I work with a lot of grants through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development dealing with the homeless. HUD, of course, has a definition of “homeless”. One of the organizations I work with also has a grant through the Department of Education. They have a different definition of “homeless”. For monitoring and reporting requirements, all the organizations keep track of their activities in a database. One of the elements in that is “race”. Guess what - they don’t line up with the various races listed on your average census form.
Seriously - is it really that difficult to get these people in the same room together and agree on a few common things once in a while?!?
It’s very difficult to get agreement on concepts and terms in any big organizations, even before you try to implement the agreed-on consensus in people, technology, and processes.
You’ve been on the SDMB since 2000. Do you think even in this much smaller smarter group of people there is clear agreement on what constitutes race, what the different races are, if there is such a concept, if it stays the same or changes, etc.?
IMO&E, it is a common misconception that various parts of federal law/regulations ought to mesh together seamlessly. While this might be the case in a perfect world, it ignores the real-life manner in which law is created in a piecemeal manner, over the course of years/decades, and written and influenced by countless different legislators, interest groups and administrations. It is enough difficulty for a single agency to have law enacted in 2009 mesh with that agency’s own policies enacted 75-100 years earlier - let alone meshing perfectly with every other agency’s policies enacted over that period.
The OP also suggests to me ignorance of how the law works. I have no experience with the agencies and definitions the OP cites, but I imagine the words “homeless” and “race” have very specific definitions within the respective agencies and their statutes and regulations. In many respects, the words homeless and race are irrelevant. The agencies could have chosen any conceivable manner to reference what they are addressing. Homeless could have been called “X persons” or anything else. But they chose these terms in order to use plain language that has some meaning to a non-expert. But the words DO NOT have the meaning the common man might think. Instead, they are clearly defined terms of art when used within that agency. Non0lawyers and non-bureaucrats often fail to understand this.
Say HUD promulgated their standards first, defining homelessness and race. The DoEd comes along, wanting to address folks with no permanent addresses and of certain pigmentation. But their interests and goals are not the same as HUD’s, so it would not work for them to use identical definitions. Would you prefer that DoEd use some different terms - such as those I used in the previous sentence - instead of the more succinct homeless/race? Then let’s say a 3d organization wants to address similar people…
I think you can imagine that an alternative system would create different problems than the OP describes.
And a suggestion that someone somehow simply comb through “all of the law” to remove all inconsistencies reflects an ignorance as to the amount and complexity of law out there. Who is going to do this task, in what time, and with what budget?
The current system certainly has its its flaws, but it works. All it requires is that users acquaint themselves with the pertinent terms and definitions.
But each of these departments have superiors even if you have to go all the way up to the Prez. The higher ups should make decisions if they organizations can’t agree for cohesiveness.
To further your analogy, it would be like Ed Zotti making the rules for the board instead of letting each mod set his/her own rules making things confusing and contradictory…
So Barack Obama should take time to figure out the official USA governmental policy on the definition of homelessness?
At any rate - my point is not about whether it’s desirable to have consistency, or who should decide on “the answer”. The OP didn’t ask that. My point is that it’s very hard to get consistency across any organization. And the larger the organization involved the harder it is.
The OP asked “is it really that difficult”, and the answer is yes.
They don’t need mutual cohesiveness, they only need to be able to be cohesive within their own departments. Suggesting that the President should sit and micromanage each federal department and agency to make sure that all their internal vocabularies are mutually syncretized with every other is silly. Never mind that it would be a full time job requiring a staff and an agency all it’s own, it would also be pointlessly fussy and frivolous, probably impossible, and almost certainly create more problems than it would solve.
I’m not saying that the President should micromanage. He has a bajillion underlings. If Obama has to set homelessness standards, then he has some real garbage people working for him.
In those situations where two departments do things differently, then the leader above those departments set standards…
Just to add my two cents to Dinsdale’s insightful post. Even if you had someone comb through all the inconsistencies of federal law and correct them, you would need the legislature to go back and pass the new legislation.
I’m not as familiar with rulemaking for the various agencies, but it isn’t as simple as just changing the rules internally, rulemaking is governed by the Administrative Procedures Act. From here
This ignores the possibility that there are various useful policy reasons for having the definitions be different.
Well, there’s already a federal definition of homelessness. DoE just expands on that, allowing for a bit more leeway to capture people who are doubled up and/or displaced. The DoE definition is the prefered one, as those families are nearly impossible to serve because they don’t meet HUD’s definition.
And these mooted standards would be what, exactly?
What if one department doesn’t want to use the other department’s definition? Should HUD get to decide what the definition of homelessness is, since it falls under its purview? Okay. Now, what about homeless veterans? Does HUD get to define them? Or does that fall under the DOD’s purview? Homeless student visa holders? Are they under HUD, or the State Department?
All of which is irrelevant, because as noted above, the definitions are set by Congress, and neither the President nor Cabinet officials have the authority to change or standardize them.
I wonder if the OP is thinking of the federal government as like a large company, where you could draw one of those organizational charts showing who reports to whom, with everybody under somebody else and the President at the top.
Seriosly, what would be the benefit? Because it is probably the case that things are exactly the way they want them.
For instance, a person can be a “resident” of the USA for tax purposes and be a “non-resident alien” for immigration purposes. So what? Are you telling me that they should be the same? That if an alien pays taxes he should be granted residency for immigration purposes? Or that if he is not a resident for immigration purposes he should not pay taxes?
Different agencies have different goals and may have different definitions of who is a resident or a homeless or a whooptidoo. So?
Because those goals begin to get compromised at the delivery end when there are too many working definitions/terms/restrictions/regulations. The homeless definition doesn’t really affect organizations I work with that severely. But there is one example I think would be good to throw out there: Reporting mechanisms.
To receive funding from HUD, agencies are required to utilize a case management database to collect data. That’s all fine and good. But as funding sources become diversified (a very good thing), the odds of your agency having to utilize a new and different reporting mechanism (usually in the form of yet another database), increase dramatically. One organization has four major funding streams, and four (extremely) time-consuming databases to report through.
Yes - it’s their money, and they can attach any strings they want to it. I’m not ignorant to that fact. But ultimately, the purpose of any funding is to deliver services, and begins to get harder and harder to do when your case manager has to juggle inputting one client’s information into 4 different systems. It’s incredibly backwards, as all the databases are capable of doing each other’s job - there’s simply no “different agencies have different goals” justification for it at that point.
This is why we have MIL-STDs and FED-STDs…until the Perry memorandum gutted the standards system, and we’re now left with nearly useless ISO standards.
Not at all. They have different definitions because they need different definitions. What difference does it make that they use the same word? You could just as well substitute “homeless as defined for the purposes of this act” in every instance instead of just “homeless” or “homeless A”, “homeless B” , etc. If they have different definitions it is probably because they need and want different definitions.
As I said, one can be “resident” for some purposes and not for others and it makes sense. What would not make any sense whatsoever is to force the entire Federal Government to define a word in a unique way. And then they would just come up with a new descriptor when they needed one and you’d be complaining about silly made-up words.
In some cases, you might be right. However, in this case, you are incorrect. They have different definitions not because they need or want them, but because (in this case), but because the DoE was able to get a more lenient definition in the political environment when their major funding bill went through.
Other than the possible political backlash of adding 1.6 million homeless to the rolls, HUD would, I’m sure, love to include people doubled up and couchsurfing, as it would make the services they pay for become that much more affective and comprehensive.
You mean like the previously-linked to Federal Definition of Homelessness?