Research Findings

What policy applies to me?

“The hardest part is pulling the needle out of the haystack.”

“It’s bit of a crapshoot trying to find out if there is a policy out there you aren't aware of.”

Due to the multitude of documents and difficulty in searching for and through these documents, it is very hard to know which OMB policies you need to comply with. Many users (both in and out of OMB) mentioned “just knowing” what they need to know after years of experience. Many of them also have created their own binders or indexes in word documents or through browser bookmarks to make sure the documents they need are always close at hand.

“Having someone simply admit that there are 4k-5k+ pages [agencies have to sort through to comply] would go a long way to building collective support.”

Why do I need to do this?

Generally, OMB desk officers get different questions from different agencies. There are very few overlapping questions because each agency has it’s own problems to solve for. However, the number one question OMB desk officers get is:

“What was the process in coming to the conclusion we needed this?”

Why do we need this policy? What was the history and reasons for the policy’s existence? Why do agencies need to drop everything to implement this policy?

When a policy comes down, it is always going to disrupt something inside an agency. It’s easier to understand the intent and goals of the policy if they understand the background. These questions are often hard to answer within OMB because of general office turnover.

“English is tricky, man.”

“Very broad strokes with little to do with what you’re doing on a day to day basis.”

“Most of the work for policy at the agency level is translating work from above out to people on the [day-to-day] level.”

There is a feeling among agency users who have to implement policy that they are not translated for people doing the day-to-day work. Which means that desk officers spend a lot of time clarifying the text of the policy.

In addition, policy interpretations differ between agencies, offices within agencies, and between OMB and the Inspector General. This causes a lot of confusion, stress, and extra work for the people in agencies trying to comply with the policy.

An example of this is how definitions can spread across many documents:

“‘Information’ means fundamentally different things in different documents. You need 3 statutes, 2 docs, 1 appendix to understand ‘information system.’”

“Topics are the most important, not necessarily document type.”

“OMB puts out a mix of documents. I don’t understand why they choose one over the other.”

Although there are different levels of OMB guidance documents such as Circulars, Memorandum, Bulletins, etc… those at the agency level view all documents as equally important and address them on the same level.

To help narrow down policies that apply to them, agency users focus on the topic of the policy or their “area of focus” to figure out which policies are important for them to pay attention to.

How do I keep up with policy changes overtime?

We heard that agency users all have very different ways of finding out about new OMB policy. Some mentioned using social connections, or LRM reviews. Others mentioned finding out through commercial sources, but there does not seem to be one common way of finding out about new policy. We did hear OMB desk officers say that their agencies tend to know about new policies, but we did not get the same feeling from agency users.

When looking at how policy changes or is updated over time, we heard the following sentiment:

“It gets updated as long as OMB cares to.”

“Ideally, OMB would update the guidance but that never happens.”

“Yo-Yo guidance” [Policy direction seems to change every day/month/year…]

From the policy writers, we heard a lot about how they try to gain feedback from various agencies before and during the policy drafting process. But from the agency user side, we heard requests to be brought into the drafting process more. Especially from those on the implementation level.

“Policy often not available for comment until it's 90% done.”

Make up of policy documents

Through this research we also asked about what specific policies are particularly helpful, or what parts of policy documents are more useful than others. This is what we heard:

Good/Helpful

“Most encouraging things seen from OMB are policies that also put together a FAQ.”

• In order to understand the scope of the policy and which actions they need to take to comply, the following are some formats that are or would be helpful:
  • Keyword searches
  • Tags
  • How-to steps
  • Case studies
  • Checklists

Bad/Not Useful

“They tend to write things in a way that make it harder to understand.”

• Heavy government language can make things hard to understand.
• Too many variations in documents.

Missing?

“As a [day-to-day] user I’m looking for what OMB’s reasons are behind their requests.”

• Understanding the “why” to a policy is important.

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General background

• Research plan
• Findings < You are here