A coincidental spate of recent reports have pointed to the sometimes lacking quality of federal websites, even though public satisfaction with them generally has been around 75 percent for the past couple years.

I find most interesting the conclusion suggested by research from University of Pennsylvania law and political science professor Cary Coglianese that attempts to update federal websites to become more sleekly modern in fact could end up undermining key reasons for their existence in the first place: to make government accessible online.

Specifically, Coglianese warns that in seeking to please an agency website's primary audience, federal web designers could easily end up minimizing the position of rulemaking on homepages.

"Rulemaking may perhaps never be a 'top task' in terms of the numbers of web users, but in a democracy few tasks compare in significance with the ability of government agencies to create binding law," he notes.

The current administration's determination that federal agencies' online presence be geared to the needs to citizens is an admirable one--and hardly a radical one either, since it was shared with similar determination by the previous administration.

However, there's a line between accessibility and over-simplification, and I fear we might be edging too close to the latter. What's popular on federal agency websites is not always what's most important in an objective sense.

Which brings up a possibility being floated around, that of merging all federal websites into a single, giant website. The current plethora of websites--there are an estimated 24,000 of them--undermine search results and depend too much on the public understanding how the federal government is set up. I don't argue that anything agencies can do to make their websites more search-friendly should be encouraged, but one giant website to govern them all strikes me as a terrible idea.

Setting aside momentarily direct questions of user experience, how would such a website be administered? I can only imagine the database nightmare required to support such a site, the rippling effects caused by a local outage, the bureaucratic slowness of getting updates approved. Such things have an impact on the user experience, too. Also, I'm unsure how site navigation would be accomplished in any reasonable way--although search is very important, it hasn't made navigation obsolete. A great deal of content would also probably be lost in transferring to a giant new federal website, as would decades (at this point) of investment into URLs. And here we're back to user expectations.

Although it's silly to expect all citizens to have detailed knowledge of the inner-workings of the federal government, it's condescension to the point of arrogance to believe that citizens have no knowledge of it.

Farmers know they get aid from the Agriculture Department; drivers see signs that highway improvement projects are funded by the Transportation Department; travelers need only look at their passports to see that they're issued by the State Department. Taking as a starting point a supposed complete ignorance of the federal government is reverse Beltway snobbery along the lines of "we who deal with this every day know that the Interior Department and NASA are different agencies, but the yokels who live outside, they're clueless."   

A giant federal website would be a case of incredible over-simplification predicated on a supercilious assumption. Some simplification is good; more of it is not better--and we might already be signing up for more of it than we should. - Dave