Voice of a Nation…Mostly
Reading Past the Four-Letter Words
By Dana Fowler
The federal register notice was published announcing the first meeting of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States¹ in May 2021. It named me as the Designated Federal Official (DFO), or lead for administration and legal compliance, and provided the logistics on how to register to attend. It also provided access to our team via email in order to provide an outlet for the legally required receipt of public comments.
It might have been a day, maybe two, from the posting of the announcement to receipt of that very first public comment. As DFO, I opened every email and logged and tracked each one. I distinctly remember one of the first ones that came in. I was at my desk drinking my morning coffee. The email was addressed to me as the DFO.
I was faced with a three page email in all capital letters. The author enumerated a number of complaints tangential to the work of the commission, focused entirely on the perceived failings of the Supreme Court. I don’t remember the exact issues raised, but I remember the tone. I remember the anger. I remember my name at the top.
It may have taken a little while, but I soon realized that this commenter was not alone. His anger mirrored the tone of many of the public comments we received over the course of the commission’s work. Well more than half of the comments we received sounded this way. Anger at the institutions, the government, and the president. All of the comments were addressed to the Commission and purportedly about their charge, but few of them actually got that specific.
As DFO, one of my roles was sharing all the public comments with commissioners for consideration, and ultimately publishing the comments. This may seem straightforward, but it wasn’t. Our public comment policy² (published with the first meeting notice) laid out the things we would not publish. Beyond profanity, and a number of other things, we also reserved the right to not publish comments that were not relevant to the work of the commission as defined by their charter. That judgement was informed by the lawyers on occasion, but the final judgement on whether or not a comment published was mine.
At this point in my career, I had been a federal employee for about two decades. This was my first direct exposure to the public comment process. And, despite my ability to exclude these comments within the established guardrails, I didn’t feel like I could do that. The process had opened the floodgates and as I watched, I needed to take it in and bear witness.
So, over the 10 months or so of my role as DFO, I did just that. I learned how to redact profanity and other prohibited items from the comments I received, spending far more time than I ever expected searching PDFs for four-letter words. But that approach allowed me to share more of the comments however tangentially-related.
As a public servant, I tried to be as transparent as possible, in line with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) and my own beliefs about the role of the public in their government. I published the angry and the complimentary. I published every comment that had been submitted by an individual, whether they were red or blue, angry, sad or joyous with few exceptions.
Public comment is the outlet for citizens to voice their support or concerns about proposed changes to how the federal government does business. In 2026, there have been a litany of federal register notices around updated, revised, or rewritten regulations. One of the most recent, which proposed substantial changes to the regulations around grants, garnered almost 500,000 comments (docket OMB-2026-0034 as of 8/20/26).³ And, in just the last few days there has been renewed public discussion about the discretion agencies have around publishing them.⁴
Public servants are often painted as obstructionists with an agenda or just incompetent. But like me when I was DFO, many of them are doing the work of listening to the people when almost no one has been.
I could have left those voices off the Commission public comment docket⁵ and I would have been within my legal authority. But shutting down those voices did not solve anything. Because after all, the federal government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
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¹ For background on the Commission’s purpose, members, and work, see its archived White House page: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/pcscotus
² The Commission's public comment policy was published as part of its first meeting notice: https://www.regulations.gov/document/PCSCOTUS-2021-0001-0002
³ For a live look at public comment tallies over time, see https://regulations-comments.abigailhaddad.com/
⁴ STAT News, "Comments on OMB research rule mysteriously removed from federal website," August 25, 2026: https://www.statnews.com/2026/08/25/russell-vought-omb-funding-comments-daughter-benefited-nih-research/
⁵ For the full public comment record from the Commission's work, see Docket PCSCOTUS-2021-0001 on Regulations.gov: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/PCSCOTUS-2021-0001/comments