This book is a product of a failure. During the presidency of Barack Obama, I was privileged to serve as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—OIRA, as it is called. OIRA is an obscure office, with a small staff of about fifty people, but it plays a significant role in the US government. It helps oversee the operation of the regulatory state, including health care, environmental protection, civil rights, highway safety, occupational health, food safety, agriculture, even homeland security. But it was originally created by the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), enacted in 1980, and one of its central missions is, well, to reduce paperwork.
Which brings me to the failure. For most of my time at OIRA, I was focused on large and dramatic issues: economic growth, health care reform, financial stability, climate change, clean air, clean water, race and sex discrimination, public health, highway safety. Paperwork reduction mattered, for sure, but it was not the highest priority. That wasn’t exactly wrong, but it wasn’t quite right, either. Countless programs, potentially benefiting so many people, end up failing because of excessive paperwork. Sometimes administrative burdens reduce economic growth and produce widespread unfairness. They even make people sick.
Sometimes the victims are businesses: from the largest to the smallest, from the well-established to start-ups. Sometimes the victims are people who need some kind of license or permit, perhaps to work. Sometimes the victims are the most vulnerable members of society: people who are in poor health, disabled, depressed, elderly, or poor. Sometimes paperwork and associated burdens hammer identifiable groups, including women and people of color. It was not until relatively late in my four-year stint that my team and I began to go hard at the problem. It was too late, and it was too little.
In the years since that time, we have learned an immense amount about the damage done by paperwork requirements, waiting time, reporting requirements, clearance processes, and the like. Some of what we have learned involves what is actually happening on the ground—what public officials are doing to people, and how they are harming them, by making them jump through an assortment of hoops. Some of what we have learned involves the human mind and its limits, which help to explain why such burdens can be so devastating. Some of what we have learned involves the private sector, which can damage its customers, and its own employees, by imposing sludge.
In many cases, officials themselves have no clue about the consequences of paperwork and related requirements. In many other cases, they know exactly what they are doing. That is true of hospitals, businesses, universities, and other institutions as well.
When people are required to jump through hoops, all sorts of bad things might happen, some of them surprising. One of the least surprising is that many people stop jumping. That might be a reasonable thing to do or essential to people’s self-preservation, but in many cases it is also a kind of tragedy. The good news is that a lot can be done to help.
A roadmap of what is to come: Chapter 1 clarifies the key concepts and offers a short account of the underlying problem. Chapter 2 investigates why sludge is so harmful, with special reference to behavioral science. It emphasizes the problems of inertia, present bias, and scarcity (cognitive, not economic). In combination, these are a potent brew. They help account for the damage done by sludge—much more, often, than anyone ever intended.
Chapter 3 explains that sludge is a product of architecture. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident, it has a major effect on outcomes. It could easily be otherwise. Chapter 4 offers a brisk, illustrative tour of the not-wonderful world of sludge, with reference to benefit programs, occupational licensing, student visas, and constitutional rights. Different people, with different values, will have different reactions to the level of burdens in different areas—but with respect to sludge, there is a great deal of room for people who disagree on fundamental issues to make common cause.
Chapter 5 investigates the legitimate reasons for sludge—above all, program integrity, which means that sludge can be a way to ensure that people who apply for things actually deserve to get them. People should not receive money to which they are not entitled, and sludge helps to prevent unjustified receipts. Record-keeping can also be important; public and private institutions impose sludge to ensure that they can learn how programs are doing. In addition, sludge can be a way of preventing recklessness and impulsiveness; it can increase the likelihood that people really want to do what they are about to do. By emphasizing justifications for sludge, chapter 5 can be seen as an effort to restore the balance.
Chapter 6 elaborates the idea of Sludge Audits, and urges that they are likely to pay large dividends. The government should be conducting many of them. The same is true of private institutions, which could save a lot of money and a lot of time and improve well-being for countless people (including their own employees). Chapter 6 also explores potential legal reforms, coming from all branches of government. While my focus here is on the United States, my hope is that these reforms can be adopted in many nations.
Chapter 7 is a brief manifesto, identifying the most precious thing that human beings are blessed to have.