Is Regulations.gov Solution for FCC?
The FCC switching to the regulations.gov used by more than 300 federal agencies is among the options a spokeswoman said the FCC is considering after facing a litany of issues handling 3.9 million net neutrality comments. It passed on that idea 11 years ago. Deployed in 2003, seven years after the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System, regulations.gov was able to handle large volumes without problem, including the 2.5 million comments the State Department received over the Keystone Pipeline proposal. With ECFS showing its age, FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray acknowledged to us that ECFS is “in need of an update," and the agency said using older technology contributed to the system’s problems.
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“The FCC is unusual in that it uses its own rulemaking system,” said Cynthia Farina, principal researcher at the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative, which studies federal rulemaking. She was among the critics of ECFS. They said in Part I (see 1410310028) of this two-part series that delays stretching weeks of posting online comments were undemocratic because insiders didn't have to wait to see the filings. This Part II examines regulations.gov. Experts cautioned that switching to that website from ECFS would have challenges of its own.
The Bush administration created regulations.gov, requiring all cabinet agencies to migrate to it, including some that already had a comments system and didn’t want to switch, Farina said. The FCC, as an independent regulatory agency, was not required to make the transition. It’s unlikely the FCC regretted sticking to its own system initially, Farina said. “There were years of problems with regulations.gov at first."
The FCC has “organizational complexities” that would make switching to regulations.gov or another platform expensive and not a trivial decision, said Andrew Pendleton, a programmer at the Sunlight Foundation, which pushes for government transparency and disclosure. He said ECFS handles filings other than rulemaking proceedings, like enforcement actions “that don’t clearly map to the regulations.gov model, which is very rulemaking oriented."
The commission “is evaluating regulations.gov with a process that involves input from all of the bureaus and offices to ensure it would meet the needs across the agency," said a spokeswoman. "It is not strictly an IT decision.”
Outdated Technology
In interviews and emails, the agency said ECFS operates on a flat-file database, which essentially means the codes in the database are on one file. The performance of one aspect of the system affects the performance of the entire system, said the agency spokeswoman. If large numbers of filings and searches are going on at once, the system can slow down.
“Trying to use something like that to power a high-volume website would perform terribly,” said Pendleton, who has worked with the FCC to put together the Sunlight Foundation's docket wrench database of regulatory findings. Like many ECFS problems, the design was a product of the 18-year-old system’s time, Pendleton told us. “Storing all the data in a big flat file wouldn't be that surprising architecture for a system that was designed without Web applications or large volume in mind."
To illustrate ECFS capacity problems, Bray, the FCC CIO, said one component of the system, though not the entire system, runs on 32 bit software. It provides 4 gigabytes of memory, about half as much as the typical home computer. Newer computers and operating systems use 64-bit software, but “it’s not unusual for older software to not have been built in anticipation of 64-bit computers,” which have only been standard for the past five years, said Pendleton.
That ECFS couldn’t handle the net neutrality comments is an indication of how “outdated” it is, said Jamie Callon, a Carnegie Mellon University computer sciences professor. “A few million comments isn’t a large amount of data these days,” and one that a modern system should be able to handle, he said.
One factor that led to the slow posting of net neutrality comments was the need under ECFS to convert comments into PDFs for posting and to operate with the search function. It’s less of a factor with regulations.gov, Pendleton said. Though comments that come to regulations.gov in forms such as emails and Microsoft Word attachments also need to be converted, regulations.gov lets users submit comments directly, so the agency would need to convert to PDFs less of what it would receive, Pendleton said. ECFS requires even filings submitted directly through the site to be in the form of attachments.
“Under normal circumstances, when several dozen comments come into the system on a given day, this process takes no more than an hour or two,” said the FCC spokeswoman. “But with so many comments to go through, it takes much longer for them to all go through this process.”