Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsAmericans are bogged down in paperwork for reasons that are sometimes necessary, sometimes thoughtless—and, at times, nefarious. In her new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—And How to Fix It, my colleague Annie Lowrey looks at all those hours spent looking for tax documents or trying to certify income for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or the FAFSA and finds that things don’t have to be this way.A time tax is an infliction of “paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation” that Americans suffer to get the rights they are guaranteed. We have the right to vote in a democracy; a time tax creates obstacles to those rights and makes realizing them cumbersome: They show up as extra identification requirements, when voter fraud is incredibly rare—or, in Jim Crow, as literacy tests.So many things are easy now. If I get hungry, I can order food from just about anywhere with just a few swipes of my thumb; one click at midnight, and diapers can be at the door before the sun rises. Why is there still such sludge in our bureaucratic systems? On this episode of Radio Atlantic, Annie joins me to discuss how these time taxes show up in our lives and waste our time, and how to make our government more efficient.The following is a transcript of the episode:Annie Lowrey: I think if instead of saying, This is about the poor people getting this program, or This is about making sure that these programs are secure, we could have a politics that says, This is malign; this is bad policy making. We give the government $8 trillion a year, and it passes back this garbage? No! No.[Music]Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today we need to think about all of the ways that the government wastes our time.I’m only half-joking. If you’ve ever thought to yourself while filling out your taxes or trying to cancel a gym membership that This is taking too long! Don’t they already have this information? There has to be a better way!—you’re not alone.My colleague Annie Lowrey has a name for these cumbersome processes: She calls them “time taxes.” She wrote about the phenomenon for The Atlantic in 2021, and in her new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—And How to Fix It, she explores how and why our time is squandered when it does not have to be.So, what gets lost in the hours spent filling out paperwork? And how do we fix it?Annie joins me now to discuss. Annie, welcome to the show.Annie Lowrey: Thank you for having me, Adam.Harris: So, I wanna start by talking about the DMV.Lowrey: Yeah.Harris: Because, right, it’s Labor Day, government offices are closed, but tomorrow across the country, DMVs are gonna be full of people trying to renew their car registrations, get Real IDs, change their addresses, change their names—whatever it might be.But those long lines at the DMV, I think, are the most trenchant example of what you call a “time tax.” So what are time taxes, and how do they show up in everyday lives, even outside of the DMV?Lowrey: So time taxes, these show up everywhere you are encountering the government, and really everywhere you’re interacting with businesses, right? It doesn’t necessarily have to be the government. And a time tax—or what’s called in the academic literature “an administrative burden”—is merely the person who is being bureaucratized, their experience of bureaucracy. So how much work they have to do to apply to something; how much work they have to do to research it; the fees that they might have to pay in some cases; and also their psychological or emotional experience, whether that’s DMV-level frustration or emotional anguish in a welfare program, or even a sense of civic pride that you might get when you’re interacting with a service that makes you feel good about yourself.Harris: So this is how people sort of interact with different things, right? So like you said, it’s not just the government—it can also be canceling a gym membership. In your new book, The Time Tax, you write about the idea that we see some of the most cumbersome examples of these time taxes as they relate to sort of social-safety-net programs. Food stamps, Medicaid, Social Security—things that people in need of help need to survive.So why is that? Why do we see a structure where the time taxes seem so cumbersome in those social-safety-net programs?Lowrey: We see time taxes as a general point, I think, being bigger, more onerous, more expensive in a broad sense of the word for programs that are affecting people with less social status, for whatever reason that might be—people with a history of being discriminated against, people viewed with some kind of skepticism by the state. So that could be people who weren’t born here, immigrants. That could be people with a history of interaction or involvement with the criminal-justice system. That could be different racial groups. White Americans are treated very differently than Black Americans. And absolutely, high-income Americans are treated very different than low-income Americans.And importantly, I don’t think that’s because low-income Americans are the recipients of this generosity that high-income Americans aren’t. So high-income Americans, they absolutely use programs like Social Security retirement benefits. They use tax programs like the 529 college-savings program or the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction. They benefit from the exclusion of employer-sponsored health benefits in some cases. But we don’t think of those as benefits, right? Those are tax policies—that’s not a benefit. It absolutely is. To the government, in accounting terms, it’s the same thing. It’s just that we’re not asking you to pee in a cup for it, which we do for a lot of benefits where you have to apply and reapply and come face-to-face with a social worker and perhaps fill out forms that might be a hundred pages long. And none of those policies interact with each other; they’re really cumbersome.And I think that’s because we want to dissuade low-income people from using these, because we believe that some share of them are applying fraudulently. And there’s this thought that, you know, Maybe if you’re low income, you need to get a little bit better at paperwork in your life. You need to straighten up and figure yourself out. And this is an imposition of that moral onto you.Harris: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you mentioned all the paperwork, and that’s even if they know that the programs exist to help them, right?Lowrey: Absolutely. Yes.Harris: And that doesn’t—as you write, that’s not by accident, that historically these sort of cumbersome processes have been used as a form of social control that is as old as data itself.So can you explain that idea a little bit? That these time taxes aren’t something that popped up in the middle of the 1950s and 1960s with an explosion of bureaucracy.Lowrey: Absolutely not. So a really clear example of these are the voting rules set out in Jim Crow. They are all hypothetically race-neutral. Or perhaps not all, but mostly, right? They are race-neutral.But, you know, a poll tax is gonna hit lower-income people, namely Black people, way harder than it’s gonna hit higher-income people. Property rules—if you’re a property owner, that isn’t gonna be applied equally. And something like a grandfather clause is instead going to allow white people, white men, to be able to vote, whereas Black men whose ancestors were enslaved are not going to be able to vote.And so even now, if we scoot forward, look at some of the rules in the SNAP program, which is food stamps. You can’t buy prepared food with your SNAP benefits. So the rotisserie chickens at Costco or at your grocery store? You cannot get those. Right now, there’s a lot of debate over ensuring that SNAP benefits only go to “healthy food.” So we’re saying, This can only be for nutrition as the state sees it, and we’re worried that you’re buying junk food and eating it.Never mind the fact, I don’t know, maybe somebody is a runner or a diabetic. Maybe they have reasons to access that. Maybe poor kids should be able to have birthday cakes—that seems fine to me. But that is why it’s a tool of social control. We’re making people know that we are skeptical of their spending habits and we’re attempting to control those spending habits through these little time taxes in the program. And I feel like once you see these, you see them everywhere.Again, I think it’s actually really good to compare it with the home-mortgage interest deduction that, like, if you have a mortgage, you get it. That’s it. They’re not like, Oh, are you living in a floodplain? Are you designing your home in this way? There isn’t that kind of paternalism in there, where there’s a lot of paternalism in a lot of other benefits.Harris: During COVID, there were so many programs that were intended to simply help people who were struggling, right? Additional tax benefits and things like that. A lot of those programs were very clearly designed so that they reached the most people with the greatest ease, and they worked. Like the children’s tax credit—things like that worked.Why don’t we do more things like that?Lowrey: I think often we have multiple goals in mind with a program. So take TANF, which is the cash-welfare program. Its stated goal, or its original goal, is to end child poverty. TANF as it is currently constructed has no effect on the child-poverty rate, which is remarkable to me. That’s in part because it’s a small program. It’s also because the goal of TANF is to control the behavior of the mostly mothers who are using it. There’s very strict work requirements. If you screw up in TANF, you get sanctioned. You are treated as a fraud risk. You are in trouble in some way. Which is not true—even with the IRS, if you screw your taxes up a bit, they’ll ask for the money or they’ll send you the money if you screwed up in the wrong way. But there isn’t this implication that this was a fraudulent act—unless you’re outright committing tax fraud; I’m just saying if you’ve miscalculated something.And so this is a way that we shrink public programs, where we’re saying, if we’re looking at the example of means-tested programs, the question is not only, Do you have certain characteristics? Do you fall below a certain income line, taking into account the size of your family and some other things? It’s saying, Okay, but we also need you to be good enough at performing for the state, at filling out this paperwork, meeting with this counselor at this given time.And it’s just, you know, I don’t know that that’s a really legitimate way to go about it, as opposed to simply saying, Yeah, if you meet the income target, you should have this.Harris: When we come back we talk with Annie about how to address the time tax.[Music]]Harris: So there were about 4 million people in the U.S. when the Constitution was signed in 1787. There are about 350 million people in the country now. And so, as the nation has grown, so has its bureaucracy and the systems that it uses. And over time, those systems age.It makes sense to want to update them, to want to make them better as technology improves. And at the beginning of the second Trump administration, the president established DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency; appointed Elon Musk to head it up; charged it with cleaning up the government, modernizing old systems, and making it more efficient. You were working on this book when that began. What did you think of that effort at the time?Lowrey: A few things. So one was that this was presented as a novel thing. And no, no—there’s, like, more than a hundred years of presidents attempting to do this, saying, The systems have gotten too complicated; we’re gonna clean things up; we’re gonna make the entire system more efficient. So it wasn’t new.I think that the fundamental idea was a good one. I think that the way that they went about it was, like, I would call it clown college if it weren’t so destructive and cruel. They were just firing civil servants at random. They made all of the federal civil servants send a five-point email explaining what they had done every week.Harris: Wasting their time.Lowrey: Yeah, exactly—wasting their time. There was no effort to look at the voluminous reports that we have from inspectors general, for instance, or the government’s various accountability offices to say, Okay, can we actually improve procurement contracts? Or, Could we find out the places where we’re really overspending on something, or, you know, We need some deep improvement. There was none of that.They hurt service delivery by getting rid of some critical people. They created all kinds of busywork. Not just the [five-point] emails. They slowed things down such that some agencies couldn’t get essential components that they would have needed without the approval of a political operative. So for instance, NASA had to get approval for, like, bolts. I’m pretty sure that NASA knows how to buy bolts, right? That is not the problem with an inefficiency in government. And they never considered the citizen experience. Do we really need to wait this long to vote? Do we have to do our own taxes? We don’t, by the way—the IRS would like to do them for us.And so it was just this all-out assault on the civil service. And it was the second time that we’ve seen it from President Trump, where he just believes that civil servants are a malign politicized force, that they’re there to take sinecures and draw money away from the taxpayer, when many of them, they just love their work—and they’re actually earning less than they would in private industry—because they’re really dedicated to their jobs and they’re very specialized at what they do.So, yes, DOGE—good idea. And I hope that that idea carries forward, but I hope that they do it much more effectively and efficiently going around the next time. I’d also note that the great sin of DOGE, too, is that it might end up costing the government money because it caused so many lawsuits. They did so many things without the appropriate permissions, without the legal changes that they needed, that they’ve just been mired in lawsuits.Harris: So when you say we don’t have to do our taxes. The IRS would like to do our taxes for us? What do you mean by that?Lowrey: Yes, you have to pay your taxes; you have to do your taxes. What I mean is that nine in 10 American households take the standard deduction, which means that they’re not itemizing their taxes. Generally, it’s because their tax situation is pretty straightforward. And so the IRS has all of the information it needs already to do your taxes for you. They have your payroll data from your employer. If you have a retirement account, they’ll have those financial records from the institution, from your bank or your lender. They’ll have local data as well. So they could merely pre-fill your 1040 for you and send it to you to look over, or they could just send you a summary and say, Okay, if you agree with this, just let us know. You don’t really have to do anything. We’ll send you your refund, or there won’t be any money exchanging hands at all.And so this is the way that taxes work in a lot of our peer countries with high incomes. In Japan, if you’re earning a salary, for the most part you don’t have to do anything. In some countries in Europe, you can do it all by text message. And the IRS is legally prevented from doing this, such that the average American spends 12 hours a year on the 1040 and spends roughly $300 on tax-preparation services. It’s silly. It’s silly. And there’s some people with very complicated tax situations. Fine. The IRS might have some requests for information. Did you have another kid this year? Did you take out another mortgage? Something like that. But they don’t need these endless, endless, endless, endless forms. They don’t need you to do them or hire somebody else to do them. They could do it.Harris: To that point, are there other ways that we could be doing things? Is there a better way outside of these time taxes? How can the U.S. make government programs more accessible?Lowrey: There’s a million and one. And it’s almost—there’s so many options out there that I feel like sometimes it’s hard for me to summarize.So one straightforward thing is that there are different income standards and eligibility standards that target the same group of people using the same programs, many of whom use multiple programs. So for instance, Medicaid and SNAP—they have different income standards. In some cases, they have different standards of qualifying income, and you can’t cross enroll. So you can’t say, Okay, if I’m eligible for this, then I’ll maybe also be eligible for that. Sometimes that’s because of a difficult reason, so consider jobless insurance, which people often use if they’ve lost their job. That goes to the individual, where SNAP is really aimed at households instead. So that’s actually kind of a technical thing. But just unifying these standards and making such that you could cross-enroll in programs would be a wonderful, wonderful thing to do.Holding states and offices and DMVs and everything else accountable for counting how much paperwork they’re putting on people, how many people they are not serving or are churning off and on programs because the paperwork is too much, and then saying, Okay, we want you to bring these numbers down—that would be really helpful. We don’t do that.In terms of health care, dealing with hospitals and insurers and doctors is absolute misery. There’s a lot of common-sense regulation that could prevent health-care providers and insurers from denying procedures that should have been approved, or making sure that your medical bill is actually accurate—which half of them aren’t—preventing them from providing you with what you are paying for through simple paperwork and attrition and frustration, as opposed to some other legitimate tool. So those are just some ideas, but there are a lot out there.Harris: Well, I guess if there are so many ideas out there, why hasn’t the government used some of those ideas, utilized the modern technology in the same way that, if I wanted a burger right now, I could pull my phone forward and just order it from DoorDash and it’s here in 15 minutes. If I needed a car to get somewhere, it’s, like, two clicks and I’ve got it. We have all of this modern technology. Why haven’t they used that modern technology to streamline a lot of this stuff?Lowrey: Because the government is not really very good at reforming itself.A lot of these changes would have to be made by Congress, and Congress doesn’t really care; it doesn’t see itself as a benefits administrator. And we’ve screwed up the lines of responsibility here. So if you’re not getting a benefit that you were supposed to be receiving, who’s at fault? Is that the state administrator? Is that the office that you’re working with, where if you complain, you are concerned that you might be retaliated against? Is that the governor? Is that the president? Because he’s the administrator of the programs, right? Is that Congress?And I also think that there’s these broken feedback loops, by which I mean: If you get Social Security retirement benefits, we have decades of beautiful political-science research showing that it makes you feel like a citizen; it makes you feel like a good person; it makes you more likely to vote; it makes you more likely to be civically engaged in lots of ways. And seniors, when there are threats to Social Security, they come out and they demand that politicians stop it.But there’s so many other little, tiny problems that relate to other programs that I don’t think that we have a mass politics demanding this. And so that’s why I think it’s hard. Nevertheless, when politicians do this stuff and make things easier, I think often it goes really well. It’s been really popular for, for instance, Zohran Mamdani in New York City. And I think that to a certain extent, we’re still operating under this understanding that these administrative burdens are demanded by the broad public because they’re so afraid of fraud in these programs. But there’s not that much fraud in these programs. We have really good ways to detect it. Giving more money to the civil service such that they could stamp fraud out would be a way to do it. And I just, I don’t know that people are voting on the basis of the way that the IRS is administering audits to other taxpayers. I don’t think that they are.Harris: I mean, they might be.Lowrey: Some of it. Everybody’s voting for something.Harris: About the sort of weaponization of data that we’ve seen over the last year and a half, and the counterargument to The government should do more things to make lives better with our data is that the government can also take our data and do things that are nefarious if they so chose to, right? You can look at the Stasi; you can look at the Pinochet regimes.How do you balance those concerns? Or does the government just already have so much data that they don’t necessarily factor in?Lowrey: I think it’s a real concern and a real threat, since we are in an environment of democratic backsliding. This is one of the reasons that mixed-status families with citizen children and perhaps undocumented parents don’t get safety-net benefits that they have every right to get. That kid is a citizen; they’re allowed to get it. It’s because they don’t want to invite this state that could be very threatening to them into their lives.I think one way to think about this is to give Americans the choice and to give the government permission: Okay, if I want this benefit, I feel comfortable with this office getting my data from the IRS. Something like that, so that it is elective and so that people can decide.Harris: You point to Estonia in the book as a sort of prime example of a place that’s successfully easing the administrative burden on their citizens. But you also mentioned that they’re a small country. And as you were talking about, the gargantuan task of making the systems talk to each other in the United States, it makes me think that we have a scale problem here, that we might just be too big to eliminate some of the cumbersome bureaucracy. But how do you square the Estonian example with our context in the U.S.?Lowrey: Yeah, Estonia is something we can aspire to, but I don’t think it’s ever gonna be something that we’re gonna have. So the thing about Estonia is they build a completely new government after they break away from the Soviet Union and regain their independence.So Estonia regains its independence in the summer of 1991, and they form a government completely de novo, from scratch, at that point. And they do so during a climate where they want Estonians to trust the government because so many didn’t due to the Soviet influence.And so they create the most elegant system of benefits that are all controlled by an ID number on all of these databases that are designed and updated constantly to talk to each other, such that Estonia has this policy that if you tell the government, any part of the government, a piece of information about yourself once, everything updates.So for instance, if you tell the voting authority, My address has changed, all of the hospitals know it. All the schools, everything knows it. All of your mail goes to your new address. It’s nothing like that in the United States at all. So I don’t think that we are gonna become that—again, a very small homogenous country that started in the 1990s functionally. But I think that we can become more Estonia-like. And they’ve also had some issues with data security. They take it really seriously. So maybe there’s some lessons from Estonia to us, too, about setting these systems up in a way that is secure.Harris: What would it take to implement some of those ideas from there? Is this just a political-will question?Lowrey: Yeah, I do think it is a political-will question. And I think it’s a political-framing question. Because very often, administrative burdens are framed as necessary to prevent fraud. They’re not terribly good at preventing fraud. They’re much better at preventing people from getting needed benefits. But I think if instead of saying, This is about the poor people getting this program, or this is about making sure that these programs are secure, we could have a politics that says, This is malign; this is bad policy making. We give the government $8 trillion a year, and it passes back this garbage? No! No. Right? At least do the obvious stuff here.And I also think that there’s ways of thinking about new policy changes that could be administratively light. So for instance, there’s always been this idea to put children up to the age of 18 on Medicare, which comes and goes and comes and goes. That’s a nice thing to do because it would mean that just kids are on Medicare. You never have to worry if your kid gets a broken bone or, God forbid, a cancer, that they’re always gonna be able to get treatment. But more than that, it’s just elegant. It’s simple. It’s the government taking work away from you.I think about this a lot in terms of free school meals as well. That’s not only a benefit for lower-income families that might be having nutritional challenges. It’s also like, If you don’t have food in the house just because you forgot, oh great, the school’s just gonna feed your kid and you don’t have to worry about it. It’s just a nice thing in terms of reducing those burdens.And so I think that a lot of that could be really popular. One thing I think about a lot is: We focus so much on reducing unnecessary burdens on businesses. Can we think about it in terms of reducing unnecessary burdens on families? Whether that’s these insurers that are not really insuring us, or this tax authority that makes us do our own taxes, or any other program where it’s just hard to grapple with.Harris: Annie, here is to hoping that that burden is alleviated. Thank you so much for joining.Lowrey: Thank you. I do hope. Thank you so much, Adam.[Music]Harris: That’s all for today’s show. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson. It was engineered and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.Until next time—I’m Adam Harris.