee familiar with the advisory process who was not authorized to speak on record and who laughed for several seconds before composing themselves. "But the delta between his engagement and the median is smaller than you'd hope."
What Happens Next
Hargrove's terms on all three boards expire at different points over the next two years, assuming the relevant agencies process the expiration paperwork on schedule, which requires a form that two of the three agencies acknowledge they are behind on.
He could, in theory, resign. This also requires a form. The form must be submitted to each board separately, signed, dated, and accompanied by a brief statement of reason. Hargrove reviewed the form when it was described to him.
"That seems like a lot of work," he said.
He has, as a result, decided to continue not participating, a choice that federal records will log as sustained advisory engagement until his terms conclude or someone updates the database, whichever comes first.
The deck, for what it's worth, looks good. He finished the railing last fall.
"It turned out fine," he said. "I figured it out as I went. Which is more than I can say for the people sending me these emails."
