Comment by rwmj
Comment by rwmj 3 days ago
You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.
Comment by rwmj 3 days ago
You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.
That e-filing web site for taxes has never worked for my son because he can’t complete the id.me process, it might be as simple as you are an unperson if you use an android phone or maybe because he’s just started in the workforce he does not have a long history of tax filing and credit history to match up with.
Two years in a row we’ve been able to fill out a 1040 and the NY state equivalent and make a paper submission in less time than it takes to reach an operator on hold.
These identity verification services look like a scam to me. LinkedIn incessantly hassles me to verify with CLEAR and it always fails without a clear error message, either “it just doesn’t work” or my hair has grown too much since I got my driver’s license or it is making me take my glasses off and comparing to a driver’s license photo where I am wearing glasses.
>These identity verification services look like a scam to me.
Even if their intent is to run an 'honest' business, the method of bouncing a user around to god knows how many domains during the process becomes effectively indistinguishable from a compromised service, and the alternative of having each site host their own id verification system screams, HACK US. I can see users becoming increasingly accustomed to getting out their cards several times during a sign-up and not having the foggiest idea of where their information went to.
> user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites
I discovered this when it was late at night and I was procrastinating going to bed and I was curious what my estimated Social Security benefit would be at retirement so I tried to log into mySSA and it said the website is closed from like 11 PM to 5 AM or something like that.
I couldn't believe it. I could understand a weekly several-hour maintenance/batch processing window, but DAILY?
It starts to make a lot more sense when you realise there is a huge group in the US actively trying to make the government fail. It's pretty hard to make a good and user-friendly website when every few years some high-level people try to kneecap you.
These aren't unsolvable problems. The UK, for example, had invested a lot of time and effort into making their websites user-friendly. In most countries filing taxes online is something you can do during your lunch break - without paying the Turbotax maffia. Driver's license? You can order that online, and make an appointment for a 15-minute window to pick it up.
If interacting with the government is painful, it is almost always because someone benefits from it being painful.
Gaming of the procurement system. The websites are all written by big consulting outfits. Not to mention the disaster that is big corporate IT projects combined with government rules.
Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent.
As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortune 500 are often the same sort of consultant-driven crap.
Digital Service didn't shut down, it just temporarily got retasked to DOGE.
It wasn't temporarily retasked, it was reorganized and permanently repurposed and renamed the US DOGE Service, and then within that reorganized service, a subordinate temporary organization was created called the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization that was scheduled to sunset not later than July 4, 2026. (All but 65 of USDS's pre-reorg employees were also fired as part of the reorg, and 21 of those remaining 65 employees did a mass resignation.)
If you visit their website, you will notice that except for historical documents, there is no full name branding at all; mostly only the logo and the occasional "USDS", when prior to the reorg (as can be seen on the Wayback machine) the original full name was prominent.
This. The website for buying treasury products is straight out of the year 2002. The login is so bad I would never consider buying them there - the service fee charged by brokerages is absolutely worth it in this case.
Back when interest rates peaked around that period I bought a huge number of I bonds which were a great investment —- got fired by my broker because I interrupted a sales presentation with “why don’t I just buy I bonds?”
Back then I thought Treasury Direct was great.
The web front ends are awful, but the back ends are even worse. The backlogs for some of these applications is insane. I was at a US embassy one time and got talking to a girl who had just had her application approved after an 18 year wait.
18 year wait for approval or 18 year wait for family sponsored immigrant visa? Because from some countries those do have 18 year backlogs.
I believe it was the latter, if memory serves correct.
You use the same system for Business visas. Hard to imagine US wouldn’t want those as easy as possible.
You don't have a good enough imagination for how stupid our current leadership really is.
I don’t know if you’re US-based or not but in the US, government work has the stigma of attracting the bottom of the barrel. It is nearly impossible to get fired for performance reasons. Combine low pay and high job security, and you’re not going to attract the most innovative, motivated, or competent people.
Early in my career, I was warned that if I took a job with the state of California, I’d be stuck there for my whole career. I’d be unhirable in the private sector.
From 2014 until it was, in effect, obliterated by DOGE actions this year there was the "United States Digital Service", a crack team of programmers, a sort of skunkworks who worked to improve U.S. government websites of departments that wanted the help. So it seems to be partisan to want good websites, but there are countless people involved in politics with many agendas.
My wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.
Spouses always get better treatment as there is a voter who would be mad otherwise. They check for scam marriages but otherwise hurry the process through - if they don't a voter contacts their congressman to push the process. That voter will also likely know a lot of other voters and thus influence the next election while someone not married is unlikely to have that local network to use.
3-4 year timeline makes more sense for Greencard application to Naturalization, that was 4.5 years for my wife. But its not 3-4 years N400 to Naturalization, no way.
Timelines for USCIS depends heavily on where you are, since some offices just have more people to go through than others. So I have talked to people that one step might be 4 months for them and a year for another person.
I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.
It's not new. Rabid ideologues on the other side blamed Obama for things that pre-dated his administration, as well. Some people just can't be rational when it comes to politicians they don't like.
I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.
Many federal web sites were very quickly altered or replaced by the new administration.
This is common. Work begins on some web sites immediately after the election. For example, when a new president is sworn in, the White House web site flips immediately.
More to the parent poster's point, it has been widely reported in the legitimate media repeatedly that many federal web sites have been replaced or significantly altered by the current administration. There's an entire pseudo-department for it that also makes headlines for its greater transgressions.
Add to that severe and sudden budget and staffing cuts, and like all government functions -- you get what you pay for.
People really really dislike when you point out that the democrats are also broadly anti immigration in practice. They forget Biden deported 4.6 million people vs Trump's 2 million.
Elon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded).
All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.
Not to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only.
It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.