Red tape and paperwork requirements attributed to federal regulations — mostly in filing tax documents — cost America over 10 billion hours a year, or enough to consume 14,983 human lifetimes.
According to a just-released accounting of the paperwork burden under Biden, handling federal red tape consumed 10.5 billion hours.
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But that was in 2023, the last year in the Office of Management and Budget’s report, belatedly delivered. It is actually 12.3 billion hours, according to a more up-to-date OMB time calculator.
“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,” said Clyde Wayne Crews, the regulations expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
In a blog post, Crews said that the paperwork burden should be one of the first topics President-elect Donald Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” should look at.
Cutting the red tape “tax” could also help cut the estimated cost of the annual paperwork burden, $187-$420 billion. A similar report Secrets reported on last week put the total paperwork bill to Americans under Biden at $1.8 trillion.
“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,” said Crews.
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Trump has promised to cut regulations, as he did in his first term from 2017-2021. This time, he made a stronger pledge to “drain the swamp” and streamline the government, and he named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as his efficiency chiefs.
Cutting regulations and paperwork, however, is hard to do. While Trump had success, the paperwork burden during his first term was similarly high.