Most days, I approach the federal government with professional skepticism. It is, after all, more or less the business model around here.
But September 11 occupies a different place. Personally.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, I found myself wondering not whether Americans remember, and not whether federal employees care, but what our government looks like when it remembers.
So I started opening websites.
Not reports. Not press releases buried in archives. Not commemorative statements I could find by searching for the right words. I started with the front doors: the homepages the federal government was showing the world on the morning of September 11, 2026.
This was not an attempt to grade agencies on patriotism, and it was never intended to become a list of bureaucratic winners and losers. A missing banner tells us almost nothing about the people working inside an agency. There are hard-working public servants, law-enforcement officers, veterans and others throughout these institutions for whom September 11 is considerably more personal than a communications decision on a website.
Instead, I wanted to try something less conventional. I wanted to use the visible federal web as a kind of cultural instrument. Twenty-five years later, what place does September 11 occupy in the visible institutional consciousness of the federal government?
Looking Through the Front Door
Beginning early on September 11, I examined, a broad cross-section of public-facing federal homepages. These website checks included agencies and institutions ranging from DHS and TSA to the State Department, Secret Service, CISA and Capitol Police.
I looked at cabinet departments, military services, national-security and law-enforcement organizations, cultural institutions and other public-facing parts of the federal establishment. I recorded whether September 11 material was immediately prominent, present elsewhere on the homepage, incidental or not observed. I also paid attention to what the page emphasized instead.
Then, at noon, I did it again.
The second snapshot mattered because websites move. A communications shop may update a homepage after a morning ceremony. A carousel may rotate. A story can rise from the middle of a page to the top. So rather than pretend a 7 a.m. observation represented the entire day, I allowed one second look. At noon, the census closed.
The methodology is admittedly imperfect. A homepage is not an agency. A communications office is not its workforce. A banner is not grief, and the absence of one is not indifference. This exercise measured visibility, not patriotism.
But federal homepages are also finite public spaces. Institutions decide what occupies them. Taken individually, those decisions may mean very little. Viewed together, they offer a snapshot of institutional attention.
What Was Visible
The federal landscape on the morning of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was not uniform.
Some institutions placed September 11 unmistakably at the front door. The Department of Defense (now branded the Department of War) carried multiple remembrance features, including material marking 25 years since the attacks and content connected to the Pentagon Memorial.
The National Guard led with a September 11 remembrance and featured Guard members recalling their experiences. The Air Force and Space Force displayed (almost identical) commemorative material in their homepage feature areas. The Department of Justice prominently presented a video from its 25th-anniversary memorial.
Other acknowledgments required a little more looking. On the Army homepage during the morning check, September 11 material appeared farther down the page rather than dominating the opening view. By noon, that had changed, where a 25th-anniversary Army Museum story had moved into the first position under Top Stories, while a separate Patriot Day “Never Forget” feature was also present.
Capitol Police offered another variation. Its September 11 item was there, but farther down in a social-media highlight rather than occupying the principal visual space.
And then there were many homepages where no identifiable September 11 acknowledgment was visible during our observation. Among the pages we examined were the White House, FBI, ATF, Department of Veterans Affairs, National Archives, Library of Congress, U.S. Courts, Architect of the Capitol and several others.
Manual inspection of some otherwise difficult-to-check sites likewise found no visible 9/11 material at the time of the snapshot, even after examining carousels or scrolling farther down the page.
The noon pass did not produce a sweeping change. The Army’s elevation of its anniversary material was notable precisely because most of the landscape remained relatively stable. That gave us some confidence that the morning picture was not merely the consequence of arriving before federal web teams had finished their coffee.
Silence on a Homepage Is Not Forgetting
This is where the experiment became more interesting, and where a simple tally would have become misleading.
The White House, for example, did not prominently display September 11 material on the homepage we observed, but it had published commemorative material earlier in the week.
The Coast Guard’s principal homepage was overwhelmingly mission- and operations-oriented, yet Coast Guard editorial channels carried substantial 9/11 coverage and retrospectives.
The Department of Veterans Affairs likewise had commemorative activity elsewhere even though its main homepage remained focused largely on benefits and services.
Those examples matter.
If the question were simply, “Did this agency remember September 11?” then searching the homepage would be a remarkably poor test. Federal institutions held ceremonies, published histories, posted on social media, remembered fallen colleagues and marked the anniversary in ways a homepage census cannot measure.
But that was not quite the question.
I was interested in prominence. That is, what did the federal government choose to put in front of a visitor arriving at its digital front doors on this particular morning?
What Was in the Window Instead?
Once I began looking at the project that way, absence became less interesting by itself. What occupied the space instead became equally important.
Across the sites examined were current administration priorities, enforcement statistics, recruiting messages, agency services, operational news, leadership announcements and the ordinary business of government. America’s 250th celebration and related 250th-anniversary messaging also appeared repeatedly across the federal landscape.
There is no scandal in any of that. Government still has to govern on September 11. Veterans still need benefits. Travelers still need information. Law-enforcement agencies still have cases. The country does not stop operating because the calendar reaches an anniversary.
But homepages have finite attention. Every homepage is an exercise in selection.
That made the recurring juxtaposition of America at 250 and September 11 at 25 particularly striking. One commemorates the continuity of the American experiment. The other remembers a morning when that experiment was attacked, and when, for a time, Americans responded with an extraordinary sense that whatever else divided us, we belonged to the same country.
I remember a rapid and relatively moving rendition of “God Bless America” sung on the steps of Capitol Hill. Sure, it was presented by a large number of congressional leaders, for many of whom singing was not why they were elected. But is as tangible as the American flag being visible in every direction for months after the attack.
It made me wonder, in today’s Washington, would we see the same thing? Or would politics trump our ability to unite in such a way?
Twenty-Five Years Is a Long Time
Perhaps that is the part of this exercise I found hardest to quantify.
For those of us who remember September 11, twenty-five years can feel impossibly short. The images have not acquired the sepia tone of distant history. There are sounds, places and moments from that day that remain stubbornly contemporary.
Institutionally, however, twenty-five years is enormous.
Administrations have come and gone. Wars began and ended. Agencies were created and reorganized. People joined the federal workforce, served entire careers and retired. Young Americans born after the attacks are now old enough to serve inside institutions whose modern missions were shaped by an event they cannot personally remember.
That may be the deeper question underneath this odd little experiment:
What happens when lived memory becomes institutional memory?
Every generation eventually confronts that transition. Pearl Harbor moved from living experience to inherited history. World wars passed from veterans’ memories into museums, textbooks and national ceremonies. September 11 is undergoing the same process in real time.
Perhaps institutional memory does not simply disappear. Perhaps it changes location. It moves from the homepage to the archive, from the employee who was there to the employee who has heard the story, from an immediate national wound to an annual ceremony, from lived experience to history.
A Litmus Test That Cannot Give a Laboratory Result
I don’t want to pretend this exercise can tell us more than it can.
There is no scientifically defensible percentage at which a nation has “remembered enough.” There is no proper number of homepage banners. And I would be suspicious of anyone claiming that a website carousel can measure the patriotism of the people behind it.
Our census measured something narrower. It measured what a broad collection of federal institutions chose to show the public through their principal digital entrances during two snapshots on the morning of the 25th anniversary of September 11th.
Some remembered loudly. Some remembered elsewhere. Some offered only a small acknowledgment. Some showed nothing we could identify on the homepage at all.
Together, those choices produced something that no individual agency page could—a portrait.
The Art of Noticing
Bureaucracy Times spends most days examining what government gets wrong. Audits, procurement failures, unanswered FOIA requests, regulatory peculiarities and administrative absurdities provide no shortage of material. Rolling one’s eyes at the federal government is occasionally less an editorial position than an occupational requirement.
But skepticism toward government and love of country are not contradictory ideas.
I came to this exercise from two perspectives that do not always appear on these pages at the same time. I came as a citizen practicing the art of noticing, and as a retired soldier enduring the art of remembering.
September 11 was not simply a day on which the United States was attacked. It was also one of those rare moments when the abstraction called “the United States” suddenly became tangible. For a brief period, the nation felt like a nation. The whole of government mobilized. Americans who disagreed about almost everything discovered something larger they still held in common.
Twenty-five years later, the federal government still remembers.
But it does not remember uniformly, and it does not always remember out loud.
Maybe institutions aren’t so different from people in that respect.
Memory changes before it disappears, but I will not forget.
Bureaucracy Times 