The Office of Management and Budget is required by law to produce a widely neglected annual report, the Information Collection Budget of the United States Government (ICB), which quantifies the annual paperwork burden that the government imposes on its citizens. The most recent ICB finds that in 2015, Americans spent 9.78 billion hours on federal paperwork.1
The Treasury Department, including the Internal Revenue Service, accounted for the vast majority of the total: 7.36 billion hours. The Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for 696 million hours imposed on (among others) doctors, hospitals, and the beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. The Department of Transportation accounted for no less than 214 million hours, including elaborate requirements imposed on truck drivers, automobile companies, railroads, and airlines. Comparatively speaking, the 91 million annual hours that came from the Department of Education might not seem like much, but for administrators, teachers, and students, they were pretty burdensome.
The ICB does not make for riveting reading, but it is worth pausing over those 9.78 billion hours. Suppose we insisted that for the entirety of 2019 all 2.7 million citizens of Chicago must work forty hours a week at a single task: filling out federal forms. By the end of 2019, they would not have come within four billion hours of the 2015 total. The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) was enacted in 1980 in an effort to reduce this burden, but it doesn't appear to be living up to its name. (Disclosure, or perhaps confession: from 2009 to 2012, I served as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs [OIRA], and in that capacity I oversaw administration of the PRA.)
If we use the average value for an hour of work as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics—$27—then those 9.78 billion hours are the equivalent of $264.06 billion. That is more than double the budget of the Department of State and the Department of Transportation, and more than triple the budget of the Department of Education. And the monetary figures greatly understate the problem. Paperwork burdens can make it difficult or impossible for people to enjoy fundamental rights, such as the right to vote or to obtain life-changing benefits—or to avoid crushing hardships.
For paperwork burdens, the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Richard Thaler has coined a good term: “sludge.” You might want to sign your child up for free school meals, but wading through the sludge might defeat you. To get financial aid for college, students have to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). It's long and complicated; many students give up and fail to apply to college at all. The right to vote may be the most fundamental right of all, but if the registration process is full of sludge, a lot of people might end up disenfranchised.
Reducing these burdens can have an enormous impact on people's lives. For free school meals, the Department of Agriculture has adopted a “direct certification” program, which means that if the locality or the school district has enough information to know that children are eligible, they are automatically enrolled. In recent years, more than 11 million children have benefited from the program (about 91 percent of the eligible population). Simplification of the FAFSA dramatically increases the likelihood that low-income students will apply for aid and eventually enroll in college. A number of states have adopted automatic voter registration, which means that if eligible citizens interact with a state agency (for example, by receiving a driver's license), they are registered as voters. In 2016, Oregon's automatic registration program produced more than 250,000 new voters; almost 100,000 of them voted. The private sector can also do a lot more to reduce sludge—for example, it can help people choosing among health care plans by simplifying options and explaining what is likely to be their best choice.
Paperwork burdens are often a product of decisions by public officials. At the national level, those decisions come from Congress or from administrative agencies, which have diverse motivations. Many of their goals are legitimate. Perhaps most important, they might be trying to ensure that people are actually eligible for the benefits for which they are applying. In addition, officials might be trying to collect data that they can use to improve their programs. Sometimes they use paperwork burdens as a kind of rationing device, limiting licenses, permits, or money to people who are willing to run some kind of gauntlet.
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