At The Department of Forgotten Cabinet Secretaries
As the Obama administration heads into the last day of its first working week, exactly nobody is poised at the edge of their seat wondering who the next Commerce Secretary will be. The reason is that nobody cares about the Department of Commerce. The only important sub-cabinet job—the head of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—has already been filled by Jane Lubchenco (an excellent choice).
Jonathan Zasloff suggests doing away with the department altogether:
In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the department. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can trust the Democrats to run the government frugally.
Of course it’s hard to actually save very much money doing this, since you wouldn’t actually be eliminating the department’s main sub-agencies. NOAA would be a good fit inside the EPA or the Department of the Interior, the Patent Office could be spun off as an independent agency or sent to Justice (or even Education; I think several countries put their patent agencies inside their education ministries) and the Census Bureau and the other statistical agencies could go hang out with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And actually the price of carrying out the reorganization might well exceed the monetary savings. Still, political symbolism isn’t always about doing things that make sense.
At any rate, as long as the Commerce Cabinet Crisis continues, I’m going to profile one Secretary of Commerce per day until Barack Obama finds his man. Check this space tomorrow for the first edition.
353 Responses to “At The Department of Forgotten Cabinet Secretaries”
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January 23rd, 2009 at 11:31 am
I’m having trouble coming up with an adoptive agency for NIST. Where would you put them?
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:34 am
The Commerce department also plays a very important role in several aspects of trade- they are involved in bringing anti-dumping actions in US courts (they do the calculations of the margin of dumping, for example) and in certifying classes for aid under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act. Perhaps some of this could be shipped to the International Trade Commission, but right now they have a different part of the job in deciding whether to bring an anti-dumping case and I’m not sure it would be desirable to make only one agency in charge.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:36 am
Mitt Romney is just about the only competent Republican pol, throw him a bone.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:38 am
NOAA would certainly not be a good fit under EPA. Merging NOAA and USGS to form a dedicated Earth Systems Agency on the other hand, is an excellent idea (with some obvious but surmountable challenges).
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:39 am
Commerce is a small department, but agencies like the USPTO and NIST are valid Commerce functions that rightfully fall under the supervision of the Dept. of Commerce. If anything, one could argue that other departments should be drawn down in favor of handing their responsibilities over to Commerce.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:44 am
Nice Jens Lekman reference.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:48 am
Start with Henry Wallace!
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:55 am
the Census Bureau and the other statistical agencies could go hang out with the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Isn’t the Bureau of Labor Statistics part of the Department of Commerce?
Start with Henry Wallace!
I would think you have to start with Herbert Hoover.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:58 am
Isn’t the Bureau of Labor Statistics part of the Department of Commerce?
I guess I could have checked first… it’s part of the Department of Labor. That makes sense… Not sure that’s any more of a logical landing place for the Census Bureau than, say, Treasury or Justice.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:59 am
If it goes anywhere, the Patent & Trademark Office should go under the FTC- since the purpose of IP (oft forgotten, but nonetheless true) is consumer protection.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Justice is a natural place for the Census Bureau … underneath all of the additional things done in the Census, the fundamental thing the Census is for is to work out how many Congressional districts each state gets, and make sure that each one has the right number of people in it, and lots of districting responsibilities are already in the DoJ as a legacy of Civil Rights legislation.
But it could also go to the Library of Congress.
Treasury should bring trade cases … having one enemy camp on trade is better than having two enemy camps with responsibilities divided between them, and there is at least some possibility inside Treasury for building opposition to pure support for globalisation over and above national interests.
NIST should go wherever Patents go … Library of Congress or DoE.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Does anyone know why the Dept. of Veterans affairs is separate from the Dept. of Defense?
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Anyone know why the Small Business Administration is not under Commerce?
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Does anyone know what NIST actually does? Aside from running the atomic clock, I can’t think of a single thing they do. They have a big lab here in Boulder, yet I’ve never met anyone who actually works there. And I’ve lived here 16 years. I’m sure there really are people who do something there, but I really don’t know who they are or what they do. NOAA, which is just next door, actually does some real research and I’ve met many people who work there. And then there are the other questions. Which department is NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) under? And why isn’t it just part of NOAA?
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Does anyone know why the Dept. of Veterans affairs is separate from the Dept. of Defense?
George H.W. Bush pandering, I believe.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
In addition to providing standard reference materials that are used by research scientists all across the country, NIST has done A LOT of important basic research in physics, chemistry, and materials science.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Oddly enough, the Dept. of Commerce is actually a spin-off of the Patent & Trademark Office.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
“NIST has done A LOT of important basic research in physics, chemistry, and materials science”
Well that’s cool. Keep up the good work. I always thought they did something important there, I just didn’t know what it was.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I’m going to profile one Secretary of Commerce per day until Barack Obama finds his man.
(1)I suspect President Obama remains unmoved by your threat.
(2) Why not a woman?
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
“Does anyone know why the Dept. of Veterans affairs is separate from the Dept. of Defense?”
Those are both HUGE departments. Just imagine how big the department would be if they were merged? My roommate was (he just died) a veteran, so I’ve actually dealt with the VA a lot. I thought they did a good job. My roommate got good medical care and didn’t have to pay a penny. Granted, the military gave him the cancer that killed him, but at least the VA treated it.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:34 pm
There is an argument for Commerce to be actually augmented into a powerful department; commerce, after all, is the lifeblood of the national economy.
Now the issue is that Commerce actually works quite well in more interventionist countries (in Canada, it’s called Industry, tagged along by the Foreign Trade department). It is, however, useful in restraining the more nuttily protectionist tendencies in American government.
And yes, there really ought not be an Education department. There is no close equivalent in the U.K. (their department is among the least prestigious and important in the Cabinet, the education function being mostly either a Cabinet matter or just contracted out to various agencies). There is no federal education department in Canada. The Australian department is subsumed with training and labour and all that stuff. I really don’t see the point for having a national education department; it just unnecessarily makes what ought be pragmatic state or local-level debates (charters, curricula, standards, unionism, etc) a muddily partisan national one.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:41 pm
A more interesting question is why our statistical agencies are so decentralized compared to other countries? Why aren’t they all organized under one roof (such as StatCanada)?
The Census Bureau does a lot more than the Decennial Census. They do the CPS, the SIPP, the ACS, a whole host of business and economics statistics. As an organization, they more closely resemble BLS, which conducts the payroll survey, JOLTS, and produce several other useful data series. They have similar staffing and IT needs, and often benefit from shared information. Seems there would be many benefits to having the public producers of valuable economic and demographic statistics under one roof.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:47 pm
You mean you’ll profile past Commerce Secretaries? Allow me to add a story about perhaps the biggest buffoon of an unmemorable lot — Don Evans. My son was an Intel (Science Competition) Finalist a few years ago and so got the invite to Washington for various ceremonies. Lots of fancy folks appeared before dinner the big night (Hillary, e.g., one of the few as smart as any of the kids), and our dear President at the time sent his buddy, Don Evans, Secretary of Commerce, to speak to the kids and guests.
It was embarrasing. Evans is manifestly dumb as a rock. It showed. Snickers crept around the room. And the content of his speech was nothing more than a paean to the glories of free enterprise and to that wonder among men, George W. Bush. Here he had 40 of the smartest kids in the country, a nearly equally smart bunch of parents and other dignitaries, and he gave a vacuous version of a 7th grade civics lesson larded with indigestible slabs of a totally absurd cult of personality.
I hear from Josh Marshall’s blog that Evans gave more or less the same speech to Commerce staffers just the other day, as a guest speaker as the Republicans at long last left. The man is stupid and deluded, and seems not to have any comprehension of his limited capacities.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Are you going to profile yourself? You are, after all, one of the 25 most influential liberals, and you’re a Hispanic-American. And you appear to have ideas relating to and interest in the Commerce Department.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
“And yes, there really ought not be an Education department.”
Yeah, why do we have one? Oh yeah, Carter. The purpose of education is to create a talented labor force. Why isn’t that just part of the Labor department? Then again, maybe these questions are just silly. To expect the government to act rationally is asking way too much. That it even functions at all is a miracle.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:15 pm
And yes, there really ought not be an Education department. There is no close equivalent in the U.K. (their department is among the least prestigious and important in the Cabinet, the education function being mostly either a Cabinet matter or just contracted out to various agencies).
This is a bit misleading.
Until 2007 the UK in fact did have a Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Alan Johnson, who is one of the UK’s most prominent politicians. Education is now split between the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, who is essentially Gordon Brown’s right hand man, and the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, John Denham, who is less well known.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
No one is going to be getting rid of any Federal cabinet agencies anytime soon.
The top 4 (State, Treas, Defense & Justice) are pretty much de facto requirements of governing a modern state. As others have pointed out, some departments or sub-departments–like the Patent Office or Census–have missions found in Constitutional language.
But the other cabinet agencies serve national constituencies, constituencies who will be loath to give up their “in” with the Federal gov’t.
Ain’t gonna happen.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Does anyone know what NIST actually does?
You know why all firetrucks are interoperable with all fire hydrants, regardless of city? That’s why. They also do research to support building safety standards and well as do active measurement research. They have a hand in everything that is measured– whether it’s physical dimensions, food, or other material properties. The boulder lab is more focused around basic physics research, though. In other countries, NIST would be known as the bureau of weights and measures.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I’m with thingsbreak on this – NOAA is not a good fit under EPA. There seems to be an autism of bureaucratic politics, purpose and structure associated with that statement. That would be equivalent to putting the CIA under the FBI or vice-versa.
IMHO, I’d like to see NOAA, NWS, NMFS, OCRM and all the ocean and coastal agencies become a department unto themselves, with the purpose of applying ecosystem-based management to the nation’s shores and waters. The less fragmentation and territorial disputes, the better.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:23 pm
This gets into another issue– why are some parts of the federal government “independent agencies”, but not cabinet-level (like the NSF) while other comparable agencies, like NIH and the USPTO, fall under the authority of a cabinet level department (HHS and Commerce, respectively) ?
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:33 pm
If it goes anywhere, the Patent & Trademark Office should go under the FTC- since the purpose of IP (oft forgotten, but nonetheless true) is consumer protection.
The purpose of trademark protection is consumer protection. The purpose of copyright and patent protection is to increase incentives for creation of useful works and inventions. Lumping these legal regimes together as “intellectual property” is wrong headed and leads to the pernicious idea that people have an inherent property right in ideas.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Of course, the real hostility to the ED in certain circles comes from the fact it is perceived as one of the Departments that takes from rich white people and gives to poor brown people.
No. Education is mostly funded by property taxes anyways, so the national department hardly matters. The main thing is policy; once you have an DofE, you have NEA going to DC and becoming a vested interest lobby. The reforms could happen a lot faster if we weren’t having this partisan national debate about it; after all, state-level Democrats have proven to be as pragmatic and adaptable as Republicans when it comes to education reform, unless the party-gridlock of national government.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Frankly, I just don’t think education is a suitable national matter. The British made a mess of it with the constant Whitehall politicking, and the Americans made a mess of it with an already screwed-up funding system. I just don’t think education is suitable for the partisan and ideologically-charged environment of D.C. State-level politicians are forced by necessity and external restraint (which the federal government lacks) to be pragmatic and flexible when it comes to bread-and-butter issues.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
I think the real question I have after reading this post is why the hell NOAA is in the Commerce Department? What sense does that possibly make? Interior, sure. Agriculture, maybe. But Commerce?
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
DTM, thanks for that answer. The thing is that basically that means you want the agencies that fall under commerce (NOAA, NIST, USPTO) to always be a branch of some cabinet-level department because the last thing you’d want is to have a lot of congressional interference of those agencies without at least a few layers of bureaucratic insulation that being a division of a department provides.
It seems that you want some independent/cabinet level agencies to be there because you want them small, efficient, and able to respond to direct orders from the executive branch quickly (eg, FEMA pre-DHS status. I suspect this is why Veterans Affairs answers directly to the president, too).
The department of energy seems ripe for consolidation: its defense-related research arms could be put into the DoD, and the bonafide energy-policy divisions could be merged with Commerce. Commerce just seems like the department you’d actually want a separate agency for.
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Wow! “The New York Times reported on May 26, 2006 that Evans had emerged as the front-runner to take over the Treasury Department pending John W. Snow’s then rumored resignation. However, on May 30, Henry Paulson was nominated to replace Snow.” That woulda’ been somethin’!
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:18 pm
The state level is more promising in theory, but serious reform has still stalled in most states due to blocking from these highly-motivated and relatively wealthy local groups. This is where national leadership can be crucial: with just a little leveraging of influence through national standards and some supplementary national funding, the balance of power at the state level can be swung away from these highly-motivated and relatively wealthy local groups.
You know that to be false. Who are the most vehement opponents of charters? Teachers’ unions, not rich people. The notion that it is rich people and not teachers’ unions who are the biggest blockages is pretty absurd and not based in reality. Heck, had the national executive been any more successful in swinging power away from those “highly-motivated and relatively wealthy local groups,” there would have been no charters, no performance pay, no nothing at all. The teachers’ unions would have been happy to take the status quo, which is essentially failure, rather than charters and performance pay.
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Louisiana has successfully converted most of the pre-hurricane public schools in New Orleans into charters. The same would not have been possible on a national level.
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I am sorry if I sound inconsiderate, but your attempt to blame present ills on some mythical group of hyper-motivated rich people instead of demonstrably hyper-motivated teachers’ unions is as relevant and as realistic as the British trade unionists’ attempts to keep a broken system going by going on a hyper-left shift (Michael Foot).
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Stephen Myles, your attempt to discuss charters as some kind of meaningfuly educational reform that has anything to do with the problems of public education is ridiculous. And I think charters are a good idea.
There are many more educational issues that need to be addressed beyond your precious and delicate obsession with charter schools, and those face a lot of structural impediments that have to do with the way state and local funding is handled.
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:40 pm
I am not sure if I would be willing to support a redistribution of educational funding. It is sort of like healthcare in this sense: if we were to start with a fresh slate, maybe a different system would be great. But we already have this system built into a lot of the economic valuations, and to change it significantly would be to disturb some very fundament community alignments.
There is a risk that a lot of neighbourhoods could be facing serious viability problems if we were to change the education funding; those 7000-person suburban villages would be put at significant risk.
There would be in that case a significant exodus into private schools, similar to the situation we have today in D.C. (I know not of a single person at my college from D.C. that went to the D.C. public system). For better for for worse, unequal funding is here to stay.
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
By the way, D.C. has among the highest per-pupil funding in the country; lots of good that did!
Sorry, but this really isn’t that much of a money problem.
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:49 pm
this really isn’t that much of a money problem.
Ever stepped inside a DC public school? Trust me, lack of money is a problem.
Insofar as the sort of rules and regulations that cause money to be spent poorly (though that’s not the main reason– more resources spent on special ed in DC is a huge factor, as well), none of those are a function of the teachers’ unions or any of the other conservative boogeymen you’re ranting about.
And charter schools? Why bother with charter schools at all? DC has a metro system: why not let the kids simply take the metro up to bethesda and go to school there?
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Bethesda residents funded their schools out of their own pockets; it is not intended for D.C. residents. And frankly, most people I know from Bethesda go to private schools like Landon anyways.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Bethesda residents funded their schools out of their own pockets; it is not intended for D.C. residents.
You could make the same argument about charter schools: people fund a specific set of schools out of their own pockets. That money isn’t intended to go to other people who decide one day that they want to open up a school out of thin air.
In any case, your reasoning is precisely wrong: those are public dollars, and if you want to give people equal access to schools without disrupting where the money is going to (the schools), then it makes sense to simply allow people from anywhere to go to them. That you don’t simply concede, “yes, that’s probably part of the overall solution to education reform,” implies to me that your interests are not really with giving people access to better schools at all.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Which pretty much backs up the assertion made up above, bringing the thread back on topic: the opposition people have to the Department of Education is that it takes federal tax dollars and gives it to the poor and minorities, much like you resent the idea of Bethesda schools being used to serve someone who just happens to live in DC.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I wouldn’t mind so much if the D.C. school district were to pay Bethesda on a per-pupil basis, much like charters. But simply eating away at (limited) local resources would be wrong.
You can’t make the same argument about charter schools. Charter schools still serve the same clientele; people are still paying for the same services, just from a different provider. Sending kids to Bethesda without paying for their upkeep is not the same thing. In any case, you show your bias in your analysis; the point of funding a school system is not to maintain the superstructuce of some specific set of schools dominated by unions; the point is to satisfactorily deliver the services, whoever the provider thereof.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:19 pm
In case you haven’t noticed, D.C. residents don’t pay Maryland taxes. To simply offload education to Maryland while not paying for the costs incurred by Maryland and saved by D.C. and still maintaining the shell of a failed school system just for the benefit of the teachers is silly.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:25 pm
It’s the benefit of the students, actually. What I said about students from DC going to Bethesda could easily be said about students from Hyattstown or Suitland going to Bethesda, as well. Stop with the sophistry. But it gets right back to the problem: at its base, a lot of people object to education reform and the DoE because they don’t like poor people getting the benefits of public monies. The Dept. of Energy has its own set of problems, but seems to be much less objectionable, in part because the beneficiaries aren’t considered a group people resent.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:25 pm
In fact, the more I think about this the more bizarre your proposition seems. What should D.C. education taxes pay for then, if it just forces someone else to pay for education? Couldn’t the entire country play the hot-potatoe game, just getting someone else to pay for education, and not themselves?
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:58 pm
NIST has a major role in both parts of its name — Standards and Technology. An earlier poster’s example was wrong; NIST has no direct role in the creation and adoption of standards related to fire safety and the fire service. In the building and fire area, what they are excellent at is what we call pre-normative research — the basic and applied research that informs good standards development by the private entities that develop model codes and standards in the U.S. NIST is not only the best source of such research in the U.S.; they are the best single source in the world. I can imagine NIST flourishing in another home but only if that new home was reconfigured. The suggestion of a Department of Energy and Science has some appeal but if Energy is the first word, it will suggest that only energy-related science is welcome, and that would leave most of NIST out in the cold. Constituencies and political support aside, NIST is a very important entity that may fit uneasily within Commerce but would be an even poorer fit anywhere else.
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Move Ray LaHood over to Commerce. Put a strong rail advocate at DoT.
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
those people just need to be outvoted at the national and state levels.
Sorry dear chap, but that is delusional. You are asking the most important swing constituency, the moderate-income suburban families, to vote to screw themselves. Unless they have a collective death-wish I do not see it happening.
If you dispute my electoral analysis, please first read up on the history of New Labour.
January 23rd, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I sympathise (although not necessarily agree) with your goals, DTM, but I must say you seem to be remarkably naive when it comes to the electoral politics. Think about what happened in California when they tried to re-distribute educational funding in the 70’s: the voters rebelled and bloody amended the constitution to tell the politicians to go screw themselves (Proposition 13). This has proven that redistribution is not acceptable on the state level. If liberals can’t turn California, where can they turn?
If you were to try this on a national level, the only thing that is going to happen is for the California scenario to play it out on the national level, with another Gingrich-style Contract With America party swept into power in a landslide and managing to repeal whatever redistribution was legislated.
January 23rd, 2009 at 6:22 pm
DTM: Actually, the Department of Commerce came fairly close to being abolished by the Republican Congress in the mid-1990s. By “fairly close,” I mean that there was little chance it would ever actually happen, but that many Gingrichites did call for it. They had their eye on abolishing Energy and Education as well, but Commerce was always first on the list.
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Short answer: it had to be one way or the other, and decentralized was how it shook out over time.
There are advantages and disadvantages in both approaches. One advantage of the US’s decentralized system is that the folks collecting and disseminating health statistics (say) are in the same department as people doing health research, working with sick people, etc. Hopefully there’s some sharing of ideas and knowledge.
(Disclosure: I work at one of the 12 (maybe 13 or 14…) major statistical agencies of the US government.)
To my understanding, the various statistical agencies (there about 12 or so “major statistical agencies”)
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
I worked on govt reorg issues for GAO in the 90s, when the Newtonians were obsessing over closing “wasteful” agencies as a trophy they could bag. A few points:
1. Trying major reorgs and closing USG cabinet agencies is so difficult and expends so much political capital that it’s really not worth it.
2. Yes, DOC is a hodge-podge agency lacking a clear mission or focus: its pieces don’t fit together under a common theme. But, so what? I never saw anything so wrong with having a kind of “other” agency, where you park parts of the govt that don’t really belong anywhere else.
3. A non-obvious purpose of DOC (not NOAA or NIST, but the ITC and other alphabet soup parts) is as an entry point for business to lobby the executive branch. Yeah, I know, they hardly need it. Still, the Chamber and everybody else would scream and shoutat the idea of losing access.
Not worth the trouble with the world collapsing around our ears, IMHO.
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Matt – I know it was off-the-cuff, but let’s not put the idea of transferring PTO to Justice into anyone’s head. PTO is basically a review and record-keeping agency. They do some quasi-judicial things as part of the patent and trademark processes, but the larger point is that they are not in the business of enforcing patents or trademarks. Enforcement is largely left to private owners. DOJ is a law enforcement agency, and notably, it doesn’t do patent enforcement, either. Where the two missions overlap is in criminal trademark/counterfeiting enforcement, and in the very narrow set of cases where the government is suing or being sued for patent or trademark infringement.
To the person who suggested merger PTO with the Library of Congress (where Copyright currently is) — that might be OK, but I’m not sure Congress would agree. (Taking Copyright out of the LOC and merging it with PTO actually seems to make sense to me, since the original idea that the copyright office would be a handy way to fill the Library of Congress with deposited books seems rather antiquated.)
As for the comment regarding moving PTO to FTC — The consumer mentions the “consumer protection” aspects of patents, but patents have never really been about consumer protection, other than in the grand sense of “promoting science and the useful arts.” Trademarks do have a consumer-protection angle that seems like a good fit at FTC, but not patents. And, like DOJ, FTC is more of enforcement body, as opposed to a registration agency like PTO. (Of course, we could *split* PTO into its component parts, sending trademark functions to FTC and patents to NIST, or the DOE, or a standalone agency.)
Oh, I give up. How about we merge every agency we don’t like into some big, huge, bloated, MegaUberDepartment in some warehouse like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where clerks wear short sleeve dress shirts and pocket protectors, and nothing useful ever escapes. Ever.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Hee. Speaking as someone who interacts with the USPTO on a daily basis, I think if you were to describe it as a “place where nothing useful ever escapes”, you’ve got a pretty good take on it right there.
The only fact that reconciles me to the forced aging of any shipped documents is that other Patent and Trademark offices around the world are even more leisurely. (With some countries I’ve been working with, I’m not certain they even HAVE a working patent office. I have this image of this huge pile of unexamined applications just gradually growing and getting shoved into more and more rooms.)
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