An Inside Look At The Committee's Committee On Committee Formation

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Somewhere on the seventh floor of a federal building that smells like old coffee and new carpet — or possibly new coffee and old carpet; the Scent Assessment Subcommittee has been unable to reach consensus — there exists a committee so profoundly, almost poetically bureaucratic that it has become a kind of secular miracle: the Committee’s Committee on Committee Formation, known internally as the CCCF, and externally as nothing, because almost nobody outside the building knows it exists.

The CCCF is the federal committee responsible for forming committees that form other committees. It is the organizational equivalent of a mirror facing a mirror — an infinite regression of procedural intent stretching backward and forward through time, producing nothing but more of itself, and doing so with extraordinary dedication, perfect attendance records, and a catering budget that would make a wedding planner blush.

I was granted rare access to the CCCF after submitting a request to the Media Access Request Committee, which forwarded it to the Media Access Request Review Subcommittee, which escalated it to the Joint Media Access and Review Oversight Panel, which lost it, found it, lost it again, and then approved it by accident during a vote on lunch options.

What I found inside was both awe-inspiring and deeply confusing — two states of mind that, I would learn, are the CCCF’s primary exports.

Twelve Years Without a First Meeting

The Committee’s Committee on Committee Formation was formally established by executive directive in 2013. It has never held its first official meeting.

This is not for lack of trying. The CCCF has attempted to convene its inaugural session 147 times over the past twelve years. Each attempt has failed because the process of planning the meeting invariably generates new committees, subcommittees, and working groups, each of which must be formed before the meeting can proceed, each of which requires its own planning meetings, each of which generates further committees.

“We were very close in 2016,” recalled CCCF Chairperson Dolores Quorum, 67, who has held the position since the committee’s founding and has spent her entire tenure presiding over a body that has never officially convened. “We had the room booked. We had the agenda drafted. We had the muffins ordered. Then someone pointed out that the agenda needed to be approved by the Agenda Approval Subcommittee, which hadn’t been formed yet, so we formed it. But the Agenda Approval Subcommittee needed its own agenda, which needed its own approval, and — well, you can see the problem.”

The muffins were eaten anyway. They were, by all accounts, excellent. A subcommittee was formed to evaluate whether future muffin procurement should follow the same vendor. That subcommittee has met 34 times. It has not yet reached a decision on muffins but has successfully created two additional subcommittees: one on pastry alternatives and one on gluten-free inclusivity in committee catering.

The Multiplication Problem

The CCCF operates under a principle that its members describe as “organic growth” and that outside observers have called “mitosis.” The principle is simple: every meeting of the CCCF creates an average of three new committees.

This is not hyperbole. It is a documented, measurable, and apparently unstoppable phenomenon. Meeting minutes from the past twelve years show the following progression:

2013 — CCCF is formed. 1 committee.
2014 — Planning meetings generate 4 subcommittees. Total: 5.
2015 — Subcommittees generate 11 working groups. Total: 16.
2016 — The Great Muffin Incident creates 3 additional subcommittees. Total: 19.
2017 — A committee is formed to study committee proliferation. It creates 4 subcommittees. Total: 24.
2018 — The Naming Convention Committee renames 6 committees, each of which is logged as a new committee. Total: 30.
2019 — A hiring freeze is imposed. A committee is formed to manage the hiring freeze. Total: 31.
2020 — Remote work transition requires a Remote Committee Operations Committee, a Virtual Meeting Protocol Subcommittee, and a Mute Button Policy Working Group. Total: 34.
2021 — Return-to-office planning generates 7 new committees. Total: 41.
2022 — The Committee on Committee Reduction is formed. It immediately creates 3 subcommittees. Total: 45.
2023 — Annual review generates 5 review subcommittees. Total: 50.
2024 — Current year. Total as of press time: 58, with 4 pending formation approval from the Committee Formation Approval Committee, itself pending formation.

“People ask if we have too many committees,” said Vice Chairperson Franklin Bracket, a man whose business card lists seven titles across three committees, none of which have overlapping meeting times because none of them have ever met. “And the answer is: we formed a committee to look into that.”

The Committee to Study Whether There Are Too Many Committees

In 2017, growing concerns about committee proliferation led to the creation of the Committee to Study Whether There Are Too Many Committees (CSWTMTMC). It was tasked with producing a definitive report on the optimal number of committees within the CCCF.

The CSWTMTMC currently has 7 subcommittees:

The Subcommittee on Committee Counting — responsible for determining how many committees exist. Has been unable to produce a final count because new committees keep forming while they count.
The Subcommittee on Optimal Committee Size — studying how many members a committee should have. Currently has 23 members, which it acknowledges “may be too many, but we haven’t formed a subcommittee to evaluate that yet. Wait — should we?”
The Subcommittee on Committee Redundancy — investigating whether any committees duplicate the work of other committees. Has discovered that it duplicates the work of the Subcommittee on Committee Overlap (Subcommittee #5), but both subcommittees have agreed that dissolving either one would require forming a Dissolution Committee.
The Subcommittee on Historical Committee Review — reviewing committees that were formed in the past to determine if they’re still needed. Has been reviewing the Muffin Vendor Evaluation Subcommittee of 2016 for three years. Current assessment: “inconclusive but the muffins were memorable.”
The Subcommittee on Committee Overlap — see Subcommittee #3. They are aware of each other. They have formed a joint working group to address the overlap, which technically counts as a new committee.
The Subcommittee on Committee Nomenclature — ensuring all committees are named according to federal naming guidelines. Spent 14 months debating whether “subcommittee” and “sub-committee” are the same word. Concluded they are, then formed a working group to update all documents, which has been reclassified as a subcommittee.
The Subcommittee on the Study’s Methodology — evaluating whether the study being conducted by the parent committee is using the correct methodology. Has not yet determined what the correct methodology would be, but is confident that a subcommittee could be formed to find out.

The CSWTMTMC’s report was due in 2019. It has been delayed seventeen times. The current expected delivery date is “Q3 of a future year to be determined by the Timeline Assessment Subcommittee, which is being formed.”

The Organizational Chart

The CCCF’s organizational chart is a document of such bewildering complexity that it has become something of a legend within federal circles. Printed at readable scale, it spans 47 pages and requires a fold-out section that was itself the subject of a committee decision.

The chart is managed by the Organizational Chart Management Committee (OCMC), a 5-person team that meets weekly to update the chart. Because each update to the chart — reflecting new committees — often triggers the formation of new committees, the chart is in a constant state of revision, like a Wikipedia page for a controversial topic but with more acronyms and less vandalism.

“I’ve been updating this chart for six years,” said OCMC member Patricia Flowchart (no relation to the concept). “Every time I think it’s done, someone forms a new committee and I have to add a box. Last Tuesday I added a box and it created a cascading reformatting event that took down three pages. I had to form an emergency working group to fix it. That working group is now on the chart. It’s a living document in the truest sense. It breathes. It grows. Sometimes I think it’s watching me.”

The chart uses a color-coding system that was designed by the Color-Coding Standards Subcommittee in 2018:

Blue — Active committees
Green — Subcommittees of active committees
Yellow — Committees pending formation approval
Orange — Committees whose status is unknown
Red — Committees that have been dissolved (there are none; no committee has ever been dissolved)
Gray — Committees that may or may not exist depending on how you interpret the 2019 naming convention ruling
Purple — The Color-Coding Standards Subcommittee itself, which gave itself a unique color, a decision that was challenged by the Committee on Committee Privileges and is currently under review

The People Inside the Machine

What is it like to work at the Committee’s Committee on Committee Formation? I spent a week finding out, and the answer is: quiet, purposeful, and slightly surreal, like working inside a very well-organized dream.

Employees arrive promptly. They sit at desks arranged in clusters that correspond to their committee assignments. They open laptops. They pull up agendas. They prepare for meetings that may or may not happen, about topics that may or may not exist, in service of goals that were defined by committees that have since been absorbed into other committees.

“My title is Associate Deputy Liaison to the Subcommittee on Inter-Committee Communication,” said Derek Agenda, 41, a man who has worked at the CCCF for nine years and radiates the calm of someone who stopped asking questions long ago. “What do I do? I facilitate communication between committees. What does that mean? Honestly, most committees don’t know the other committees exist, so my job is mostly introducing committees to each other. It’s like being a matchmaker, except everyone is a committee and nobody wants to date.”

I asked Derek if he ever felt frustrated by the pace of progress.

“Progress?” he said, testing the word like it was a food he’d heard of but never tasted. “No, I don’t think progress is really what we’re about here. We’re about process. Process is its own reward. You form a committee. The committee forms subcommittees. The subcommittees form working groups. The working groups produce recommendations that are reviewed by committees. It’s not going anywhere. But it’s going beautifully.”

Other employees expressed similar sentiments. Margaret Rules, 56, has served on 14 different CCCF committees over her 22-year career. She described the experience as “meditative.”

“You know how some people do yoga to find inner peace? I attend committee meetings. The repetition. The ritual. The reading of the minutes from the last meeting, which are identical to the minutes from the meeting before that. It centers me. I am at one with the process.”

What Has the CCCF Actually Accomplished?

In twelve years of operation, with 58 committees, an estimated (the count is disputed) 340 members, and an annual budget of $14.7 million, the Committee’s Committee on Committee Formation has produced the following tangible outputs:

0 official meetings of the full committee
2,847 subcommittee meetings
14,200 pages of meeting minutes
58 committees (and counting)
1 organizational chart (47 pages, perpetually incomplete)
347 muffins consumed
0 decisions reached
1 definitive conclusion: that more committees are needed

“Some people look at those numbers and see failure,” said Chairperson Quorum, straightening a stack of papers that I suspect were blank. “I look at those numbers and see love. Pure, procedural, unconditional love. We have built something beautiful here — something that exists for no reason other than to exist, that produces nothing other than more of itself, that serves no purpose other than the purpose of serving. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”

She paused, then added: “We should form a committee to define love. I’ll draft the proposal.”

By the time I left the building, she had.

Madison Mandate is Government Is Love’s Senior Correspondent for Recursive Bureaucratic Structures. She was asked to join three committees during the reporting of this story and accidentally accepted two of them. She is now a sitting member of the Subcommittee on Media Relations Within Committee Structures and the Working Group on Working Group Awareness. Her first meetings are pending scheduling by the Meeting Scheduling Committee, which is pending formation.