WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you’ve ever wondered how the federal government always seems to have a solution ready for problems you didn’t know existed, the answer is simpler than you think: they made the problem first.

Welcome to the Problem Creation and Resolution Cycle, or PCRC — the elegant, self-sustaining engine of governance that has been quietly humming beneath the surface of American policy for decades. It is the government’s most reliable process, its most productive output, and, according to insiders, “the only thing that actually works around here, which is ironic because it works by making things not work.”

After a six-month investigation involving leaked memos, candid interviews, and one very uncomfortable freedom of information request that was denied on the grounds that “the information might make people too free,” we can now reveal the full scope of how the PCRC operates — and why it is, in the words of one senior official, “the most beautiful closed loop since the wedding ring, and just as hard to escape.”

The Six Sacred Steps

The Problem Creation and Resolution Cycle follows six steps with the reliability of a Swiss watch, if that watch were powered by tax dollars and occasionally ran backward.

Step 1: Identify Something Working Fine

Every great government intervention begins with the same observation: something, somewhere, is functioning without government involvement. This is, within the Beltway, considered a crisis of the highest order.

“When we see a system operating smoothly — a market clearing, a community self-organizing, a child running a lemonade stand — we recognize that as a gap in coverage,” explained Dr. Patricia Overreach, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Preemptive Governance. “If something works without us, it means we’ve failed. And failure is not an option. Creating failure, however, absolutely is.”

The identification process is handled by the Bureau of Functional System Detection (BFSD), a 200-person office whose sole mission is to scan the American landscape for things that don’t need fixing. They use satellite imagery, social media monitoring, and a proprietary algorithm called FINDER (Functional Infrastructure Necessitating Destructive Executive Response).

Step 2: Regulate It Until It Breaks

Once a functioning system is identified, the regulatory apparatus springs into action with the graceful precision of a wrecking ball.

New rules are drafted. Compliance requirements are issued. Licensing frameworks are erected. Forms are created — lots of forms. The goal is not to improve the system but to introduce so many layers of oversight that the system collapses under the weight of its own compliance, like a souffl placed inside a hydraulic press.

“We call this phase ‘The Loving Squeeze,’” said former regulatory analyst Tom Gridlock. “You wrap both arms around the thing and just hold on until it stops moving. Then you check for a pulse. There usually isn’t one, but that’s actually the desired outcome.”

Step 3: Declare Emergency

When the system predictably fails — because it is now spending 94% of its operational capacity on filing paperwork and 6% on whatever it was originally doing — the government declares an emergency.

Press conferences are held. Reports are commissioned. Cable news segments are produced featuring concerned-looking officials standing in front of charts that all go in the wrong direction. The word “crisis” is deployed no fewer than 47 times per briefing, a figure that has been remarkably consistent since 1971.

Step 4: Create an Agency to Fix It

With the emergency established, a new federal agency is created to address the problem that the previous federal regulation created. The new agency is given a budget, a mission statement, a logo, and an acronym that somebody spent three weeks crafting to spell something inspirational.

Step 5: The Agency Creates New Problems

The new agency, staffed with dedicated professionals armed with good intentions and bad incentives, immediately begins creating new problems. This is not malice. It is physics. A bureaucratic body in motion stays in motion, and its motion invariably generates friction, heat, and between 12 and 40 unintended consequences per fiscal quarter.

Step 6: Repeat

The new problems are identified, regulated, declared emergencies, and assigned to new agencies. The cycle continues. It has never stopped. Some researchers at the Brookings Institution believe the cycle has been running since approximately 1913, though others place the origin as far back as the Whiskey Rebellion, which was itself a government-created problem that was heroically solved by the government, establishing the template for all future governance.

Case Study: The Great Lemonade Stand Crisis

No examination of the PCRC would be complete without the now-infamous Lemonade Stand Crisis of 2023, which remains the gold standard for government-manufactured catastrophe.

It began when the Bureau of Functional System Detection flagged a neighborhood in suburban Ohio where children were operating lemonade stands without permits, health inspections, business licenses, nutritional labeling, or OSHA-compliant pitcher-pouring protocols.

“These children were engaging in unregulated commerce,” said BFSD analyst Diane Ledger, her voice trembling with what appeared to be genuine alarm. “Unlicensed. Uninspected. Unloved by the regulatory state. We had to act.”

Within six months, the following regulations were imposed on lemonade stands nationwide:

• Permit A-7 (Citrus Beverage Vending Authorization) — $350 filing fee
• Health Inspection Compliance Form 19-B — Required quarterly, performed by a licensed Citrus Safety Officer
• Nutritional Disclosure Label — Must include sugar content, caloric information, and a warning that “this product was produced in a facility that also produces childhood memories”
• OSHA Workplace Safety Assessment — Required if the stand employs more than zero people
• Environmental Impact Statement — Mandatory assessment of lemon procurement’s effect on local citrus ecosystems
• Small Business Tax Registration — Because a seven-year-old making $11 in an afternoon is, technically, a sole proprietorship

The result was predictable. Lemonade stands vanished overnight. Children across America were forced indoors, confused and lemonless. A Washington Post editorial described it as “the collapse of the youth beverage economy.”

The government declared a Childhood Entrepreneurship Emergency. A new agency — the Office of Youth Beverage Entrepreneurship Recovery (OYBER) — was created with a $45 million annual budget. OYBER’s first act was to launch a grant program for “lemonade stand revitalization,” which required applicants to complete a 28-page form, submit a business plan, undergo a background check, and attend a mandatory 3-day “Citrus Commerce Compliance Workshop.”

To date, OYBER has funded zero lemonade stands. It has, however, produced 14 reports on the lemonade stand crisis, hosted 6 conferences (in Maui, for some reason), and created 3 sub-offices, each of which is currently identifying new problems.

Case Study: The Sidewalk Chalk Emergency of 2024

In early 2024, the Bureau of Functional System Detection detected children drawing on public sidewalks with chalk. In retrospect, what happened next was inevitable.

The EPA was consulted and determined that sidewalk chalk could potentially contain calcium carbonate, which is also found in limestone, which is a sedimentary rock, which forms over millions of years, making sidewalk chalk use “a potential geological heritage issue.” A regulatory framework was proposed.

Simultaneously, the Department of Transportation flagged sidewalk chalk drawings as potential “pedestrian distraction hazards,” citing a study that did not exist but was commissioned retroactively to justify the concern. The study, when it was eventually produced by the National Institute of Sidewalk Safety, concluded that chalk drawings “could theoretically cause a pedestrian to look down, which could theoretically cause them to not look up, which could theoretically result in something.”

“The science was clear,” said Dr. Harold Caution of the National Institute of Sidewalk Safety. “Or it would be clear, once we finished writing it. The important thing is that the conclusion was determined before the research began, which is how all good government science works — you start with the answer and reverse-engineer the question.”

Within months, the Sidewalk Chalk Emergency was in full bloom:

• The Chalk Registration Act required all chalk purchases to be logged with the Bureau of Art Supply Oversight
• Permit C-12 (Temporary Ground-Based Art Authorization) was required for any chalk use on public surfaces, with a 6-to-8-week processing time
• The Chalk Environmental Impact Review Board was established to assess each individual chalk drawing’s ecological footprint
• A Chalk Buyback Program was launched, offering $0.15 per stick of chalk turned in — a program that cost $12 million to administer and collected approximately $340 worth of chalk

The sidewalk chalk industry collapsed. Children, now unable to draw outside, moved to drawing on walls, which triggered an entirely separate regulatory cascade involving the Bureau of Vertical Surface Management.

A new agency — the Office of Ground-Based Artistic Expression (OGBAE) — was created to “restore chalk access to American children.” It has been operational for eight months. It has not yet restored any chalk access, but it has designed a very nice logo.

The Flowchart of Problem Creation

Our investigation uncovered an actual internal document used by the PCRC Training Division — yes, there is a training program — which contains the official Problem Creation Flowchart. We have reproduced it here:

1. Is something working? If YES, proceed to step 2. If NO, take credit and proceed to step 2 anyway.
2. Can it be regulated? If YES, regulate it. If NO, redefine the activity until it can be regulated, then regulate it.
3. Has the regulation caused problems? If YES, proceed to step 4. If NO, wait. It will.
4. Declare a crisis. Use words like “epidemic,” “emergency,” and “existential threat to the fabric of.” Do not finish that sentence. Let people fill in the blank.
5. Create an agency. Give it an acronym. Give it a budget. Give it a mission that is vague enough to justify anything and specific enough to sound legitimate.
6. Has the agency created new problems? If YES, return to step 1. If NO, the agency is not working. Create a new agency to investigate why.

“It’s not a cycle,” insisted Dr. Overreach when presented with the flowchart. “It’s a spiral. An upward spiral. Toward more caring. More love. More agencies dedicated to that love. If it looks like a circle from the outside, that’s only because you’re not close enough to see the growth. Get closer. Come inside. We have forms for you to fill out.”

The Numbers Don’t Lie (But They Don’t Exactly Tell the Truth Either)

According to data from the Government Accountability Office — which is itself a product of the PCRC, having been created to solve problems created by agencies created to solve problems — the federal government currently operates 442 agencies, of which an estimated 278 were created to solve problems caused by other agencies. Those 278 agencies have, in turn, created approximately 1,100 new problems, which are currently being addressed by 94 proposed agencies awaiting congressional approval.

The total annual cost of the Problem Creation and Resolution Cycle is estimated at $1.7 trillion, though the estimate itself cost $14 million to produce, and a subsequent estimate of the estimate’s accuracy cost an additional $3.2 million and concluded that “the number is probably a number.”

A recent Gallup poll found that 73% of Americans believe the government creates more problems than it solves. The government’s response was swift: it created the Office of Public Perception Problem Resolution, with a $60 million budget, to address the problem of people thinking the government creates problems.

“We take this perception very seriously,” said the office’s newly appointed director, Janet Credenza. “And we will solve it the same way we solve everything — by creating a comprehensive regulatory framework, declaring an emergency when it doesn’t work, and then forming an agency to deal with the fallout. It’s a proven system.”

She paused.

“Wait,” she said. “Did I just describe the thing? I think I just described the thing.”

She was reassigned the following week. The office continues its work.

Dr. Grant Funding is Government Is Love’s Senior Correspondent for Self-Sustaining Bureaucratic Phenomena. His previous investigation into the Department of Investigation Investigations is currently being investigated.