Honestly recreation.gov is one of the few government websites that has a “good” user experience. I’m not a fan of BAH but I think they executed well in this case.
While $184M may sound like a lot, compare that to the $200M+ that was spent on the failed launch of Healthcare.gov - taxpayers got nothing out of that. That work was scrapped. That website ultimately cost closer to $840M.
What you don’t see in these numbers are the insane requirements needed to launch successfully. It’s not just building an AirBnb clone for parks, there is a huge amount of bureaucracy and stakeholder management in a national project like this.
$20M in annual recurring profit also doesn’t sound like that much in the grand scheme of things. Morally I wish it wasn’t necessary, but practically it’s impossible to deliver quality customer service without some form of financial performance incentive.
Would I love to live in a world where government employs programmers and DIYs this stuff much cheaper and more efficiently? Of course. USDS and 18F are bright spots that are trying. But they also don’t have the capacity to work on anything except high priority projects.
Worth noting is that USDS actually played a critical role at a critical moment in improving the Rec.gov RFP. Charles Worthington deserves special commendation for his technical acumen in representing the people/gov't.
Most government RFPs do not get this same level of technical oversight and - short of building an entire technical branch to build the actual services themselves - the rec.gov experience led me to believe that at least having a highly technical government representative in the RFP process is critical to setting the conditions for a good outcome.
Without USDS, the National Parks Service would have been left to navigate the technical minutia through the "helpful" commentary of private contractors alone.
There are a slew of new digital services firms that are trying to build exactly this.
Government has a workforce challenge -- it is aging out, being starved of resources, and technology isn't core to agency mission(s). For decades they have outsourced to the same set of big companies that often failed to deliver. 18F and USDS are more than small departments -- they are bootcamps for the people who go through and then impact the the agencies and firms they move on to after. They were really inspired by the failure, then success, of healthcare.gov.
10 years ago upwards of 80% of government IT projects failed. This is improving.
I interned with the navy in college. I wanted to be a federal employee when I graduated. I even had special consideration due to my internship, and my disability. Did I? No. I did not.
The experience of trying to get a federal job was abysmally bad. First, there are precious few GS positions that actually do coding. Everything seems to be contracted out. The few positions that were there were very hard to apply for. I applied to every position I found across 5 different states, and my resume simply disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole.
After a month or so of that nonsense, I threw in the towel and looked for something in the private sector. The difference was a breath of fresh air. I got interviews in days, offers in weeks, and I've made enough money that I'm basically financially independent at this point.
The government has a long way to go with their hiring process.
I don't think this is true. GS grades are capped by the compensation of Level IV of the Executive Schedule (sometimes with locality pay they would exceed that and so they get capped), which is roughly the same as Congress salary, but definitely SES pay tops out a good 25k above that.
Grow up in the DC area and even if you never work for the Gov't directly you just absorb this information out of the air.
Exceptions are made for federally-employed physicians, which is the only reason the military is able to have its own doctors. They could easily do the same industry gap compensation bonus on top of schedule for engineers if the non-government market gets to be similar to the physician market.
Well, but Executive Schedule people are essentially all political appointees, not individual contributors. This is the several hundred people who get appointed by the President- most of them requiring Senate approval- and come in to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs or whatever. This is not the Civil Service but the political appointees who sit on top of them and cycle out regularly back to think-tanks or industry jobs when their party loses an election.
SES is not political appointees. SES are career executives, and generally serve through many administrations. Political appointees are usually 'Secretaries' and that ilk, which may be 'SES' equivalent, non-career/competitive appointments, but are not Career SES.
There are TONS of SES folks below the appointee level.
I agree with this. I am no fan of BAH for personal reasons having been forced to work adjacent to them, but the recreation.gov website is quite good and a good experience, coming from someone who uses it extensively for camping.
TFA focuses on the significant problem of mismanagement of US public lands, and the extent to which handing over such a large amount of control over these publicly owned resources to a private entity with a profit motive has lead to negative results.
The design and functioning of rec.gov itself is not even tangential to the subject.
The thrust of TFA addresses the misaligned financial incentives and the problems inherent in outsourcing aspects of public lands management to entities with a profit motive.
It has little to nothing negative to say about the site's UX.
> Would I love to live in a world where government employs programmers and DIYs this stuff much cheaper and more efficiently? Of course. USDS and 18F are bright spots that are trying. But they also don’t have the capacity to work on anything except high priority projects.
Appropriate more funds. If this is an issue of citizen stakeholder engagement, I ask someone point in the necessary direction besides my Congressional reps.
Other levels of gov have funding issues, but not federal. In fact, big appropriation bills often create these mega-procurements that companies like BAH latch on to.
Government's ability to attract people who could execute a project like this requires different compensation and career incentives. Base pay is capped at <$150k for the highest GS level at the highest step. There's also no real potential for bonuses or equity.
Beyond pay, government careers fundamentally optimize for low-risk decision-making. The goal is to not get fired over 20 years so that you can retire with a pension. This is why contractors like BAH gets hired: you, as a government program manager, don't get fired for going with a brand name even if they fail. If you hire some unknown development firm with great tech skills and they fail, you get canned.
There's also a lack of bold leadership and urgency that is customer-experience focused. Healtchare.gov benefitted from some amazing engineers, but the true catalyst for its comeback was that Obama realized it was a do-or-die initiative for his administration. His team moved heaven-and-earth to steamroll entrenched vendors, recruit talent, and hold people accountable.
Leadership and talent are what make the difference.
Very much aware. Have gone through the USDS hiring pipeline and was extended an offer. Your tour of duty is limited (between 6 months-2 years) due to how they hack the GS payscale, and I argue USDS/18F has the leadership and talent to deliver based on all available evidence. Matt Cutts did exceedingly well considering resourcing and his mandate, and I have similar hopes for the new USDS administrator. They produce results, full stop.
Appropriate more funds, yes, but more importantly: Fix procurement. This is where there real down-in-the-trenches work needs to happen. Fix every single agency's approach to software procurement, one by one, until the entire federal government is properly incentivized to fund high quality FOSS software for the long haul.
It's a little better than it used to be with FedRAMP and such. But even now, agencies are still relying on broken-by-design contracts for terrible proprietary software.
Yeah! This happened to some extent while I was there, but only around the margins. I'd love to see it be a top priority.
To be fair, it's a really tough problem to solve. It would be a tough problem even without the help of the entrenched federal IT contractors (who would only stand to lose a huge amount of business).
> From a selfish standpoint, this type of system discourages spontaneous trips. When I did my road trip three years ago, I already noticed the trend of mandating an RSVP for any activity. I am not against any RSVPs as I understand the concept of resource protection, but with a greed-based system with profit and not sustainability as its goal, there are fewer incentives to set aside spots for walk-ups.
The increased demand makes `walk-ups` a logistical headache for workers (volunteers) on the ground. If there are X amount of campsites available as first-come-first-served, the campground host then has to spend time turning away people all day when those spots get filled by 9am.
I'm not certain what the solution is for bringing the type of spontaneity back that many people crave, but the reservation system is in place for a reason. Crazy demand for nature.
A great example is sunrise at the peak in Haleakala National park on Maui.
So many people were crowding the top that they started parking on critically endangered species and making an amazing experience something of a zoo. Something had to be done.
The reservation approach is two pronged. One batch of the majority of reservations is offered well in advanced. Then something like 48 hours before hand the final batch is offered.
This helps those who want more spontaneous while also keeping the numbers manageable.
Bluntly, the US population has mostly grown to the point where we are regularly having to deal with the fact that some things and experiences are just limited.
There's something endearing and maddening about a culture like ours that just flat out doesn't understand limits.
> Bluntly, the US population has mostly grown to the point where we are regularly having to deal with the fact that some things and experiences are just limited.
This is the bigger problem. Not just US population, but world population has grown enormously, and is richer, and travel is cheaper. So there are exponentially more people arriving at tourist destinations that a hundred years ago received only a handful of people a week.
I've been mulling over the colonial era privileges that people expect to be able to have. But with a greater population, especially a wealthier population, the old timey vacation that everyone imagines just isn't possible. This disparity is part of the loss felt by those with privilege.
Exactly. When I went camping 20 years ago it was easy to just pull in to a nice park when we got tired of pulling the trailer. We would almost always get a campsite.
No more. Nowadays there seems to be 10x the number of RVs in use and advance reservations are mandatory. We never even try to camp in places that are "first come/first served" today because it's completely hopeless. The only places where fc/fs works today are commercial RV parks where you'll pay $50-$100 per night for a camping spot packed in like sardines with everybody else.
The solution is the same one used by airlines and hotels: dynamic demand-driven pricing, charging enough that you don't sell all your seats until the last minute.
An airline that sold out of all its seats 6 months ahead of time would be considered incompetent, but governments do this all the time with reservations for various activities, because they are trying to "be nice" by charging low entry fees.
Increasing prices will increase equity. By charging rich people more, you can afford to give greater subsidies for marginalized groups and poor people, and lower the price from whatever it is currently for them. You can even use that revenue to pay them to go camping, if you really want to!
In any event, that unlikely to be helpful in this specific situation, as the majority of all revenues from rec.gov go directly to BAH[1], rather than to the public land management agencies responsible for stewarding the resources in the public interest.
BAH also has price setting authority, with a dearth of public oversight.
It's called "public land" because it is already paid for, and effectively owned, by the public. I would consider a government who resorted to market solutions "incompetent".
I both feel it sucks while it also clearly is necessary. But I think they can make things more equitable and we need to invest money to increase access.
scarce back country permits for popular places should be a raffle system not refresh as fast as possible. That system would be hard for 2 night trips, but maybe set aside like 10% for that, let them allocate first, then open 1 nights.
imho give some chunk of preference to locals and sports/non car touring uses. E.g. RMNP climbing is my personal example. I've never had a problem getting in, but I also usually climb at night. The top parking lot is pretty small and filled up in the mornings. But people that have to carry gear should get preference, it's much easier to take the bus without gear. AND if you're staying later having to walk an extra couple miles with pads or bags bc the bus stopped sucks.
RMNP is also just a prime example of awfulness of crowds and people. There are one or two trails that almost all visitors go on. They don't venture out even though it's such a huge beautiful park.
Part of it is ease of trails. At least partially concrete and very short. But the facilities are disgusting just a few bathrooms and people sh*t on the floor...
People are awful, loud, littering, rude. Hard to fix that.
Would love to discourage car touring where people stop on roads you can't get around. Big % of people go to the big 4 and don't get out of their cars for more than a couple feet to intrude on animals for selfies.
Also cars are just awful polluters minimally try to minimize idling. Encourage people to actually get out in nature.
I get there accessibility issues that's an able est bias, hence building out more easy / paved loops.
We should definitely protect land and animals. But there is a huge amount of space to open up.
Building more facilities/enforcement would better protect the land too.
Maybe have some of those armed rangers who roll around in giant SUVs instead walk and stop littering (that's jest, it's crazy the amount of them that carry guns).
Especially if you bring in and build out forest service land.
Marketing might help too, there are so many amazing places that don't get traffic it's all going to the same few spots.
It's the angry stream of people you need to turn away that becomes the issue. It's not confusing, it's just time consuming and frustrating for all involved. Doubly so if there's an event the overwhelms your normal facilities and staffing.
I recall a bedraggled stream of cars and park officials when I camped to see the solar eclipse in Nebraska. All very nice people, one even drove around to issue protective lenses to all the campers that didn't bring them, but I sure sympathized with those who didn't make reservations and those who had to disappoint them.
I have no issue with online reservations or contractors,
but do have an issue with the incentive of application fees:
to enter a lottery for a reservation, every applicant pays
a fee, whether they get a reservation or not. After the lottery,
the contractor keeps all the application fees.[0]
The contractor could increase their profit at very little cost
simply by getting more people to
apply for the same limited number of reservations.
Dark pattern, perverse incentive, or profit model?
Does even Ticketmaster have that level of chutzpah?
For some of the things the author complains about there really are no good options. You can only shove so many people up the Half Dome cables on any given day or so many campsites in Yosemite Valley before it becomes a nightmare. You can't just build more of the experiences people are looking for in national parks like you can build taller buildings in a city. So your options are to ration by price (which NPS/etc generally don't do), to ration by luck (lotteries for e.g. Half Dome), or to ration by ability to plan ahead (far-in-advance reservations for campgrounds). None of these are great but what is the alternative?
Read "Industrial Tourism and the National Parks" by Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire. His solution is as simple as making people get off their asses and walk or bike, etc, rather than the then-current trend of building paved roads and parking lots ever closer to the "attractions".
There is, believe it or not, an IMAX theater right outside of Zion that shows movies of the park. My first reaction was to be appalled by the brazen crassness of such a thing. In time, my opinion has softened: if it diverts people from coming into the park for nothing more than a look around, great. Let them stay the hell out of the park and move on to the next checkbox on their vacation. It'll be less crowded for those of us who do like to hike.
This is the solution: not only does it manage demand, it reduces initial and maintenance costs and decreases destruction of natural lands. I couldn't come up with as good and natural a response to this problem.
Though I like this idea, as I age, I sympathize with people who are unable to do this for a variety of reasons. I'm sure those people can be accommodated, but that opens the door to abuse, putting us right back in this position.
I totally agree. In my country as soon as some natural reserves got paved roads, they also got restaurants and coffee shops, souvenir shops and an annoying crowd that could be equally entertained by having a coffee at the outskirts of their hometown, but instead they are now polluting a scenic landscape with their presence.
It's Nature. It is crappy already. When I went up Half Dome in the 70s It was the middle of June and pretty hot. It's a long walk and all of it is steep and some of it is slippery and scary. But "I'm a tough mountaineer" so I didn't turn back. And that image/ego thing is why making it crappy will not work.
For years I was musing about a camping trip to Shenandoah National Park which is only a couple hours away from me. However due to family, busy work, and laziness I would start planning too late and saw most spots booked on rec.gov. I would usually blame myself for lack of organization
This year I decided to just pack my car with equipment and drive to SNP one very early morning. At worst I would spend hours in the car for a day hike. However it turns out that many camping spots are available on first-come-first-serve basis, and not online. Another group without reservations joined my camping spot bordering the forest and it was a fun hanging out and chatting with strangers. You can also find plenty of camping space near hiking shelters, or with a permit in the back-country provided you're aware of the regulations and bear safety.
After that first trip, I was kicking myself for forming a mental model of camping as severely constrained by space and crowds. I think that false model formed by relying on only rec.gov and some online articles about how crowded the Appalachian Trail has become. I hear the hiking crowds visit SNP in May-June, so we'll see how it goes.
I worked at Booz Allen on this project for some time actually before moving onto other projects during my time at the company. If I recall correctly, the site was made in React and used the internal government cloud.
This article reads like a 14 year old who is mad at society for the first time in their life.
"That website is made by a company worth 14 Billion with a B!" There are around 1000 companies with a Billion or greater market cap. Is this supposed to be a criticism?
Outrage at mismanagement of public lands is not uncommon amongst those of us who follow the issue closely.
I think Paul's emphasis on BAH's financials is meant to support the argument that a significant element of the management of a publicly owned resource should not have been handed over to an entity that is driven by profit motive.
And signing over authority over pricing and eliminating much of the public oversight was especially inappropriate.
recreation.gov is one of a rare few citizen-facing sites/apps (another is Libby) which are good in almost every way that they need to be.
I use both of these every week, often every day; and they are continue to evolve to get out of the way and let me get what I need quickly. Perfect? No. Infinitely better than they could be? Absolutely.
Compare the site California decided to use after opting out of standard consolidated solutions. It's mildly better now, at least it can load and refresh, but it was god awful for years after launch.
Mildly better is being kind to Reserve California. Florida saw what CA did and decided to follow in their footsteps, and now this new setup is the standard consolidated solution?!?
If you think rec.gov is bad wait until you see parks.ca.gov. Its probably one of the worst campsite booking sites ever made. Rec.gov isn't that bad imo.
to me, the biggest problems with recreation.gov are:
1) the incentive to have lotteries for things (like angels landing in Zion, half dome cables in Yosemite, etc) where you have to pay just to enter the lottery and are out your money even if you are not selected. none of that money goes to actually help maintain that national park. BOA just pockets it
2) it has completely changed the landscape of who is in the campgrounds from local families that went up the canyon for the weekend with their kids to professional #vanlife / RVers that pay memberships into these services that tell them exactly which spots to book at exactly which time 8 months in advance so they can continue their year round lifestyle of living on the road
I was intimately familiar with the period in time during which Booze Allen won the Rec.gov contract. (My company was a founding member of AccessLand.org, a coalition of non-profit and for-profit orgs pushing for open data reform for America’s parks.) As much as I want to dunk on BAH for their spook work, and more broadly opine on the the parasitical undermining of government by corporate lobbyists, it is important to give credit where it is due and recognize the overall-great work that BAH did on the rec.gov contract.
People forget that before BAH, Reserve America (owned by IAC) used to have the federal and California contracts. RA delivered a terrible experience, never innovated or iterated, did the least amount of work possible, stripped their own internal team down to a skeleton crew in order to juice profits, and maximally leveraged their incumbency. What was supposed to be a 5 year contract turned into a 10 year contract, and then they leached out further profits by holding the transfer to BAH off for years through legal shenanigans. The RA team were transparently unethical, and in private meetings would say things that you might expect from a government contractor who truly thinks they have monopoly status and cannot be displaced. They did not have the user’s best interest at heart.
Schadenfreude is generally distasteful, but I’m not above saying how pleased I was to see Reserve America lose the federal and California contracts.
By contrast, my experience with the BAH team was that they brought “best-practices” to the table (they ran agile sprints, for starters), openly dialogued with community members to seek feedback on how best to improve Rec.gov, and had recruited an internal team that obviously cared about building a great experience for the parks, and for the government generally. BAH were not actively hostile to open data ideals — unlike other bidders, including RA — and seemed to have a more inclusive attitude to how government can be transformed through APIs and open data, whereby the gov’t contractor would build and maintain the core infrastructure, but 3rd parties could compete to provide better services to the public. In short, BAH operated in a good faith attitude and generally succeeded in building a good experience for users. As many comments here reflect, Rec.gov stands unique among many government websites and services as a pretty solid experience.
On the downside: BAH has failed to provide full open-data access to 3rd parties. There is still no place online that a developer can register an API key and check availability data (an outstanding requirement of the RFP contract) — some 3rd parties do have access to this data, but by failing to make availability data publicly and easily accessible, innovation here has been stymied. Conversations with 3rd parties to design and negotiate a 3rd party bookings API have also not materialized, as they said they would in good faith. These shortcomings are frustrating, and represent missed opportunities for BAH to continue building upon their infrastructure in providing a template for Govt services, and turning around their brand.
By contrast, Xerox won the California contract; an unusable abomination of contractor hack work. I did not think it was possible to do worse than RA, but they have somehow managed it. I suspect, however, that this is largely through incompetence rather than malice on their part. Unfortunately, without a full availability and bookings API, no 3rd parties can improve the experience either so we’re stuck with reservecalifornia.com for the interminable future.
As much as I want to bag on the profit motive behind BAH, this OP article is missing some historical nuance about how bad things were, and could still be.
I have a question. I keep hearing about so many problems with the way things are done in the US. The tax filing system. Mass incarceration. Problematic police departments. Reproductive rights. Privacy rights. And on and on and on.
But few (if any) representatives seem to want to fix any of this stuff. I see no progress. Just an ever increasing partisan divide based largely around religion and an "us vs them" mentality.
Where do we go from here? Does this stuff ever get better?
There's problems in every country - no political system is devoid of corruption, cronyism and the influence of lobbyists. But one thing I do find unusual about US (and to a lesser extent the UK) politics is how extreme the partisan nature of every aspect of politics is. Any explicit discussion of politics is about "sides"; even the most good-natured discussions are about "balancing" red and blue, rather than representing the reality of diversity of thought. And that word - "diversity" - even means something different in the US than elsewhere: rather than actual diversity (acceptance of a spectrum), it rather tends to mean hitting a set of strictly predefined (discrete!) boxes.
I can't help but think - especially given the existence of some parallels in UK politics - that FPTP must have some input into creating this culture.
The US system elects based on popularity, but the problems require technocrats. Decrease in educational standards and funding, as well as funding for other services, is both the reason and part of the answer.
We need bureaucracies that can be evaluated on efficiency in performance to mission. Many US representatives, ideologically, want to starve the US government of resources for a variety of reasons (serving the wealthy, lost cause, religious background, Reaganite). Rather than target efficiency, it's a simpler narrative to point to an underfunded, possibly brain-drained agency and make fun of its failings as it seeks to achieve its particular mission.
> We need bureaucracies that can be evaluated on efficiency in performance to mission.
That implies that there's broad agreement on a) the mission of various government agencies, and b) the desirability of the mission or even the agency. There are large subsets of the American population that question the desirability and disagree about the mission of the ATF, DEA, INS, CIA, FBI, and several other agencies. Electing and appointing people who are good at accomplishing those missions is not enough to satisfy many Americans.
Something like the Prime Law of Politics applies everywhere and at all times; things tend to stay the same even with apparently "large" political changes, because in mostly democratic countries, the people have what they want, even if they complain about it.
We'll also see laws flapping back and fourth between administrations. This already happens with some funding for NGOs and they hate it (funding for birth control and abortions in sub-saharan africa is one notable example). It's going to be very stressful.
Should we be able to chart a consistent course on issues where there is no broad agreement among the people? Should the government involve itself in such issues at all, rather than leaving highly controversial purposes to be accomplished by voluntary means?
This stuff literally only gets better if people get out and vote
Politics in the western world is shedding the 19-20th-century ideologies and right/left wing parties and devolving into at it's root, autocracy vs small-d democracy.
The problem here is that the autocrats also support 'free-market capitalism' (which works basically as described in this article - crony capitalism), and motivates their voting blocs with fear. Their voting blocks vote reliably. The result is things like Trump and Brexit.
The small-d democratic parties basically motivate their voters with hope and freedom to do your own thing. the problem is that their voters tend to do their own thing, and that thing is not attempting to control others for profit, and they tend to be apathetic about voting. Especially since their demographic tends to be young, and the young are famous for having loads of political opinions but not actually showing up to vote - especially in minor elections, such as mid-terms and state elections in the USA. Active disinformation campaigns don't help.
Somehow, the Nordic countries seem to have cracked the participation code a few generations ago, and are anti-autocratic and nice places to live. Whether this can be sustained in other democracies is an open question.
No, it is not, if you are paying the slightest bit of attention to the world or to history
In the US, there is a structural electoral deficit for mainly urban voters in favor of small-d democracy and more progressive approaches, vs more authoritarian approaches, both because of the Electoral College in presidential elections and gerrymandering in other elections. Only when there is a greater wave of voting do candidates slightly favoring the people (vs corporations & authoritarians) get elected. See 2008, 2020. These had substantially greater overall and youth turnout. When the overall and youth turnout is low, the better motivated right-wing and often elder voters still turn out and they win.
Seriously, just read something on the issue before posting such generic nonsense - it's not clever. If you have am actual question, post that.
Dose it get better? No. It’s very a profitable setup for some, and representatives need support from some to maintain their position so they can do “Good.” Trying to make stuff better will get you branded somewhere between a raciest and a Nazi.
I’m curious of what sort of examples you would categorize as “people who were trying to make things better but ended up getting branded as racist or nazi”.
While $184M may sound like a lot, compare that to the $200M+ that was spent on the failed launch of Healthcare.gov - taxpayers got nothing out of that. That work was scrapped. That website ultimately cost closer to $840M.
What you don’t see in these numbers are the insane requirements needed to launch successfully. It’s not just building an AirBnb clone for parks, there is a huge amount of bureaucracy and stakeholder management in a national project like this.
$20M in annual recurring profit also doesn’t sound like that much in the grand scheme of things. Morally I wish it wasn’t necessary, but practically it’s impossible to deliver quality customer service without some form of financial performance incentive.
Would I love to live in a world where government employs programmers and DIYs this stuff much cheaper and more efficiently? Of course. USDS and 18F are bright spots that are trying. But they also don’t have the capacity to work on anything except high priority projects.