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If there's one thing politicians of all stripes can agree on, it's this: The immigration system is broken. What's less obvious is the extent to which that's physically true. An online system that was supposed to automate the processing of green cards and other immigration benefits has struggled to function properly since at least 2009. Now Jerry Markon writes at the Washington Post that, the US government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated paper approach to managing immigration and a decade into the project, all that officials have to show for their effort is a single form that's now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper. The project called ELIS, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it's now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation's immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats. "You're going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we're still a paper-based agency,'' says Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. "It's a huge albatross around our necks.''
Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the mammoth problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency. When the project began, DHS was only two years old, cobbled together after the Sept. 11 attacks from myriad other government agencies, and the department was still reeling. "There was virtually no oversight back then,'' says a former federal official. "DHS was like the Wild West on big acquisitions." "The biggest problem is that the holes that were in the system that allowed the terrorists to come in—for 9/11, the Times Square bomber, all of those people—came through USCIS" and the flaws in the system remain, says a USCIS manager who departed within the past year and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation that could affect future employment. "They don't have any real-time validation of any of the documents" from banks and higher education schools. The long-delayed website has burned through more than a billion dollars, mainly from refugees, asylum seekers and other foreigners who fund the system through application fees. It now faces an influx of more than 5 million petitioners under Obama's executive actions on immigration—if ELIS ever becomes capable of handling the relevant forms.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:47AM
I noticed that too, but I couldn't think of any recent government successes that nobody could argue against, the way the Moon landings or smallpox were. I'm not sure if that's because there haven't been any, or if we're just too close to realize how effective they were. I wanted to use two different states' ACA market sites as examples but couldn't be assed to look up which ones were which.
There's definitely a sampling bias towards recent events, though, simply because they're fresh in memory. I mean, I could have pulled up Versailles as an epic government fuckup, but didn't because it was so long ago.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:10AM
I wanted to use two different states' ACA market sites as examples but couldn't be assed to look up which ones were which.
That's invalid because those are state, not federal. There's plenty of things that state governments are doing decently well even today, such as several states finally stopping the drug war within their borders and legalizing marijuana.
The bottom line is that the federal government is totally broken and can't do anything right any more. It used to do some good things, like Apollo and eradicating smallpox, but those were a LONG time ago. I guess you could argue that NASA still does some good work with its landers and probes (like the New Horizons probe that just gave us a shitload of data about Pluto/Charon, plus the Mars rovers), but that still pales in comparison to the scope of what they achieved with Apollo, especially when you consider the vast difference in technology between then and now.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday November 12 2015, @12:21AM
I noticed that too, but I couldn't think of any recent government successes
Therein lies the problem. There are no recent government success stories.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.