Talk Policy with PPI is a podcast series of discussions with leading policy experts and policymakers on relevant topics in the news. For this latest episode of Talk Policy, PPI’s Director of Social Policy Veronica Goodman sat down with Professors Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan of Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. They are the authors of the book, “Administrative Burden,” and their research focuses on public policy and improving social program design, performance, and outcomes. They discuss how administrative burdens prevent those in need from receiving critical welfare benefits and what effect the pandemic has had on these systems. What changes need to be made? What needs to be done to remove the red tape and simplify these processes? How can policymakers make a positive difference?
The full podcast is available here and below as a transcript. Purchase Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan’s book, “Administrative Burden” here. Other episodes of Talk Policy can be found here.
Radically Pragmatic, a PPI Podcast
TALK POLICY: Administrative Burdens with Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan
Progressive Policy Institute (0:10)
You’re listening to Radically Pragmatic, a podcast from the Progressive Policy Institute. We talk with lawmakers, policy experts and thought leaders about the issues driving the news nationally and internationally. The Progressive Policy Institute is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform with offices in Washington, D.C., and Brussels. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. We encourage analytical conversations, not your typical partisan talking points.
Veronica Goodman (0:44)
Hi there and welcome to Radically Pragmatic, a PPI podcast. My name is Veronica Goodman, and I’m PPI’s Director of Social Policy. For this segment of Talk Policy, I sat down and talked with Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan, professors at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. They’re the authors of the book “Administrative Burden,” and their research focuses on public policy and improving social program design performance and outcomes. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and enjoy the episode.
Veronica Goodman (1:23)
Hi, I’m Veronica Goodman, Director of Social Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute. I first want to thank professors Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan of Georgetown University, here with us today to discuss administrative burden and public policy. And we’ll take some time to discuss exactly what that means and why it’s important. They’re the authors of the book on this topic, appropriately named “Administrative Burden,” which I can’t recommend enough for policymakers and experts or anyone interested in improving public policy. And then in your book, you cover different case studies to show how these administrative burdens can manifest differently depending on the situation and circumstances from the ways that families access food, through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, to the way that people vote. And so I think there’s a really exciting conversation that’s been taking place during the pandemic and as the Biden Administration, with Democrats in Congress, have been hard at work, providing relief and you know, trying to shore up economic recovery. And really how we build back the safety net better from all of the social spending programs of the American families and jobs plan. So things like food assistance, and income support for families with children, paid family leave. And I think given the nature of the pandemic, we’ve had to rethink how we provide aid to families or how people interact with the government and government programs. So I think that the concept of administrative burdens continues to be extremely relevant to the discussion. And thank you for taking the time to join me today.
Don Moynihan (2:51)
Thank you. So glad to be here.
Pamela Herd (2:53)
Happy to be here.
Veronica Goodman (2:54)
Thank you. And so just to get started, if you could please both just briefly introduce yourselves and your motivation for having written this book. And Pam, maybe you can go first and also explain what we mean when we use the term “administrative burden.”
Pamela Herd (3:08)
Sure, my name is Pam Hurd. I’m a Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University and the McCourt School of Public Policy. So the the term administrative burden kind of encompasses three kinds of costs, right, like, broadly speaking, it’s the onerous experiences that we might have when we interact with government. So typically, what people think of is like the three hour wait at the Department of Motor Vehicles to get their license. But we mean, this writ large across a range of different government policies. And we think about those costs in three different ways. So the first are kind of learning costs, like figuring out whether or not you’re eligible for a program, whether there’s a program out there that might help you, for example, if you’re struggling to find health insurance, compliance costs are I think, stereotypically, what we think about when we think about administrative burden or red tape, right, it’s the paperwork, it’s the interviews, it’s the effectively the amount of time on in some respect, as part of this in terms of those encounters with government to access benefits or services. The final category, though, of costs that we think about our psychological costs, and these are the kinds of stresses stigma, and kind of the sense of being overwhelmed, for example, that people experience when they’re trying to access really critical supports or any supports, right, like you get really frustrated at the DMV. But then imagine yourself in a situation where you’re trying to access health insurance for a sick child, and you’re encountering, you know, bureaucratic obstacle after obstacle. And so those kinds of moments are just really scary. I think one quick example right now that we point to that’s probably terrifying for a lot of people is, you know, we’re going to face this, is evictions. And meanwhile, there’s an enormous amount of money just sort of lying around that the federal government allocated so that people wouldn’t be evicted. But actually accessing those resources is turning out to be, you know, really difficult with those processes. So imagine yourself in that situation where you’re trying to not get evicted, and you’re just met with obstacle after obstacle. Those are the kinds of psychological costs that we, you know, we really worry about in terms of their impacts on people.
Don Moynihan (5:31)
And I’ll follow up. So I’m Don Moynihan. I’m the co-author of the book. I’m also a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. And I think another way of thinking about the motivation we had writing the book was trying to fix these different types of communication gaps we’ve observed in the policymaking world. One is between people’s experience of government and maybe the ways in which policymakers talk about it. And so the types of experiences people have, where they can’t get access to something, or they find an administrative process to be complicated and frustrating, we can all relate to those we’ve all had those experiences, but they don’t seem to be often at the forefront of policymakers’ minds. And we think that’s partly because an issue relabeling, there’s also within this policy researcher community, sort of a Babylon effect going on where we might be studying the same sorts of things, but we call them different things. And so economists might call them ordeal mechanisms or public administration. In fact, you might call them red tape or you might not have a particular language to think about them. And the third type of communication gap is that we see the same sorts of administrative burdens occur across lots of different policy areas. And so in our book, we talk, we start with voting, and then we talk about abortion. And then we talk about health policy and social policy and Social Security. So you know, the part of the point is that these might seem idiosyncratic and specific to a particular policy area, but actually do reoccur all the time in lots of different spaces. And by naming and recognizing them, we have a better handle on being able to explain why they occur, whether they’re worthwhile, or what we might do about them.
Veronica Goodman (7:33)
Great, thank you for that. And I guess I’m now sort of having a good understanding of the concept. You lay out in your book, different case studies and why it matters for all of these different areas of policy. But how is it in particular maybe more relevant, even in the pandemic, to the way that some of these programs function?
Pamela Herd (7:53)
Yeah, I mean, the pandemic, in many ways, right, exposed a lot of large failures in the U.S. And it also exposed a bunch of kind of weaknesses or failures within the social welfare system in the U.S. So I do think that what became really obvious during the pandemic, basically, was the extent of these burdens and social welfare policies, right. So the big one that people point to is unemployment insurance, right. And so at the beginning, we saw this sort of huge surge in applications, we saw state agencies completely overwhelmed and unable to process those applications. And I think in the beginning, people just sort of thought, well, it’s just this like, once in 100 year event, like of course they weren’t going to be able to manage this. But once it kind of dug beneath the surface, what we saw was, well, that’s certainly not insignificant, but a lot of what was going on was kind of a fundamentally broken system to begin with. It’s a system basically the unemployment insurance system, it’s really a system that is kind of more effectively designed to prevent fraud than it is to actually provide access to benefits for people who are eligible for them. So I think you know, that being a striking example, but just to get beneath the surface even further, a little bit, I think one of the the second things basically, that the pandemic exposed on is not just the generic failure, for example of the UI system. But I think what it showed is that, you know, UI didn’t hold up well, other programs did it. Right. So I think we saw SNAP, for example, food stamps hold up pretty well, administratively, during the pandemic, Medicaid held up pretty well. What was the difference? Right, why did one collapse, but programs like Medicaid and SNAP held up much more effectively? Part of the answer to that, in terms of those burdens, is the degree of federal control over programs. So this is pretty much systematically true where the federal government has a ton of control. Over these programs, they typically have somewhat less burden than when that control is largely devolved to the state. And there’s a bunch of other examples I could give you. But I think that’s a couple of things to really point out from the pandemic, at least in terms of design and what we saw kind of happen. You know, I think that the second thing that’s really important to point out from the pandemic, in terms of what we learned, is actually just the learning, meaning that a lot of people don’t actually access these social welfare systems. But we had a moment where all of a sudden, all at once a lot more people were trying to access the system, and actually realized what it was like to interact with it. And I think that was really jarring for a lot of people and kind of an eye opening moment, in terms of thinking that, yeah, you know, what, we kind of need to work on this, like, this isn’t a well functioning system. And these burdens are unnecessary, they’re onerous. And they really undermine the fundamental goals of these programs, right? If the goal of the unemployment insurance system is to protect people during spells of unemployment, but people can’t access those benefits, the program doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how large the benefits are, it doesn’t matter how many people we say should be eligible to them. For them, if people aren’t actually getting them, the program doesn’t work. And I think it was a bit eye opening for some policymakers, some activists, and even policy researchers, I think, to kind of take a closer look at this issue.
Don Moynihan (11:39)
Yeah, I think one of the big lessons for folks is that policy design and implementation really matters. And so you know, if you’re an advocate, and your goal is to get a piece of legislation passed, the one thing you learn in the last couple of years is that there might be no guarantee that the money that might flow from that legislation gets into the pockets of people that need it. And sometimes those processes of policy implementation are designed not to work, right. And, you know, we have these sort of remarkable moments during the pandemic, where the Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, was talking about pointless roadblocks that his Republican predecessor had put in place for unemployment insurance is almost unthinkable. And I think we also saw moments where people could see these really big differences between programs that seem to work and seem to not work. So Pam mentioned rental assistance, which has just been stymied by sort of multiple layers of government that are involved in delivering that complex processes. But on the flip side of that, if you think about the stimulus checks that were mailed out, that was a burden free experience for the vast majority of people, you know, you essentially had the federal government trying to help people and doing it in that case, in the most straightforward way possible, where they said, we’re gonna have these really simple eligibility rules, you know, how many dependents do you have? What what’s your income? And based on that, we will send you a check. If there’s no big application process, you don’t have to demonstrate how many assets you have. You don’t have to apply for this. And so that was an example I think of when the federal government said, how can we use administrative data to sort of move burden away from individuals and onto the state and make the experience easier. We’re seeing some of that now, with the child tax credit, which I think is another, you know, we might think of this as a pandemic, your program, its expansion to reach a lot more people. But there’s also a contingency on that point that maybe we can talk about more, which is that for something like 86% of people are getting the expanded payments each month without having to do anything, but people who are less connected to the tax system because they haven’t been paying income taxes because their income is so low, they have to negotiate the administrative processes of applying for those benefits. And so they are having a different experience. And so I think that is one other point arise out of this is that a program I worked pretty well for some groups, but then still be experienced as owner as product groups.
Veronica Goodman (14:36)
Agreed. And I’m so glad that you know, you brought up the child tax credit because Pam and I were talking before the podcast about how that’s really a great case study in terms of what happens when administrative burdens are really low and you’re trying to focus on reaching as many people as possible with you know, the ultimate policy goal just being to get help to families who are struggling. And I’m glad that you mentioned SNAP, because it’s a program that I’ve studied in depth. And it’s one of the big case studies in your book. And really in particular, I thought it was great that you looked at the way that the burdens affect different groups disproportionately. So you have the elderly who have some of the lowest take up rates, just given sort of the hoops that they have to jump and the and the way that the administrative burdens are really complex in terms of recertification windows. So, I love that if you could talk a little bit more about that case study and just generally how the administrative burdens of these programs might affect groups and, and perpetuate inequities and outcomes.
Pamela Herd (15:43)
Yeah, the food stamp example is a nice one, actually, in terms of thinking about, you brought up older adults, and we do we have this huge take up issue with older adults in the foods in terms of food stamps, in terms of the you know, in meaning that the fraction of older adults eligible for the program who actually receive it as a relatively low, I believe it’s still hovering around 60%. And so why is that? Well, it really is, it’s a simple calculation, which is burden. And the central issue for older adults, actually, is that the way older adults basically are more likely to qualify for food stamps, because they have extraordinarily high out of pocket health care costs. So low income older adults can spend 20% to 30% of their income on out-of-pocket health care costs. And so that’s how you’re supposed to be able to apply that basically to reduce your income threshold to become eligible for the program. But it’s just an incredibly complicated process that varies by state. And so as a result, a lot of older adults who really are desperate like they’re literally making the trade off between the eating and accessing health care, are not getting these benefits. And so it’s a really nice example of kind of within a program, how we can see disproportionate impacts. Whereas actually, for children and adults, we don’t don’t do quite as badly, we see much higher take up rates probably between 80% and 90%, that you mentioned the child tax credit. And I do want to go back to that as well, though one thing in terms of thinking about disproportionate impact, and that I mean one of the reasons people who studied poverty were so excited about this expansion was because we know deep poverty has accelerated basically over the past 20 years. And so one of the things that child tax credit expansion could do is actually reduce deep poverty. The catch here is that the degree to which that program is burdensome is it’s largely burdensome for that population. So the people who kind of most need that benefit, are also the people who are most likely to struggle actually accessing it. And the Biden Administration is clearly aware of this. They’re working actually, for example, with Code for America right now to kind of do some redesign on their website for people. For people who are not automatically basically getting it in terms of trying to access it, they’re clearly aware of this. Advocates: there’s a lot of advocates out in the field who are doing a lot of work trying to do outreach. But it’s you know, it’s a meaningful problem. And the one thing I would sort of step back, big picture and say, you asked at the beginning, like how did you come to this? Why did you get interested in this, the policy that they kind of started with it, my dissertation was on was actually Social Security, retirement, and social security retirement right. Like it is our most effective social welfare program, in terms of poverty reduction, it is our largest, and it is our most popular, it’s basically the definition of social welfare policies success, it also has basically 100% take up, and it doesn’t have 100% take up, because it’s not complicated. The eligibility, having written a benefit eligibility calculator is a part of my district, the eligibility process is complicated. Like if we actually put that burden on individuals and said, okay, document, your earnings history to qualify for this program. And for us to figure out your benefit size, you’d have like 50% take up in the program at best. It’s simply the way that we designed it. And so when we say params, I think for those of us who focus on poverty, or folks who focus on property, they look at an 80% take up, they look at 90% take up and they say, That’s amazing. We’re doing really well. I do kind of want to shift that lens a little bit and say, no, not amazing. Amazing is 100%. Not even amazing, that’s actually effective. Like that’s what we should expect from these programs, because we know we’re capable of doing that. So that’s the only thing I would add in terms of thinking big picture about how do we really reduce inequality? How do we make it so that it doesn’t disproportionately fall on certain populations? The model is Social Security, basically. And we think about program design and implementation and burden that way. And so then when you get to food stamps, when you get to the child tax credit, that becomes the expectation of what we can do.
Don Moynihan (20:18)
So I think in an ideal world, we would like policymakers to ask themselves the questions of who was missing out from these programs? And why now is that you know, the sort of traditional econ perspective from ordeal mechanisms, the answer would be, well, they don’t deal with the hassles, that means they don’t value the benefits. Whereas I think some of the the arguments we’ve tried to promote is that if people are struggling with the processes, and maybe for a myriad of reasons, including, you know, intense poverty, the experience of scarcity, other life challenges going on, like poor health or being evicted from your house might affect your ability to manage administrative burdens. And then finally, you know, what are policy makers doing about it, right, if you can just sort of look at a program that has 50% take up and not pay attention to the 50% of people are not taking up those benefits, you should be looking at their motivations, their barriers, and our ways to deal with sorts of bottlenecks that they face.
Veronica Goodman (21:29)
So one of our Fellows at PPI is Joel Berg, who’s also the CEO of Hunger Free America, who does hunger advocacy all over the country. And he actually just completed a road trip across the country. And he stopped at certain SNAP offices, where people would go to sort of fill out the applications and try to get aid in person. And he said, for a lot of them, they weren’t open or you know, the hours coincide with people’s work schedules, so they’d be missing a day of work. Or even just once he got the application, it would be over 20 pages, which would be really difficult for somebody to navigate on their own. So one of the one of the things that we look at at PPI is how do we sort of combine the applications for all these programs and make them you know, sort of a one stop shop, there’s legislation on the Hill called the HOPE Act, which would try to make it be one application for all of these programs and see how your eligibility would be right there in the online application so that people would have a very straightforward idea of what they’d be getting, which I hope is sort of the future, but sort of as we’re talking about the child tax credit, and how the conversation has been moving to things being automatic and direct, and an administrator federally, you know, I guess, what do you sort of, do you expect that this will be the new trend? And how programs are designed? Or do you think it will be done in a sort of bipartisan way?
Don Moynihan (22:59)
It should be done in a bipartisan way. I mean, I think there isn’t any deep philosophical reason why conservatives and liberals wouldn’t agree that they want our government to work well, and simply and effectively and respectfully for the citizens that they serve. And, you know, in many respects, some of our critiques embedded in the book could be read about the need for bureaucracies to just constantly monitor their performance, because without that sort of monitoring, they will tend to slide into maybe prioritizing the needs of the bureaucracy over the people that they’re serving. And so the you know, the core idea at the heart book is that human beings deal with these government processes. And so we should think about that when we’re designing and implementing these processes. I think they’re, you know, there’s a much longer conversation to be had about why then these potential coalition’s break down, in particular policy areas. And you know, the shorter version of that conversation that we document in the book is that if, if your party is generally opposed to a particular policy, it’s likely that you’re going to support imposing more burdens and barriers in that policy, or if it serves a constituency or group that you don’t particularly care for, or that don’t come out and vote. But immigrants don’t because they can, right there, you’re more apt to be subject to the negative face of administrative power. But the hope with this project is that simply by exposing how important these administrative burdens are, you could build this sort of general bipartisan consensus that you once The law was passed, and we agree that people are eligible for benefits or that we’re going to serve them, we try to do it in a reasonably competent way that takes into account the actual challenges people have in their lives and treat them as real people.
Pamela Herd (25:15)
On a hopeful note, right, like the you look at the, you look at the food stamp program. And, you know, it was under George W. Bush, when he was president, that they really put a huge effort into reducing barriers and burdens in that program. So, you know, it’s not futile, like there is there is oftentimes actually, I think, some consensus around reducing those burdens there, but politics mattered, you know, and so that will be sort of a part of the part of the picture, too. You know, I think we clearly document throughout the book, I mean, the most obvious place you see this, this, especially around abortion policy, where it’s really different burdens are really driven by politics. We saw some of it during the Trump administration and around programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps like these, these burdens, because they couldn’t get changes passed in Congress. So there’s some back and forth. But I would actually argue that the overall picture at this point is a bit more hopeful, in terms of the acknowledgement of how much of a problem this is, in most places, and the willingness to try to kind of fix and reduce them.
Don Moynihan (26:27)
Let me add one more point to that, which is that what we’ll talk about in the book is the ways in which burdens grow and become more powerful when they’re kept in the dark. They’re sort of like a fungus. So when they’re kept in the shadows, and people don’t talk about our effects, you’re more likely to become prominent, if you if you flip the script around and think about the way in which people talk about fraud as a concern, and push that to the front of the policy discussions, have hearings in legislature about the potential for fraud point to individual cases that may not be terribly representative, and then make policy on the basis of that. That’s an example of the ways in which values shape our policy and implementation choices. And that’s fine, values should do so. But we should pay attention to the potential trade-offs between one approach versus another. And so if you’re only making policy to limit fraud, you can drive fraud down to zero by building a policy implementation system that’s essentially impossible for anyone to navigate. And what we want is just for policymakers to have those two ideas in mind, if I’m going to do wax, how’s this gonna affect access to this particular program?
Pamela Herd (27:51)
And I do think in terms of the awareness, journalists have been covering this, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. And I think that really matters, you know, in terms of the degree to which they’re putting this out for people who may not encounter burdens in these programs, who are kind of shocked, like if you saw the response to the Annie Lowery piece in The New York Times, I’m sorry, in the Atlantic around the time tax. I mean, when you listen to people’s responses to that, they were like, really surprised, disturbed, we need to do something about this. So to that point about increased visibility has to help. I think that’s true. And I do think that journalism, actually journalists, have been doing a really good job of late really covering it.
Veronica Goodman (28:38)
Yeah, absolutely. And that that was really an excellent piece by Annie Lowery. You know, as you were mentioning, Don has how some of our values guide, sometimes disproportionately the conversation, Pam, I can’t help but think about some of the things you were tweeting lately about the FDA decision around the vaccines for kids. We’re a very captive audience here in our household because we have a five-year-old and a two-year-old, desperately want them to be vaccinated, of course, and so it would be great if you could talk a little bit about how that’s also coming about.
Pamela Herd (29:16)
Do you mean the burdens and…
Veronica Goodman (29:17)
Yeah, the burdens from, yeah, the process of everything.
Pamela Herd (29:21)
So we also have an eight year old who is unvaccinated. I’m deeply sympathetic. Yeah. I mean, actually, the vaccines are really interesting when you think about it in terms of burdens. So we often start to talk about administrative burden by actually saying burdens actually aren’t always bad. So on the one side with vaccines, one thing that we’ve seen are mandates, right, that there’s burden and like I had to at Georgetown, we have a vaccine mandate, so I had to obviously get the vaccine, and then I had to upload my documentation. But that kind of burden arguably is an okay burden. Because what Don was talking about in terms of weighing the costs and benefits of these burdens, I think it’s a really clear case where whatever cost, I’m entailing with that burden is far outweighed by the health benefits, right, of making sure that people are vaccinated. I think that the where we’ve seen burdens as bad with vaccines is Yeah, I think it’s reasonable to say, we know, actually, there are, there are actually a lot more people out there willing and wanting to get vaccinated, but in fact, are impeded by barriers. So some of it is kind of learning. You know, a lot of people are just starting out where the vaccine is free, basically, because nothing in our health care system is free. Or if you go to see the CVS website, for example, to try to get a vaccine, you’re met with a screen that initially just asked you to provide your health insurance probably stops a lot of people right there, right? Because they just don’t get it free. So there’s been some coverage of that. How accessible is it really, so we hear a lot of this. Well, you can get it anywhere. But you know, what, if you work in an unstable employment, where your schedule is constantly changing, where I know, theoretically, you’re supposed to get sick leave. But in practice, we know that actually doesn’t happen. It’s a real cost to you to try to figure out when you can get the vaccine to avoid causing problems with your work schedule. Whereas we’ve seen efforts when people just show up, you know, at low wage workplaces, for example, they get a ton of people vaccinated. So I do think one of the things that we’ve seen with the vaccine rollout is that we were not taking seriously enough the actual burden involved, for particular sub populations, low income populations, immigrant populations, and that’s have real consequences for us in terms of the fraction of people actually vaccinated.
Veronica Goodman (32:04)
Sure, and so I guess, looking forward for both of you, are there any topics you’d like to see more research on in this space, or what you’re hoping to focus on in the future?
Pamela Herd (32:16)
One quick area I mentioned before Don’s time is done is I’m looking for a greater understanding actually, about not just the impact these kinds of burdens have on people’s like access to programs, but their actual mixture, their health, their psychological well being, and their views of government. So one thing that we haven’t really talked about is how these really negative interactions with government actually impact people’s views about what government can do, and then what they’re willing to support in terms of kind of government intervention on the thing that I always point to, right, was that billions of dollars in aid that was hugely beneficial during the pandemic, but for a certain group of people, for not an insignificant group of people. Despite all that money being spent, they were left with really negative feelings, actually, because it was inconsistent, it was hard to access. So those kinds of feedback mechanisms. So I would like to understand a lot better in terms of how it actually affects people’s views of government. How does it affect people’s willingness to support going forward kind of more social welfare policy intervention to do things like reduce poverty and increase access to health insurance?
Don Moynihan (33:31)
Yeah, I think I’d reiterate what Pam said. I think there’s also like a class of research that is much more at the intersection of just practical design and academic research, that I hope to see a lot more of where governments will routinely experiment with a new way of doing things maybe by doing data matching, or by combining forms as you talked about, or by simplifying processes in some way. And even if they don’t run a full randomized control trial, that they do some sort of tracking to get feedback on whether that worked or not. Because some of the times administrative burdens occur in the public sector is simply because we’ve had an administrative process in place to do things a certain way for a long period of time. We become wedded to that. People might understand it’s not perfect, but they don’t have a systematic incentive to examine and improve those processes. So I think there’s a huge opportunity. And I think the Biden Administration is moving in this direction. But to do this for a practical, experimental approach to research where you just systematically and routinely look at potential problems, try something else, get feedback. And if that doesn’t work, try something else again. So I think that’s one type of research, I’m excited to see a lot more of. And then there’s sort of another type of research, which is more to do with sort of structural issues, that you know, why is it harder for some people more than others? Right, you know, issues of like human capital, health, financial resources, race, where you live? I think those are sort of fascinating, deeper issues. Why, as Pam also referred to, why might these processes matter to how you think of yourself as a citizen, as a member of society? Like, what are the sort of policy feedback processes that lead you to come out of a mundane experience, like going to the DMV, and feel happy or unhappy about that, to a more fundamental or important experience, like, you know, trying to get a benefit that’ll affect whether you get stay in your house or not? Right? And do you still see yourself as engaging in sort of a social contract in those processes where government is there to help you? Well, government is, instead, not being particularly useful to you. I think this sort of deepers or questions, then whether the American state can still do big and important things? Whether people see government as a positive force in our lives, and whether they feel like they are a player in this process, as opposed to simply being the subject to this sort of whims of market and governmental powers? So I think that, you know, you have these multiple levels of research opportunities here. It’s very exciting, right? There’s more than anyone can do. As well as like, there’s lots of different policy areas where, as I said at the start of our conversation, pretty much anyone can talk about your experiences of these administrative burdens. And so pretty much in any policy area, there’s also an opportunity to do this type of research.
Veronica Goodman (37:07)
I think that’s a that’s a great note to end on. I’ll add that I saw in the recent memo from the Office of Management and Budget, that they’re making administrative burdens a priority in terms of how they’re thinking about equity, which I think it’s just fantastic. But thank you so much. This has been really interesting. And thank you to both of you for taking the time to discuss your research and your work with me today. I hope folks take the time to read the book “Administrative Burden,” I will link it to the recording for this conversation, and thanks very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.
Progressive Policy Institute (37:42)
Thanks for listening. Want to learn more about the Progressive Policy Institute? Follow us on Twitter, at @PPI and on Facebook, at Progressive Policy Institute, or go to our website, at progressivepolicy.org. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and check back for new episodes. We’ll talk with you soon.
[End]
