At some point, someone in the U.S. government decided that the government had to be “accessible” to children online. Nearly every government agency has some kind of web presence for the under-13 set.

In some cases, this makes sense; I’m sure that the Smithsonian’s kid-targeted information is greedily snapped up by fingers sticky with jam and ennui. The CIA and NSA both have surprisingly interesting kids’ web pages, focusing on disguises and codebreaking.

A lot of thse pages, of course, manage to weave some kind of anti-drug message into their overt message; but the majority are simply about the thrills of, say, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, or the Treasury Department’s Bond Calculator for Kids, or the U.S. Fire Administration, or the Simplified Tax and Wage Reporting System for Kids (on whose site you can run a virtual lemonade stand; the main activity is — I am not kidding — filling out tax forms. They do not seem to intend any irony at all.

Taking the cake for ineptitude and general puzzlement, however, is probably The National Agricultural Statistics Service For Kids website is worth a look, complete with little cartoon Stanley Statistician, and “Pam Pie-Chart”.

(There’s also NASS para los niños, con Estadistico Stanley. Ay caramba!)

Both the English and Spanish versions seem to be entirely content-free. After reading the sites, I still had no idea what the National Agricultural Statistics Service did. Something to go with agriculture and statistics, I’d wager.

(Update 14 May 2002: Sadly, the Simplified Tax and Wage Reporting System for Kids page seems to have gone away. It was truly a thing to behold; but now you’ll have to settle for the Wayback Machine version, which is missing some of the images. I cannot emphasize enough how jaw-droppingly funny this site was; if you were an anti-tax activist and wanted to underscore how government interference hobbles small businesses, you could not have put together a web site that illustrated your poitn any better.)