Somewhere in America right now, a citizen is holding a piece of official correspondence that runs four paragraphs, deploys the phrase “pursuant to the applicable regulatory framework” three times, and tells them absolutely nothing about what they are required to do or when they are required to do it. They will call the number at the bottom. They will be placed on hold. They will eventually reach someone who will tell them to visit the website. The website will tell them to call the number.
This is not a malfunction. The fog is the product.
The bureaucratic language problem is older than anyone currently serving in Congress, and the people who produce it have always had a ready defense: precision. Technical language is precise, they say. Plain language is imprecise. Specialists need specialist vocabulary. What they never say out loud is the rest of the sentence: and when ordinary people can’t understand it, that’s fine with us, because confusion creates dependency, and dependency is the whole business model.
There is a long and honorable tradition in American public life of plain people calling out this exact scam. It runs through pamphleteers and populist editors, through radio voices and labor reporters, through anyone who ever had the nerve to read an official statement aloud in a room full of working people and ask, “What does any of that actually mean?” Every generation produces its own version of the man who reads the government form slowly and then asks the audience: “You’re a grown adult with a job and a family. You pay taxes. You follow the news. And they expect you to understand this without a law degree and three weeks of free time?” The audience always laughs because they have all held that form. The audience always laughs because they know the laughter is covering real anger.
The current version of this problem runs even deeper than a confusing letter from the IRS. The federal government employs well over two million civilian workers. State and local governments add several million more. Each of those institutions produces documents, rules, notices, and communications at a volume that no individual human being could read in a lifetime. The Federal Register, which is where official federal regulations live, runs to tens of thousands of pages a year. When a new rule takes effect, it frequently cross-references dozens of previous rules, which themselves cross-reference dozens more. The person the rule is actually aimed at, the small business owner or the independent contractor or the farmer, has no realistic way to know whether they are in compliance, which means they have no realistic way to know whether they are one bad audit away from a penalty. That uncertainty is power. Keeping you uncertain keeps you manageable.
The named enemy here is not stupidity. The bureaucrats who write this way are not stupid. Some of them are genuinely brilliant. The named enemy is incentive. Nobody inside a large agency gets promoted for writing a notice that ordinary people can read on the first pass. The reward structure flows toward internal approval, legal defensibility, and the comfort of colleagues who share the same vocabulary. The citizen at the kitchen table with the confusing letter has no seat at the table where that document was drafted. She is, in the language of the people who wrote it, the “affected party.” Affected, yes. Party to the process, no.
So what would actually change this? Four things, none of them revolutionary, all of them resisted with remarkable consistency by the people who benefit from the current arrangement.
First, require every federal agency to post a plain-language summary of any new regulation within thirty days of publication, written at a reading level accessible to an average American adult, and make that summary legally authoritative for good-faith compliance purposes. If you followed the plain version and got it wrong because the plain version was wrong, that is the government’s problem, not yours.
Second, audit the Federal Register. Not politically, not ideologically, but functionally. Every cross-reference that exists solely because a lawyer wanted cover should be identified and eliminated. Redundant regulatory layers are not precision. They are bureaucratic scar tissue, and they serve no one except the consultants who charge by the hour to navigate them.
Third, create genuine penalties for agencies that fail plain-language standards. Not suggestions. Not a strongly worded memo from a deputy undersecretary. Actual funding consequences, because money is the only language large institutions reliably speak.
Fourth, and this is the one that will cause the most professional outrage in the most comfortable offices in Washington: stop treating complexity as expertise. The person who can make a hard thing sound simple is almost always smarter than the person who makes a simple thing sound hard. The latter is performing expertise. The former has actually achieved it. Hiring and promotion standards inside agencies should reflect that, and right now they demonstrably do not.
None of this requires ideological agreement. Conservatives who hate regulatory overreach and progressives who want people to actually use government programs they are entitled to should both want citizens to understand the rules. The opposition is not partisan. The opposition is professional. There is an entire class of people whose value proposition depends entirely on ordinary people being unable to navigate official systems without help. Lawyers, consultants, compliance officers, lobbyists who know the back hallway, fixers of every variety: they do not get paid if the form is clear. They do not get hired if the letter makes sense. Their industry is the gap between what the government says and what any human being can understand.
The great comedian of American bureaucracy is the application form that asks you to certify, under penalty of perjury, that you have read and understood the attached twenty-two pages of regulatory guidance, the guidance that the agency itself, in an internal study that was quietly released on a Friday afternoon, found that fewer than one in ten affected individuals could accurately summarize. Sign here. You understood it. We all understood it. Nobody understood anything, and that is exactly how it stays.
The fog is not a bug they keep meaning to fix. The fog is the castle wall, and you are meant to stay outside it.