Feds to make online the way to go for your bird watching
The sweeping executive order signed by President Biden will make many federal agencies transition from laborious paper forms to online applications.
The devil is in the details.
It certainly sounds good that more federal government permits will be available online rather than through laborious paper filings, after President Biden signed an executive order making the change. (A big takeaway from the “customer experience” upgrade will be the ability to renew a U.S. passport online.)
Read about another impact of the recently signed presidential executive order here:
I suspect the process will take some time to sort itself out.
As the story in the tweeted link says, “FWS and the Interior Department said this morning they had no additional information about the new executive order.”
In the words of Sgt. Schultz: “I know nothing . . . . "
You could read a lot into that statement.
Recently, I was asked to complete a federal government form. The application said, without irony, that the best way to complete the form is to connect online using Internet Explorer.
A web search shows a 2016 announcement that Microsoft will end all support for Internet Explorer by the middle of next year. The use of that browser has dwindled to almost nothing . . . in anticipation of the coming death knell.
Will the federal government also be asking for these new online forms to be filled out by using AOL dial-up service?
(For the record, the Safari internet browser seemed to work instead of Internet Explorer, as I filled out the government form. And the hamsters in the cage powering my Web dial-up connection kept running for the two hours I needed.🐿🐿 If you haven’t figured it out, I’m trying to have a chuckle. By and large the federal government does an amazing job at running a country with so many divergent viewpoints.)
And in hoping for another light moment . . . .
There was no word on whether I would need to go online to book a reservation to duplicate one of my recent national wildlife refuge visitor experiences. (I’m joking; such personal visits will not require a permit, unless it’s a commercial activity or perhaps reserving a wildlife viewing blind.)
At Colorado’s Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge south of Walden, the staff attendant told me to come back in the early morning to spot resident moose by looking for dark shapes. I returned the next morning with excitement. And to my surprise, I saw a hundred dark shapes: All were cattle grazing, instead of moose, on the national wildlife refuge.