The Waiting

Anyone who has tried to get something done with the government of Guam learns, before long, to wait. A permit, a license, a hire, a ruling, a simple reply: the steps are written down and clear enough, and then the matter stops moving. Weeks pass. The weeks become months. The websites where some of this is meant to happen look a generation out of date, and behind them the real work waits on someone covering several jobs at once, or on a position that was never filled.

I did not come to Guam with roots. I came with a family, a willingness to work, and the assumption that effort and competence would find their place. For the most part the island has been generous to me. But I have done my share of waiting here, looking for my own footing and watching other capable people look for theirs, and I have come to see that the waiting is not a minor inconvenience. It is a cost, and it is paid by the people who can least afford to absorb it.

This is not impatience. The delay is documented, in the government's own records.

A task force recommended putting building permits and business licenses online in 2019; years later, the computerized system still had not been delivered.¹ At the Customs and Quarantine Agency, a request to clear out old records, approved in 2009, did not finish working its way through procurement until 2025, and as of early 2026 the clearing still had not been done.² A purchase request submitted one January was still waiting on a signature the following August, in a financial system that takes 3 to 4 months to move a single request to completion.² For 3 years that same agency ran with a single working x-ray machine, while the replacements sat stuck in procurement.² Little of this is anyone's negligence. It is what happens when too few people are asked to do too much: the audits found supervisors pulled from their own duties to cover operations, and procedures left unrevised since 2003 for lack of time to revise them.³

None of it reflects a population that cannot handle better. By the end of 2025, 80.5 percent of Guam's residents were online,⁴ fluent in the banking and messaging and commerce of their own daily lives. The island's own technology office, meanwhile, still lists its standards for software development, project management, and networks as under construction.⁵ The people are ready. The machinery that serves them is not. The island does not lack for ideas about what a working system looks like; what it lacks is a way to deliver one.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Most of what goes undone is not work that needs a human mind. It is routine: checking a form against a rule, matching one record to another, issuing a receipt, moving a request to the next desk. Software has handled tasks like these elsewhere for decades, and the newest tools do them faster and more cheaply still. They can carry the routine from end to end and set aside only what calls for a person, for far less than it costs to leave the work undone. The aim is not to replace the people. There are already too few of them. The aim is to take the routine off their hands, so they can give their time to what genuinely needs judgment, and so residents stop waiting months and years for the rest.

The obvious objection is fair enough: a government that could not replace a broken x-ray machine in 3 years is not about to deploy anything clever. But that is the argument turned the right way around. Every failure in the record is the same kind, the large, multi-year, big-ticket procurement that the island's institutions handle worst of all. The case here is for the opposite: small, ready-made tools, bought or rented cheaply and running within weeks, not another system commissioned over years. The hard part has never been knowing what to build. It has been delivering anything large, and the way past that is to stop building things that large.

It has been done already. Honolulu, whose permitting office was for years a byword for delay, put a piece of automation at the front of the process to check each application for completeness before it reached a reviewer. The prescreen that once took roughly 6 months began taking a matter of days, while the staff kept the judgment that actually needs a person.⁶ The first thing worth automating is the gate everyone is stuck at, and clearing it is the work of months, not decades.

Whatever the path, people cannot keep waiting. A family does not pause its life while a license sits in a queue. A business does not stall its plans waiting on a permit. A worker with something to offer does not wait years for a government to decide it has room for another. Every month a service goes undelivered is a month of someone's life handed over to a desk, and the island has been spending that currency freely.

The waiting is not shared evenly, either. The person who knows someone can now and then move to the front of the line; the newcomer without a name to drop waits its whole length. But the line moves too slowly for everyone, and most of what it is waiting on could simply be done.

So this is why the coming election matters to me, more than I expected it to.

I am not interested in personalities, and no one candidate is the answer. What I am watching for is a plan to actually do the work: to put the tools that already exist to use, to clear the backlogs that have been allowed to harden into something permanent, and to measure success in services delivered and time saved, rather than in positions announced and ribbons cut.

I will be honest about my own stake, because it would be dishonest to pretend I have none. I came to this island hoping to build a life worth keeping, the same hope that brought many families here long before mine. If I never had to earn another dollar, I would give my days to work like this and count it a privilege. But providing for a family is its own duty, one I hold gladly and will not set aside. And the point was never my own situation. It is the household kept waiting on a decision, the small business whose permit will not clear, the resident owed a service the island has every means to provide. They are the ones the waiting costs most, and they are the reason a serious plan cannot come soon enough.

The work can be done, and much of it sooner and for less than the island assumes, with tools that already exist and people who are ready to use them. An election is a choice between continuing to wait and beginning to move. I know which one I am hoping for, and in November I will give my vote to whoever truly means to get things done.