The bigger obstacle to clear prose was the sheer number of people invited to complain about whatever Richard wrote. Anything that implicated any federal agency had to be sent to that agency for approval. “So we’d send it to, like, the EPA,” said Carter. “And it wasn’t one person at the EPA. It was ten. There were times I had five different comments on the same sentence all wanting me to change the sentence a different way.” The process drove Richard Hatchett nuts. “It just gets dumber and dumber,” he’d say.
