What David Brooks Gets Wrong about the Time Tax

Both private companies and conservative politicians contribute to the problem

As someone who has spent many years thinking about why administrative burdens emerge in American society, and what can be done about them, I am always excited/concerned when influential voices take the cause seriously. So it was with a mixed emotions that I read David Brooks, the influential New York Times opinion writer, Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts. So what did he get right and wrong?

First, it’s great that David Brooks is paying attention to the burdensome experiences, “…a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else.” Indeed, sir! Welcome to my world! LFG!

Brook’s perch is as a moderate conservative. So I think it is worth seriously wrestling with the piece. Understanding both the strengths and weaknesses of his arguments reveals not just his biases, but those of others, including my own.

The positive take is that Brooks makes a persuasive conservative case against what Annie Lowrey has dubbed “the time tax.” I hope he uses his significant platform to continue to do so. The negative is that he ignores or mischaracterizes both some of the sources and potential solutions of administrative burdens.

Bureaucracies create administrative burdens…

Here are the things that I think Brooks broadly gets right: large organizations generally, and units within organizations with non-mission based tasks in particular, tend towards formalization, imposing negative externalities upon others that accumulate over time. Brooks says:

The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control. In every organization I’ve interacted with, the administrators genuinely want to serve the mission of the organization, but the nature of their jobs is to enforce compliance with this or that rule.

Large and formal organizations add layers of management as they grow, to manage the span of control of employees as it extends beyond what any one supervisor can manage. With size, impersonal rules replace informal guidance, and the bureaucracy grows. Over time, new employees become more and more attentive to the rules than the mission.

As units or offices bureaucratic organizations are created, they focus on their specific task, even if it is not contributing to the mission. Once in place, they generate rules and processes intended to serve the purpose of their office, but may also simply impose burdens on others while producing marginal value. The design of bureaucracies makes such offices unlikely to detect the negative externalities they create, and defensive about the claim that they are adding little value.

Let me offer a personal example. I had to travel abroad for work recently. The prior standard operating procedure in the past is that I email a staff person, who verifies I have funds to cover the cost of the trip, and I supply them with receipts after. Relatively informal, and logical. But I discovered a new university rule, which is that I now have to register my overseas travel with the university before I go, which has contracted with some sort of travel risk management service. So now, I have to set an account with and provide my detailed itinerary to this private contractor. I spent 20 minutes doing this, and in return, they sent me a stream of fairly useless emails about the risks of traveling. For me, the rule was pretty much a deadweight loss. Lost time, no benefit to myself or the organizational mission of teaching, research and service. But I can see why the organization created the rule, which is as a form or risk management, making it easier to verify if faculty or staff are in harms way if a conflict, disease, or natural disaster occurs, and to also being able to say that the organization had communicated all known risks to them. A university President frustrated by a lack of information about, say, if students are in danger during an overseas terrorist attack might ask administrators to ensure this never happens again. And so a new rule, and a new system, is born with the best of intentions. It costs money and time and for the most part provides little value.

These are not new observations. They are as old as the study of bureaucracies (e.g. most famously Max Weber, or Michel’s iron law of oligarchy, or Robert Merton on goal displacement). Bureaucracies become cautious, and in the public sector especially, that caution is often justified. There are entire research literatures on public sector negativity bias, organizational reputation and blame avoidance. Rules serve as a hedge against blame. This is why I’m skeptical of Brooks invocation of Haidt and Lukianoff’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” - the idea that younger people have become more coddled, and we have refashioned out institutions to accommodate these sensibilities - as a driving force in the growth of bureaucracy. A more persuasive claim is that organizations develop more rules and procedures and administrative offices as they are more subject to public attention and authority. Public organizations are more bureaucratic because their missteps are more newsworthy, and the public can direct elected officials to add layer upon layer of accountability. This adds more internal offices to provide that accountability, more reporting structures, more rules. Old systems of accountability are not replaced; new ones are just layered upon them.

Whether these offices are perceived to have value reflects a) subjective assessments about their purpose, and b) rarely investigated empirical evidence about their impact. Public administration scholars have long focused on first point point. In 1946, Dwight Waldo wrote that “one man's red tape is another man's system” while 30 years later, Herbert Kaufman noted that “one man's red tape is another's treasured procedural safeguard.”

Subjective assessments of the value of particular offices is easier than actually investigating their impacts, especially if those assessments align with with your prior beliefs or ideological campaigns. For example, Brooks is happy to sign on to the relatively new and wildly successful campaign to argue for the abolishment of DEI bureaucracies.

Conservatives complain that diversity, equity and inclusion administrators are injecting a dangerous ideology into American campuses. That’s true. But the bigger problem is that these workers are among the swelling ranks of administrators.

Lets just pause for a moment to reflect upon how quickly and easily the far right has succeeded in persuading moderate voices that offices who dedicated to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are promoting a “dangerous ideology.” It is seemingly so self-evident that no evidence is needed.

Brooks also bemoans administrators and managers “doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”” Lets assume that Brooks and many others value harassment trainings at zero. The evidence on the efficacy of such trainings is, at best, mixed. But those other tasks seem important. Having a clear mission, having data that tells you how well you are doing, and functional “systems” (lets say an IT system) matter a lot to organizational success! It doesn’t seem wise to waltz into an organization and fire people working on those tasks without actually verifying if they are having a useful impact or not.

Setting aside the subjective assessments of bureaucratic offices, outsiders and even organizations themselves are bad at assessing the value of such offices.

…and bureaucracies might be able to reduce burdens

There is a better way to deal with bureaucracy, which Brooks ignores, which is to apply what Cass Sunstein has labeled “sludge audits” i.e., review of rules and processes to see if they truly add value. (The irony here is that monitoring the growth of bureaucracy creates another bureaucracy and set of reporting procedures).

Organizations can also do more to devote resources to understanding and improving customer experience. Historically, the public sector has been especially bad at doing this because it was not seen as a priority. But there are success stories, like improvements in veterans affairs, FEMA or IRS service delivery.

The Biden administration has been devoting unanticipated effort to reducing the time tax — Biden even signed a customer experience executive order that targeted the time tax and administrative burdens. Brooks does not mention any of this. Perhaps he is simply unaware of it, because such efforts are not seen as newsworthy. And so politicians who might echo Brooks complaints about bureaucracy in speeches don’t invest real effort into fixing them. Why bother, if you don’t get much political credit for difficult and time-consuming work? The political incentives to do better would improve if there was more coverage of the efforts to make public organizations more functional, not just complaints when things don’t work. Maybe Brooks will feature this in his future work on this topic!

Markets generate administrative burdens too

There are other things that Brooks overlooks or gets wrong. He cites Philip Howard as an author offering a useful perspective on bureaucracy. In the piece that Brooks cites, Howard bemoans the failures of Presidents to push back on red tape, with the exceptions of “industry deregulation under Carter, welfare reform under Clinton.” In the next paragraph after he cites Howard, Brooks bemoans that an airline customer service representative cannot get him rebooked on a cancelled flight. Bureaucracy!

Wait though. Wasn’t the airline industry deregulated under…wait for it…Jimmy Carter?

Maybe it sounds like I’m being picky here. We can entirely sympathize with the plight of wasting time trying to persuade someone to solve our problems when they have no power to do so. But my point is that these problems occur in the industries that Howard cites approvingly as examples of deregulation. A large, profit-seeking firm in a deregulated industry has decided that it is better for the bottom line not to empower its staff to help clients.

Its not just airlines. Brooks most compelling examples come from the health care system. Which is, in America, consumes an astonishing amount of our time and money. Americans spend, by one estimate, the equivalent of $22 billion a year deal with health care administration. It is also a very marketized system. And the degree of American health care bureaucracy reflects that marketization. If you’ve used health care systems in other countries, the time tax certainly feels lower. Within the US, the users of our largest public health care system: veterans health administration, rate it better than private providers. This is not to say that Veterans Health Administration is not a giant bureaucracy, just that it might be easier to manage a complex task (personal health) within a reasonably well-run bureaucracy than bouncing between multiple profit-seeking providers who can weaponize burdens to make money. In recent work with Pam Herd, Hilary Hoynes and Jamila Michener, we labeled this problem as:

administrative fragmentation: the multiplicity of administrative actors that an individual must interact with to complete a task. It seems axiomatic that administrative costs increase when a person has to negotiate with multiple organizations. Most obviously, learning costs increase because someone must be aware of more than one relevant organization and understand how to engage with multiple sets of rules. Compliance costs also increase as the person commutes between organizations, and has to provide documentation multiple times to different actors. The frustrations of being shuffled back and forth also mount.

Or look at student loans. One reason why people hate student loans is not just the debt they have incurred, but the negative experiences and inconsistent treatment they have received from private loan servicers that the government relies on. By marketizing student loan debt, we have also made the experience of having student loans more bureaucratic.

The idea that deregulation will reduce the time tax might sometimes be true. But sometimes, deregulation will make things worse, serving to empower private actors who see ordeal mechanisms as a profitable mode of operating.

As for Howard’s second example, welfare reform under President Clinton, I’m not sure whose perspective he is taking here. Certainly, states were given more autonomy to experiment with their welfare systems. And they used much of that autonomy to make TANF so burdensome to access that the program has become increasingly irrelevant. Welfare reform also delinked SNAP from TANF, creating a whole additional set of burdens that saw take-up of SNAP drop precipitously. In other words, for the people who actually received welfare programs, welfare reform increased administrative burdens. This reflects that federalism, rather than triggering laboratories of innovation, allow states to impose more burdens with less oversight.

These examples reflect a conflict in Brooks reasoning that should concern us all. He is interested in freedom. But what kind of freedom is he, and by extension, the rest of us, interested in? Is it freedom from bureaucracy? Or is it freedom to impose burdens? His problematic examples — the frustrating encounters, the time lost — suggest the former. But some of the implied solutions — deregulation — might encourage the latter.

Maybe Trump supporters oppose bureaucracy; Trump will give them a lot more of it

Brooks final paragraph suggest that Trumpism represents frustration with bureaucracy.

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

Lets set aside about the plausibility of whether Trump supporters are motivated in this way, and ask what I think is a better question: if they are angry about bureaucracy, will they be served by Trumpian solutions? Probably not. Such solutions include not just massive politicization that will reduce the quality of public services. Based on Trump’s record, we know that he will directly impose more bureaucracy, by, for example:

• Removing worker autonomy: Brooks correctly points out that reducing the autonomy and discretion of workers leads to more burdens, both for the workers, and the public they serve. Trump’s vision of massive politicization will lead to a terrified bureaucracy, unable to make the smallest decisions without the say-so of political appointees. It is a recipe for burdens.

• Deconstructing parts of the government whose job it is to stop citizens from being scammed: this included changing the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or refusing to offer citizens the help they were legally entitled to having been ripped off by private higher education institutions.

• Introducing administrative burdens in the social safety net - Trump signed an executive order calling for adding work requirements to any social program. When this was applied to Medicaid, the results were disastrous, leading to eligible people losing benefits because of the red tape involved in documenting work, and generating no labor market benefits.

• Reducing capacity in government to benefit industry or those who don’t want to pay taxes - for example, Trump and other Republicans have opposed badly needed investments in IRS capacity that have improved customer service and allowed the IRS to pilot a free tax filing system. Trump wants you to pay Turbotax, and spend more time fruitlessly trying to get an IRS employee on the phone.

Its not just Trump. Across a wide swath of domains, conservatives have deliberately and consistently layered more and more bureaucracy onto peoples lives in public services: abortion, voting, and safety net services. Education is another example: An excellent recent piece in the New York Times detailed how DeSantis anti-trans policies has exponentially increased paperwork for all parents and school staff on matters as minor as whether a student can get a band-aid without parental paperwork. The case vividly illustrates how burdens emerge when policymakers distrust both the public and their own employees.

Administrative burdens can be a form of policymaking by other means, allowing the achievement of social control or other policy goals with a measure of plausible deniability in cases where the true purposes of policymakers are unpopular. If Brooks does progressives a service by pointing out how their well-intentioned values unintentionally beget administrative burdens, he also misses how conservatives are perfectly happy to impose bureaucracy upon citizens for less noble reasons.