Taxes. Permits. Licensure. Benefits. We’ve all had to interact with the public sector before in ways that were…not that great.
Sure, most Americans are, in fact, proud to pay taxes. We see most of these things that government does as important. But most people also wish it could be done better. Yes, we like that we pay our taxes. Do we like scrounging together a bunch of documents every year to fill out a complicated form or paying someone to do that for us? Not so much.
A lot of government works this way. At the local level, people talk about permitting and the administrative headaches that come with the process. In the world of health and human services, safety net benefits often require hours of paperwork in order to become eligible for. And don’t get us started on driver’s licensing.
This is a topic that Cass Sunstein has called “sludge.” The legal scholar, behavioral economist, and former head regulatory czar for the federal government has been talking for years about the impact that long forms and long lines have had on the lives of Americans.
These might seem like minor inconveniences, but these costs add up. An afternoon spent at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for a driver’s license renewal that could take twenty minutes can end up costing someone four hours of their time. If the average wage for an Ohioan in $26 and the average Ohioan needs to renew their driver’s license every four years, that means the Bureau of Motor Vehicles could be costing Ohioans nearly $200 million of time per year due to inefficient licensing practices.
This does not only exist in the public sector. If you have tried to change a cell phone plan, cancel your cable plan, use a coupon, or many other private-sector practices, you have probably seen sludge and its impact on your time. The difference between the public sector and the private sector, however, is the private sector usually does this to increase profits, while public sector sludge could be reduced at a benefit to everyone.
So what can we do to reduce “sludge?” Sunstein suggests what he calls “sludge audits.” An agency director can direct its division heads to deliver a report on how much time that people spend interacting with their bureaucracy. This can then provide a guide for agency heads to tackle the parts of their processes with the most “sludge” and find ways to reduce the impact of their processes on the public.
By tying the hours to average wages for the region, agencies can also put a dollar figure number on the impact of sludge generated by the agency and subjected on the public. This can provide a handy guide for making process improvements. We may be attached to processes that we currently carry out in a certain way, but if reducing a form from two pages to one page can reduce costs felt by the public by millions of dollars, it’s a lot easier to understand that concrete impact.
The public sector is a key part of the economy. But it can always do better. Reducing costs borne by the public by just interacting with it is a great way for the public sector to improve.