Legislators and advocates have a poor understanding of how the bureaucracy actually works, so they continually add elements and exceptions to programs without understanding that they are adding another straw to the camel's back. Legislators don't want to spend the time streamlining and simplifying because it requires extensive knowledge of the program; and new legislation of this sort isn't exciting. Meanwhile advocates are focused on protecting individuals, and not on the larger picture. They want more complexity to protect the rights of each person in the program but don't understand the negative impact it can have on program operations and the entire population.
Program administrators are driven by the fear of audit findings. It is a permanent black mark on their record. Thus, they communicate to the public in the same legalese that the legislation and regulations are written in and making it incomprehensible, thereby making it audit proof. I've had program administrators admit that they don't understand what their public facing documents mean.
Furthermore, the fear extends so far that even when the program administrators clearly have the authority to make changes for the better, they don't do it. I remember telling a program administrator how they could improve the readability of their documents, and she asked "are we being sued over it?" All I could think is that lawsuits should be the floor for improvement, not the ceiling. Too often change is not considered as an option, only a requirement when there are new rules or a lawsuit.
"Old systems of accountability are not replaced; new ones are just layered upon them." This could be enshrined as the iron law of bureaucracy, most of which we can blame on legislatures that never really own their mistakes or responsibility for contradictory and dysfunctional statutes. A corollary is that administrators are loath to officially grant permission to anyone to stop doing anything. This creates waste, confusion, fear, and when lawmakers blame civil servants for any and all problems, resentment.
I'm glad you mentioned the private sector's contributions. They don't have to worry about rules like the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires agencies to estimate the burden of compliance with federal regulations and requests. In fact, many businesses are very creative in finding ways technology can shift more burdens onto their customers. Microsoft relies on a user community for technical assistance. Facebook doesn't recognize users as customers and so doesn't offer assistance at all. Supermarkets replaced over half of their checkout lines with self-checkout, and menus are becoming scarce in restaurants. All of these (and many more examples) present barriers to service.
What a great summary of the issues of administrative burden. Sometimes, it takes someone pointing out to those in charge the burden they're inflicting, but that someone has to have some voice of authority. When I was an academic and Associate Dean (retired now), the University began to use Blackboard (a learning management online tool). After a year or two the University decided that Blackboard could only be accessed using your University email. Because I was in the Business School with the largest graduate student population, I rounded up the Associate Provost, Blackboard administrator, other Associate Deans, and the head of IT to explain that graduate students didn't use a University email because they had to give up work time to come to campus, go to IT and get an account. Parking during the day without a sticker could result in a ticket and, since graduate students came to class at night when a sticker wasn't required, they didn't have a sticker. First year students had a University email account automatically generated when they registered with an email sent explaining how to access the account. The University is predominantly undergraduate and hadn't thought about graduate students. I suggested doing the same thing for graduate students and, happily, that happened. I wish organizations had anonymous suggestion boxes so users could suggest improvements and, the organization should publish an annual report of what was suggested and how it was handled.
thanks for sharing - its a great example of how local knowledge about frictions can inform decsionmaking to avoid unnecessary burdens. Part of the problem is when humans with this sort of knowledge (including clients) are disconnected from decisionmaking
I listened to Brook's interview on Making Sense a few months ago. It was good. And I concur, good to hear advocacy from the right for reducing administrative burden, rather bloat in this case. But that's not unusual. It's why OMB's and other's efforts have largely been supported by every administration.
Looking more broadly, outside of government, it's not the consensus that administrative bloat leads to growth in burden. Everyone engages with large bloated companies every day, many offering best in class service experiences. Take the Fortune 20, every company is extraordinarily large yet offers class leading simple customer interactions (except for those in Healthcare).
Burden matters to their business. In no US public institution does it matter. You can advocate for sludge audit but sludge audits have been done, and done nothing. Because burden hasn't been made important to anyone in a position of leadership.
You cite again the VA Trust scores as an indication of success for their burden reduction efforts. 3/4 of that data comes from pharmacy pickup surveys. It's meaningless. Nobody really cares enough to dig into the data because it is all for show. Quoting Bezos "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it." OMB doesn't care enough to inquire. Good news? Print it!
This is the problem, which is what Brooks I think is highlighting. The lack of real accountability for DEI, for burden reduction, etc., to deliver results that matter to the main objectives. Or in the case of burden, as you know is my soapbox, is to make the financial impact of burden part of the main objectives.
Thanks for this thoughtful response to Brooks's column, and for the shout-out to my work. However, I don't recall ever writing about airline de-regulation or welfare reform except perhaps to refer to them in a historical narrative. David Brooks quotes me not for de-regulation but for the point that humans lack the cognitive capacity to comply with red tape and get the job done. "Cognitive overload" is an epidemic in healthcare--due to byzantine re-imbursement bureaucracy (thousands of health plans should be standardized into, say, a dozen) and obsessive regulatory regimes for secondary goals such as privacy. While government is long overdue for a spring cleaning, the thrust of my work is to re-empower human agency, especially for officials. Tell us what to do, but don't tell us how to do it. I think America is suffering from a crisis of human disempowerment, including within govt, as I argue in a short book just published: Everyday Freedom.
I am always surprised when Americans blame obsessive regulations for the failures of their healthcare system. Now living in California, but having lived in Germany, France, The Netherlands, UK, it seems clear that a government-led healthcare system can be much more efficient than a private one. From my perspective, the problems of the US health-care stem from trying to apply market solutions to problems that are not well suited to that.
I am wondering whether both Brooks and yourself are missing something. I agree that time is important. But isn't the bureaucratic damage that accumulates over time a function of the growing size of the involved institutions?
Your travel-abroad example is unlikely to happen in a start-up. Even a smaller private university would have less bureaucratic hurdles.
You hint at the necessity to keep institutions mission focused. Could this be achieved by incentivizing small size over big size?
Economic theory emphasizes the importance of competition. Ideally, that would mean that as institutions grow and ossify, they become less competitive and die. This does happen, but does it happen often enough?
How could we restructure the law so that big institutions die a natural death and make space for less bureaucratic institutions?
I am not enough of an expert to judge Sunstein's proposal, but (as you mention in parentheses) it seems to go in the wrong direction, replacing one bureaucracy by another one.
Do you know whether anybody explored the idea of a small-is-good fee and dividend model?
I got the idea from the carbon fee and dividend. Taxing carbon at the source, but then, to avoid an increase in bureaucracy, handing out the money as a dividend to citizens.
I am wondering whether this could be turned into a model helping to reduce bureaucracy.
Legislators and advocates have a poor understanding of how the bureaucracy actually works, so they continually add elements and exceptions to programs without understanding that they are adding another straw to the camel's back. Legislators don't want to spend the time streamlining and simplifying because it requires extensive knowledge of the program; and new legislation of this sort isn't exciting. Meanwhile advocates are focused on protecting individuals, and not on the larger picture. They want more complexity to protect the rights of each person in the program but don't understand the negative impact it can have on program operations and the entire population.
Program administrators are driven by the fear of audit findings. It is a permanent black mark on their record. Thus, they communicate to the public in the same legalese that the legislation and regulations are written in and making it incomprehensible, thereby making it audit proof. I've had program administrators admit that they don't understand what their public facing documents mean.
Furthermore, the fear extends so far that even when the program administrators clearly have the authority to make changes for the better, they don't do it. I remember telling a program administrator how they could improve the readability of their documents, and she asked "are we being sued over it?" All I could think is that lawsuits should be the floor for improvement, not the ceiling. Too often change is not considered as an option, only a requirement when there are new rules or a lawsuit.
"Old systems of accountability are not replaced; new ones are just layered upon them." This could be enshrined as the iron law of bureaucracy, most of which we can blame on legislatures that never really own their mistakes or responsibility for contradictory and dysfunctional statutes. A corollary is that administrators are loath to officially grant permission to anyone to stop doing anything. This creates waste, confusion, fear, and when lawmakers blame civil servants for any and all problems, resentment.
I'm glad you mentioned the private sector's contributions. They don't have to worry about rules like the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires agencies to estimate the burden of compliance with federal regulations and requests. In fact, many businesses are very creative in finding ways technology can shift more burdens onto their customers. Microsoft relies on a user community for technical assistance. Facebook doesn't recognize users as customers and so doesn't offer assistance at all. Supermarkets replaced over half of their checkout lines with self-checkout, and menus are becoming scarce in restaurants. All of these (and many more examples) present barriers to service.
What a great summary of the issues of administrative burden. Sometimes, it takes someone pointing out to those in charge the burden they're inflicting, but that someone has to have some voice of authority. When I was an academic and Associate Dean (retired now), the University began to use Blackboard (a learning management online tool). After a year or two the University decided that Blackboard could only be accessed using your University email. Because I was in the Business School with the largest graduate student population, I rounded up the Associate Provost, Blackboard administrator, other Associate Deans, and the head of IT to explain that graduate students didn't use a University email because they had to give up work time to come to campus, go to IT and get an account. Parking during the day without a sticker could result in a ticket and, since graduate students came to class at night when a sticker wasn't required, they didn't have a sticker. First year students had a University email account automatically generated when they registered with an email sent explaining how to access the account. The University is predominantly undergraduate and hadn't thought about graduate students. I suggested doing the same thing for graduate students and, happily, that happened. I wish organizations had anonymous suggestion boxes so users could suggest improvements and, the organization should publish an annual report of what was suggested and how it was handled.
thanks for sharing - its a great example of how local knowledge about frictions can inform decsionmaking to avoid unnecessary burdens. Part of the problem is when humans with this sort of knowledge (including clients) are disconnected from decisionmaking
I listened to Brook's interview on Making Sense a few months ago. It was good. And I concur, good to hear advocacy from the right for reducing administrative burden, rather bloat in this case. But that's not unusual. It's why OMB's and other's efforts have largely been supported by every administration.
Looking more broadly, outside of government, it's not the consensus that administrative bloat leads to growth in burden. Everyone engages with large bloated companies every day, many offering best in class service experiences. Take the Fortune 20, every company is extraordinarily large yet offers class leading simple customer interactions (except for those in Healthcare).
Burden matters to their business. In no US public institution does it matter. You can advocate for sludge audit but sludge audits have been done, and done nothing. Because burden hasn't been made important to anyone in a position of leadership.
You cite again the VA Trust scores as an indication of success for their burden reduction efforts. 3/4 of that data comes from pharmacy pickup surveys. It's meaningless. Nobody really cares enough to dig into the data because it is all for show. Quoting Bezos "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it." OMB doesn't care enough to inquire. Good news? Print it!
This is the problem, which is what Brooks I think is highlighting. The lack of real accountability for DEI, for burden reduction, etc., to deliver results that matter to the main objectives. Or in the case of burden, as you know is my soapbox, is to make the financial impact of burden part of the main objectives.
Thanks for this thoughtful response to Brooks's column, and for the shout-out to my work. However, I don't recall ever writing about airline de-regulation or welfare reform except perhaps to refer to them in a historical narrative. David Brooks quotes me not for de-regulation but for the point that humans lack the cognitive capacity to comply with red tape and get the job done. "Cognitive overload" is an epidemic in healthcare--due to byzantine re-imbursement bureaucracy (thousands of health plans should be standardized into, say, a dozen) and obsessive regulatory regimes for secondary goals such as privacy. While government is long overdue for a spring cleaning, the thrust of my work is to re-empower human agency, especially for officials. Tell us what to do, but don't tell us how to do it. I think America is suffering from a crisis of human disempowerment, including within govt, as I argue in a short book just published: Everyday Freedom.
I am always surprised when Americans blame obsessive regulations for the failures of their healthcare system. Now living in California, but having lived in Germany, France, The Netherlands, UK, it seems clear that a government-led healthcare system can be much more efficient than a private one. From my perspective, the problems of the US health-care stem from trying to apply market solutions to problems that are not well suited to that.
I am wondering whether both Brooks and yourself are missing something. I agree that time is important. But isn't the bureaucratic damage that accumulates over time a function of the growing size of the involved institutions?
Your travel-abroad example is unlikely to happen in a start-up. Even a smaller private university would have less bureaucratic hurdles.
You hint at the necessity to keep institutions mission focused. Could this be achieved by incentivizing small size over big size?
Economic theory emphasizes the importance of competition. Ideally, that would mean that as institutions grow and ossify, they become less competitive and die. This does happen, but does it happen often enough?
How could we restructure the law so that big institutions die a natural death and make space for less bureaucratic institutions?
I am not enough of an expert to judge Sunstein's proposal, but (as you mention in parentheses) it seems to go in the wrong direction, replacing one bureaucracy by another one.
Do you know whether anybody explored the idea of a small-is-good fee and dividend model?
I got the idea from the carbon fee and dividend. Taxing carbon at the source, but then, to avoid an increase in bureaucracy, handing out the money as a dividend to citizens.
I am wondering whether this could be turned into a model helping to reduce bureaucracy.