Likely Normal

There’s a special kind of magic in how government agencies can turn the simplest tasks into multi-million dollar tech nightmares. While the rest of the world zips documents across the globe in seconds via email, many bureaucracies still cling to fax machines like they’re sacred relics—except these aren’t your grandpa’s fax machines. Oh no, these are $15,000 “secure” fax beasts that weigh as much as a small car and require a team of IT priests to perform weekly rituals (or “maintenance,” as the budget line calls it).

The logic is baffling. A private company would see a problem like “We need to send forms” and solve it with a PDF. The government? They’ll form a committee, spend two years studying whether digital signatures are “too risky,” then drop $50 million on a “next-generation encrypted document transmission solution” that, upon delivery, turns out to be… a fax machine with a Wi-Fi dongle duct-taped to it. Meanwhile, the intern tasked with actually sending the fax will spend three hours wrestling with a phone line that may or may not also be used by the Pentagon’s missile defense system.

And let’s not forget the bespoke government tech—custom-built software that only works on one specific version of Internet Explorer (released in 2008), or those “secure” tablets that cost more than a Tesla but can’t load a webpage without crashing. The real kicker? Half these problems could be solved by just letting people email things like normal humans. But no—somewhere, a 400-page regulation written in 1982 insists that all official communications must be “hard copy reproducible,” which is bureaucrat for “We’ve committed to the fax bit, and we’re seeing it through.”

The result? A mountain of obsolete tech, a forest’s worth of wasted paper, and taxpayers left wondering why their money is being spent preserving the technological equivalent of a Blockbuster Video in the age of streaming. “Efficiency” in government too often means that they found a way to make the fax machine talk to the cloud (for an additional $200 million).