Not to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only.

It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.

That e-filing web site for taxes has never worked for my son because he can’t complete the id.me process, it might be as simple as you are an unperson if you use an android phone or maybe because he’s just started in the workforce he does not have a long history of tax filing and credit history to match up with.

Two years in a row we’ve been able to fill out a 1040 and the NY state equivalent and make a paper submission in less time than it takes to reach an operator on hold.

These identity verification services look like a scam to me. LinkedIn incessantly hassles me to verify with CLEAR and it always fails without a clear error message, either “it just doesn’t work” or my hair has grown too much since I got my driver’s license or it is making me take my glasses off and comparing to a driver’s license photo where I am wearing glasses.

> user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites

I discovered this when it was late at night and I was procrastinating going to bed and I was curious what my estimated Social Security benefit would be at retirement so I tried to log into mySSA and it said the website is closed from like 11 PM to 5 AM or something like that.

I couldn't believe it. I could understand a weekly several-hour maintenance/batch processing window, but DAILY?

It starts to make a lot more sense when you realise there is a huge group in the US actively trying to make the government fail. It's pretty hard to make a good and user-friendly website when every few years some high-level people try to kneecap you.

These aren't unsolvable problems. The UK, for example, had invested a lot of time and effort into making their websites user-friendly. In most countries filing taxes online is something you can do during your lunch break - without paying the Turbotax maffia. Driver's license? You can order that online, and make an appointment for a 15-minute window to pick it up.

If interacting with the government is painful, it is almost always because someone benefits from it being painful.

Gaming of the procurement system. The websites are all written by big consulting outfits. Not to mention the disaster that is big corporate IT projects combined with government rules.

Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent.

As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortune 500 are often the same sort of consultant-driven crap.

This. The website for buying treasury products is straight out of the year 2002. The login is so bad I would never consider buying them there - the service fee charged by brokerages is absolutely worth it in this case.