The lost crusade against bureaucratic gibberish

If you want to understand Americans' frustration with Washington, start with the words the government uses to communicate with them. Take the Labor Department's explanation of health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers under the 2009 stimulus legislation:

"Generally, the maximum period of continuation coverage is measured from the date of the original qualifying event ... However, ARRA, as amended, provides that the 15 month premium reduction period begins on the first day of the first period of coverage for which an individual is 'assistance eligible' ... Only individuals who have additional periods of ... coverage remaining after they become assistance eligible are entitled to the premium reduction."

What does that mean? Essentially, it explains that certain laid-off or downsized workers can get special subsidies.

It is complicated information to absorb. But does it have to be so hard to read?

Anti-jargon warriors don't think so.

A small but growing band of civil servants, lawmakers and consultants is leading the charge against bureaucratic legalese. They believe that Washington is dysfunctional and that to fix it, the public must understand what the government is telling them.

It's a movement that's deeply populist in spirit, with its aim to bring the government closer to the people.

Ultimately, proponents believe they're protecting the sanctity of not only the English language but the republic itself.

"How can you trust anyone if you don't understand what they're saying?" asked Annetta Cheek, a 25-year federal government veteran who now runs the nonprofit Center for Plain Language.

Plain-language advocates acknowledge that slaying jargon within the federal bureaucracy often seems impossible. But their ranks are growing in Washington.

"When people talk about government red tape, first, it's because of the incomprehensible gobbledygook that's used to write many of these federal regulations," Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, the House's point man for plainspeak, said. "The average user can't understand their responsibilities unless they hire lawyers and accountants to figure it out."

"We hear from small businesses in particular that any government documents are too unruly and long," Cass Sunstein, head of President Obama's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said. "It does breed a kind of frustration."

The law neatly converges with Obama's pledge to create a more open, transparent government, Sunstein said. It also builds on a long-standing battle against jargon in Washington.

People have been railing against bureaucratic legalese for half a century. But as the government's responsibilities have grown, so have its rules and regulations, plus all the exceptions and carve-outs that interest groups have lobbied to include.

Ensuring that all these provisions are technically and legally correct means that it's often easier for the government to produce documents that are complicated than ones that are simple.

According to the federal government's primer on plain language, PlainLanguage.gov, the father of the movement was John O'Hayre, an employee of the Bureau of Land Management who resolved that convoluted prose had made government documents impossible to read.

O'Hayre's 1966 book, "Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go," helped launch the movement.

President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1998 requiring all federal employees to use short sentences, the active voice and "common, everyday words."

But nothing has stemmed the bureaucratic jargon. The 2010 Plain Writing Act has no penalties for complex writing, and the federal government has yet to appoint its own editor in chief to monitor the agencies' efforts.

Connecting good governance with plain language has been a long struggle. In his famous 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell argued that government's "lifeless, imitative style" produced groupthink.

"If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy," Orwell wrote.

But, left to their own devices, agencies tend to develop inscrutably dense vocabularies.

A few departments have taken the early lead in the war against bureaucrat-speak. Veterans Affairs began a massive effort to rewrite its benefits rules in the early 2000s after an internal review and more than a dozen court decisions cited the need to clarify its confusing, ponderous style.

The VA's Regulation Rewrite Project has taken years, but preliminary feedback has been positive: After recasting one benefits form in plain language, the response rate to that form rose from 35 percent to more than 55 percent, saving the agency $8 million every time it mailed the letter out.

Convincing the rest of the government to follow suit may seem like its own bureaucratic nightmare: Every agency must appoint plain-language "officers," post guides and issue reports to comply with the 2010 act.

One agency that has openly embraced the movement is among the most loathed institutions in Washington: the Internal Revenue Service. This year, the IRS won the Center for Plain Language's top prize for intelligible writing in public life.

Receiving the award in May, Jodi Patterson, who runs the IRS office for taxpayer correspondence, distilled the essence of the plain-language movement.