Making Government Programs Easier to Access

By Sam Berger, Associate Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Today, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) released its second annual report describing the Administration’s work to identify and reduce burdens that individuals, families, and small businesses face every day when interacting with government programs. The Biden Administration has made reducing administrative burdens a central priority. At OIRA, we have been working to minimize the burdens that fall on members of the public through our review of government forms and relevant regulations involving public benefits and services.

Administrative burdens—complicated forms, requests for redundant information, or confusing application processes—have a real cost: they lead to people being unable to access critical programs for which they are eligible. By one estimate, every year more than $140 billion in government benefits that Congress has authorized goes unclaimed—including tax credits for working families, health insurance coverage for low-income adults and children, unemployment benefits, and disability supports. In a similar vein, researchers have found that many small businesses that could qualify for tax credits do not claim them.

Unclaimed benefits can mean that more families struggle to make ends meet and more small businesses fail to grow. While others may succeed in accessing benefits, they still pay a heavy toll in the form of lost time, increased stress, the shame of stigma, or other costs.

As part of our ongoing burden reduction initiative, last year we released a report discussing key agency efforts to reduce administrative burdens. Today’s report provides an update on some of those efforts and highlights new steps being taken across the Federal government to reduce burdens and improve government service, including:

• The Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Digital Service’s efforts to increase automatic renewals in the Medicaid program using the government’s own data, instead of having people fill out complicated forms.
• The Small Business Administration’s efforts to speed up the process for businesses seeking disaster loans.
• The Social Security Administration’s efforts to simplify and streamline steps for low-income disabled children, disabled adults, and older Americans to maintain eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits.
• The Department of Homeland Security’s improvements to the E-Verify system, which helps confirm a potential employee’s eligibility for employment, making the system easier for employers and employees to use while improving program integrity.
• The Department of Agriculture’s efforts to work with states to simplify and streamline processes for obtaining and maintaining benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

These initiatives will help millions of individuals, families, and small businesses. For example, they will allow more than 5 million Americans to automatically renew their health coverage without filling out paperwork, saving them 2.5 million hours of their lives; disburse money three times faster to small businesses suffering in the wake of a natural disaster; reduce burdens on 350,000 employers a year seeking to verify potential employees’ eligibility to work; and eliminate nearly 200,000 hours of burden on low-income older and disabled Americans in the SSI program.

OIRA and agencies continue to look for more opportunities reduce administrative burdens in Federal programs. In many cases, members of the public are in the best position to identify burdens because they are the ones who directly experience them. To share your views on government forms, you can visit OIRA’s website to see forms we are currently reviewing and that are open for comment. To make the process simpler, consider consulting OIRA’s guide to providing input on these forms. Your comments can make a difference, by helping us to understand the administrative burdens you face, as well as identify ways to address them.