The travel industry paid tribute to Miles' Law last week, the adage that "Where you stand depends on where you sit." It roughly translates to this: Your stand on political and public policy questions usually aligns with your economic interests.
Demonstrating that theorem in the Transportation Department (DOT) regulatory docket last week were domestic and foreign airlines, travel agents, tour operators, technology companies, metasearch providers, consumer advocates, airport operators and hundreds of individual consumers. The object of their attention was the DOT's latest consumer protection rulemaking effort, issued last May.
The DOT's 118-page package of proposals was, in our view, an ugly, disorganized and badly drafted piece of government-speak, rife with faulty premises, bad law and inconsistent logic. One of the worst examples we've ever seen. But, thanks to Miles' Law, when the deadline for public comments finally rolled around on Sept. 29, just about everybody found something to endorse or at least tolerate.
One of the few exceptions was the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, a public interest group with no known skin in the game, which attempted to assess the DOT's rulemaking proposal against federal guidelines for analyzing regulations contained in executive orders.
It concluded that the DOT failed to clearly identify the problems it was trying to solve, to verify that they exist and to propose remedies whose effectiveness could be measured.
Some industry commenters made polite references to such deficiencies in the DOT proposal. ASTA and the airlines pointed out a number of inconsistencies, apparent drafting errors or examples of unclear language as well as shortcomings in the required cost-benefit analysis.
Some, including the U.S. Tour Operators Association, specifically cited the requirements of the executive orders and urged the DOT to "suspend further consideration of its proposals until their full impact on ticket agents, in particular tour operators, has been more carefully thought through and analyzed in a comprehensive manner."
It's a long shot, but we think suspending further consideration the best course.
We believe the DOT, in a hurry to "do something," produced a bad package that lumped together too many disparate proposals that were in various stages of readiness.
In a better world, there would be a way to force the DOT to return to the drawing board, break the package into logical subsets and proceed with its wish list of proposals in a more orderly fashion.
Unfortunately, advocates for each industry segment had every incentive to endorse those parts of the package from which they might benefit, or from which their competitors might suffer, while condemning only those portions that could do them the most harm.
The sad result could be that with careful cherry-picking, the DOT will be able to find in the thousands of pages of industry comments just enough support to do whatever it wants to do and squeak by the inevitable appeals court review.
The theorem that "we get the government we deserve" has been traced to the 18th century French lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre. We know nothing else about him except that, like Miles, he was right.