The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has released the Information Collection Budget of the United States Government (ICB), in compliance with the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA). This is another of many federal government doings that merits the attention of incoming president Donald Trump’s advisory Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The annual report has slipped in recent years, with this new edition capturing only fiscal year 2023 despite our living in the second month of fiscal year 2025. It is unclear when the 2024 ICB will appear.
PRA compliance in part entails “minimiz[ing] the paperwork burden for individuals; small businesses; educational and nonprofit institutions; Federal contractors” and others.
The Biden administration’s latest editions, however, downplay minimizing business paperwork burdens on the productive class. Despite the landing page referring to the ICB, that traditional term is nowhere to be found in the main report. Instead, for the second year in a row, the main-body report has ditched the traditional plain-paper format for a glossy-looking product called Tackling the Time Tax: Making Important Government Benefits and Programs Easier to Access.
The subtitle says it all, capturing the shift in emphasis. Sympathetic reporting on the varieties of red tape affecting business that largely spawned the Paperwork Reduction Act in the first place does not figure in a great deal.
Small business is mentioned, but only with respect to financial assistance to them, reflecting a broader Biden administration shift toward inducing small business dependency and expanding the ranks of the federal contractor class. This too is a concern for the DOGE, headed by Elon Mush and Vivek Ramaswamy to address.
The ICB’s emphasis is less on streamlining government itself than easing access to growing federal largesse, such as automatic eligibilities for programs and partnering with community-based organizations. Where DOGE aims to slash spending, OMB’s 2023 Tackling the Time Tax fretted that that, “every year more than $140 billion in government benefits that Congress has authorized goes unclaimed.”
The normalization and encouragement of dependency on federal programs are in keeping with other moves like the White House’s rewrite of guidance on regulatory analysis (called Circular A-4, issued in response to Biden’s executive order Modernizing Regulatory Review) replacing a skeptical cost-benefit stance with collaboration with agencies in the pursuit of net benefits. Paperwork reductions we see now are less likely to come from ending or streamlining government programs, than from making it easier to claim financial benefits from an expanding inventory of them.
The ICB’s “Paperwork Reduction Accounting” appendix indicates that 10.5 billion hours were required to complete paperwork from 39 departments, agencies and commissions—up from 10.34 in 2022. A table below depicts these.
The bulk—6.657 billion hours—is attributable to the Department of the Treasury (up from 6.603 in 2022). The runner-up Department of Health and Human Services clocks in at 1.59 billion hours (compared to 1.65 billion in 2022; here we do find reduction). Past years’ cross-governmental paperwork-hour tallies appear below, by fiscal year.
- 2015: 9.865 billion hours
- 2016: 11.442
- 2017: 11.529
- 2018: 11.357
- 2019: 10.998
- 2020: 11.618
- 2021: 9.974
- 2022: 10.34
Despite the emphasis on ease of access to programs, paperwork hours are considerably higher today than the 7.2 billion at which they stood back in 2000. There are far more programs today, although the Government Accountability Office (GAO) affirms we don’t know how many.
A small Trump-era slowdown in paperwork materialized between 2017 and 2019, perhaps in part attributable to that administration’s regulatory liberalization emphasis. We might anticipate that again if DOGE focuses on this element of federal excess.
Lifetime Equivalents
How may we visualize 10.5 billion hours of federal paperwork?
Here’s one way. An 80-year human lifespan amounts to 29,200 days, which translates into 700,800 hours (life is short; here’s an animation). The 10.5 billion hours of paperwork in 2023 translates into the equivalent of 14,983 human lifetimes’ worth of “dead tape.”
For periodic real-time assessments, the OMB maintains an online landing page for “Government-Wide Totals for Active Information Collections.” It appears as if the time tax tackling isn’t going too well, since as of today it stands at 12.3 billion “total annual hours” in the OMB’s “Inventory of Currently Approved Information Collections,” compared to the 10.5 billion hours detailed in the most current full report. The dead tape is greater than 17,000 lifetimes by that reckoning, but we’ll await the formal fiscal year 2024 roundup.
Paperwork burdens can be quantified in dollars as well. OMB’s landing page helpfully proclaims a “total annual cost” of paperwork of $187.2 billion, compared to $163.2 billion a year ago.
Toward Realistic Paperwork Cost Estimates
OMB appears to be translating paper-shuffling compliance into $15.18 per hour. Back in the 2011 ICB, OMB remarked that “if each hour [then 8.783 billion] is valued at $20, the monetary equivalent would be $176 billion.”
There is a question about whether $15 hourly is realistic. Ascribing higher salaries to paperwork-heavy jobs, such as those of banking and environmental compliance personnel, would impute a considerably higher paperwork burden cost. For comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes the following mean May 2022 hourly wages (the median is lower) for basic categories that one might regard a more representative of the costs of keeping up with complex federal paperwork. All exceed the $15.18 seemingly imputed to paperwork by OMB.
- Human Resources Managers: $74.39
- Accountants and auditors: $43.65
- General compliance officers: $38.55
Assuming $40 an hour would mean over $420 billion in mere paper-shuffling costs at the new ICB’s 10.5 billion paperwork hours level. Importantly, that’s not counting actual compliance with underlying rules and regulations.
Numerous policy transformations spearheaded by the Biden administration are becoming reflected in paperwork and its costs, despite the claims of time savings. As the incoming Trump administration attempts to establish spending and program cuts and regulatory liberalization as priorities, perhaps the intent of original Paperwork Reduction Act might be reaffirmed also.
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