The cascade of rigidity

I was excited to see America.gov launch yesterday, and happened to be reading How to peel a banana by Marina Nitze this week. There’s a nice parallel between being able to access the right information and the information itself being right.

Nitze writes about the “cascade of rigidity” which she defines as what happens when “each layer of government interprets the layer above it a little more stringently than the one before… rules only ever get added and calcified, never taken out or relaxed”. She uses the foster care licensing standards as her primary case study and talks about how HHS published model foster care licensing standards in 2018 with the explanatory context stripped out, states copy-pasted them, and created situations where care providers were disqualified under rules that didn’t make sense (e.g. a grandmother on tribal land being disqualified because she didn’t meet a recycling requirement but the land she lived on did not have recycling service). Nitze and her team figured out how to work with the system: they worked with HHS to make separate standards for kin legally permissible, and then published better model standards themselves, letting the same copy-paste machinery carry them; 39 states and 6 tribes had adopted them so far.