What Are Administrative Burdens?

Administrative burdens represent the costs that people encounter in their experience with government policies as they have actually been implemented. These costs fall primarily into three areas, identified in Table 1. 

Table 1. The three components of administrative burden

Why Do Burdens Matter?

Governments should be concerned about burdens for several reasons. First, as people’s experience with government become more difficult, they lose faith in government doing its job. They associate government with excessive formalism, delay, lack of responsiveness and pointless procedures, rather than as a means to solve collective problems. As burdens accumulate across multiple parts of government, the experience of burden becomes their experience of government. 

Second, even small burdens can have big effects. A range of empirical studies show that governments tend to underestimate the consequences of seemingly minor administrative demands. For example, for many social services, half or fewer of those who are eligible claim the support, at least partly because they don’t want to deal with the hassles involved. The flip side of this observation is that removing a “pain point” in an administrative process can have a potentially large positive effect. 

Third, burdens may reinforce or worsen inequality. One reason for this is that many services directed toward those with less political power or voice will tend to be more burdensome. Another reason is variation in human capital and other resources. People with less education will struggle with complicated forms of processes. Those with less financial resources will be unable to hire help. Those with weaker social or family networks will have less opportunity to ask for help. Poor physical and mental health make it difficult for people to complete onerous processes. Burdens may also be unequally targeted when conditions of discrimination occur, where policy designers or street-level bureaucrats ask more of marginalized groups.  

Where Do Burdens Come From?

Burdens can arise for multiple reasons. First, bureaucracies have traditionally not built a good means of detecting when administrative processes or experiences become too complex. Paying close attention to measuring customer experience, participation rates in public programs, or the patterns of who is excluded and why requires extra effort and attention. Second, policy designers are often unaware of the hassles that they create when they add more and more requirements onto a program. Research shows that policymakers with less direct experience of welfare programs, for example, are more willing to accept the introduction of burdens into those programs. More complex policy design, with more conditionality, usually means more burdens. Third, burdens sometimes continue because of benign neglect: no one intends the hassles, but there is a tendency to accept the status quo, even if better options are possible. 

Finally, burdens may be used as a form of policymaking by other means. Here, policy actors add more burdens onto a policy with the intent of limiting access to it, because they oppose the program’s goals, or do no support the constituency that would benefit from the program. In our book, for example, we documented multiple cases in which politicians who identified as small government conservatives would impose more and more hassles on citizens because they opposed social programs, and wanted to limit their reach. They would rarely acknowledge this motivation explicitly, which points to the value of burdens as a policymaking tool: they are often opaque, and their workings difficult to understand. This offers policymakers some measure of plausible deniability. They may say they are adding new verification checks in a welfare program to minimize fraud, for example, when there is little evidence of fraud, and the largest effect of the verification check is to minimize the participation of those who are truly eligible. 

What Can Governments Do about Burdens?

Reducing burdens means first identifying and acknowledging them. Policymakers need to measure burdens that the public experience, and consider the likelihood of such burdens when designing policy. They then need to compare the costs and benefits of state actions in a way that incorporates attention to burdens. This is standard practice when thinking about regulation of businesses, but often an afterthought when it comes to the regulation of individual citizens. 

Efforts by the Biden administration in the United States offer one model of burden reduction. Burden reduction has been a central theme of an executive order that President Biden signed to address racial equity, as well as to improve service delivery and rebuild trust in government. The executive orders call for agencies to fix specific problems, but to also engage in annual reporting on burden reduction efforts. All federal agencies are now given guidance on how to measure, identify and reduce burdens, and the White House has started publicly reporting on the progress that agencies are making.  

For government organizations seeking to identify and reduce burdens, a number of tools exist. Governments can shift burdens away from the public by using technology and administrative data, rather than asking the public to provide the same information again and again. Some tools are less familiar. Human-centered design is a technique to understand administrative processes from the user perspective, using those insights to adjust those processes to better match human capacities. Human-centered design will often employ distinct stages of discovery, design, delivery, and measurement as part of an iterative and ongoing process. Journey mapping is a visualization technique that maps out steps that clients take in their engagement with administrative processes. It helps to illustrate the complexity of processes, including potential pain points where users struggle. 

As with any public sector reform effort, mandates and tools can only go so far. To succeed in the long run, burden reduction efforts require leaders and organizational culture that puts the public at the center of public services, and investments in customer experience capacities to make this goal a reality. 

Policy Recommendations

• Policy design and implementation should strive to make public services simple, accessible and respectful.
• Policymakers should have a bias toward burden reduction.
• It is possible for governments to build burden reduction tools.
• Technology, administrative data, and human-centered design can help, but a supportive leadership and organizational culture is necessary. 

Implications for Practitioners

• Administrative burdens arise from learning, compliance and psychological costs that people encounter in their interactions with policy implementation.
• Administrative burdens are sometimes invisible to policymakers, but even small burdens can have large effects on people’s access to public services and rights.
• Burdens may reinforce or worsen existing patterns of inequality.

Pamela Herd is a Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on inequality and how it intersects with health, aging, and policy. She is an expert in survey research and biodemographic methods. She is currently one of the Co-Principal Investigators for the General Social Survey, and co-director of the Better Government Lab. Donald Moynihan is the inaugural McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. His research seeks to improve how government works. At the McCourt School, he co-directs the Better Government Lab, and authors the newsletter Can We Still Govern?