The Paperwork Reduction Act Created a Paperwork Explosion

A law meant to simplify government forms now blocks commonsense improvements, wastes taxpayer money, and slows life-saving services.

Legislators love misnomers. The USA PATRIOT Act "increased patriotism" by reducing domestic freedoms. The Inflation Reduction Act increased inflation before our eyes. And since its introduction in 1980, the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) has dramatically increased the amount and complexity of government paperwork.

The PRA was last updated in 1995. Websites back then were extremely basic: mostly text with the occasional grainy image that took a full minute to load. There was no concept of online forms or accessing government services over the internet. The Clinton administration had launched whitehouse.gov a mere seven months earlier, and the federal government did not even begin managing the .gov top-level domain until 1997.

The world has changed. Most forms are filled out online—increasingly, on mobile devices. A typical form is not a static set of fields but rather dynamic, showing or hiding questions based on prior responses, enforcing required elements, and ensuring your response meets criteria. Forms are often rigorously tested and tweaked to increase submission rates, with improvements like removing extraneous fields, swapping jargon for plain language, and prefilling known data. Mainstream analytics tools can measure exactly at which field users are pausing or abandoning the page altogether, and many organizations hire user researchers to watch and collect feedback about a form's usability among its target audience.

What hasn't changed is the PRA. Still lumbering under a definition of "information technology" from 1949, it forces government agencies to frame information collection as individual static (paper) forms. It threatens employees who want to get feedback from the public. It forces every proposed change, however small, through a rigid process that can take years and adds no value. The PRA even causes the government to break its own laws by making it impossible to meet congressionally mandated deadlines.

If you want a smaller government that does less, the PRA does the opposite: It drives the proliferation of more paperwork and stands in the way of efficiencies and subtractions. If you want government to successfully deliver on its mission, whatever that mission may be, the PRA is quietly dragging down the whole ship—and it's time to break free of it.

How the PRA Works

Per the PRA, when a government agency wants to create or update an "information collection"—typically a form, though its grasp has extended to user logins and profiles, customer satisfaction surveys, and user research—the central Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) must approve it first.

Approval involves completing forms about the form (which all require several layers of internal agency approval), then submitting that package to an agency's "desk officer." The desk officer's job is to forward the package on to OIRA, a role that the Bobs of Office Space would certainly call into question. Desk officers often contract out this work, though, and prioritize their own efficiencies by submitting one enormous package once a year. A recent submission from the Forest Service contained 151 forms.

Once OIRA receives the package, it (eventually) publishes it in the government's newspaper, the Federal Register—a staple at every breakfast table. The proposal must be available for public comment for 60 days. The originating agency then compiles responses to any comments received, though it doesn't have to actually do anything about them. OIRA reviews this package, and the proposal (whether changed or not) is reposted to the Federal Register for 30 more days. After an additional period of OIRA review, it might be approved. This can take years in the worst of circumstances.

Approved collections must be reapproved every three years, even if you don't change a thing, generating an endless cycle of paperwork—about paperwork.

How It Doesn't Work

When I joined the federal government in 2012, navigating the PRA was the first thing I heard about in my onboarding. The PRA was a major barrier to improving veterans' access to benefits and health care when I served as chief technology officer (CTO) of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.).

Reason could run Brickbats only on my experience of the PRA at the V.A. and never run out of content. Some examples:

• The V.A. disability application form contains all the information necessary to determine V.A. health care eligibility. Instead of having veterans complete two entirely separate (and duplicative) applications, the V.A. proposed adding a simple checkbox to the disability form to also enroll in health care. This would reduce paperwork. After repeated urgent escalations in the face of a mounting health care enrollment backlog, during which an estimated 307,000 veterans died, OIRA responded nearly a year later that the checkbox was a "non-substantive change" that didn't require approval.
• It took over 180 days to approve adding same-sex partner information to the V.A.'s application for health care after the United States v. Windsor ruling legally required it. 
• It took over 180 days to approve the proof of coverage letter required by the Affordable Care Act for veterans enrolled in V.A. care.
• The V.A. needed to conduct a study to collect veteran data required for a congressionally mandated report. Final PRA approval was not granted until November 2013—well past the deadline.

As part of the paperwork to approve paperwork, agencies must list the number of "burden hours" a form takes—in other words, how long it takes to fill out, including gathering or looking up any necessary information. Does OIRA require them to base this number on the actual amount of time it took people to fill out the form, as observed by agency staff or measured (automatically) by widely available online tools? Nope. Agencies simply make this number up out of thin air.

The IRS believes it takes 12 hours a year, including collecting records throughout the year, to file your taxes. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if that's accurate. 

Sadly, the Federal Register is full of submissions where the amount of time it takes to get the approval exceeds the total burden hours (the estimated completion time, multiplied by the number of expected responses), like this submission from the Department of the Interior for the "Online Eastern Population Sandhill Crane Survey Data Entry Portal" with a total estimated 11 burden hours. 

One might even argue that OIRA's current implementation of the PRA breaks the very law it's meant to carry out. The legislation lays out 11 intended purposes, including "to minimize the paperwork burden for individuals, small businesses, educational and nonprofit institutions" and "ensure the greatest possible public benefit from and maximize the utility of information created, collected, maintained, used, shared and disseminated by or for the Federal Government." 

OIRA's process accomplishes exactly zero of these 11 stated intentions. It can't. OIRA has no expertise in technology, user research, usability, or form design. It doesn't even have any agency or subject matter expertise.

It also lacks authority. OIRA can lord an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) control number (OIRA's stamp of approval you will see at the bottom of government forms) over your head, but it can't influence the policies, decisions, and workflows that interact with the information being collected. Nor can OIRA improve, or even see, the databases that store the resulting data. When I was CTO, the V.A. collected a veteran's address hundreds of times and stored it in any one of 83 different databases, none of which were synced. As a result, the agency routinely sent important correspondence to the wrong place and scheduled veterans for exams in the wrong state.

OIRA never noticed this, prevented this, or suggested improvements. But when I proposed merging the V.A.'s many forms into one digital "wizard" that would collect only the minimum amount of information absolutely necessary from a veteran, prefill (and allow correction of) existing data, and finally sync data across the V.A.'s disparate backends, OIRA blocked me. I was told I first had to submit every possible permutation of this wizard for public comment—a mathematically impossible quest.

This experience was not unique to the V.A. My first federal role was entrepreneur in residence at the Department of Education. There, nearly 50 different higher education grant forms had, over time, developed separate unique identifiers. When it came time to report on general grant information, multiple people had to be hired every year to painstakingly reconcile the identifiers across forms. A simple solution here would be to update every grant form with a single (already existing) identifier—but OIRA shut down this idea by requiring the agency to submit each form as its own separate PRA package. It was less paperwork to continue hiring the temporary full-time workers each year—but way more paperwork and waste overall.

In addition to challenges with actual implementation, there are also significant secondary effects regarding the number of activities not taken because of vagueness or fear of the PRA. A cursory review of the Department of Commerce's PRA guidance promises one will have their entire agency budget frozen if they so much as accidentally ask a question without an OMB control number.

The federal government knows full well what a hindrance the PRA is. The 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama, gave the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the authority to waive the PRA during a health emergency. President Donald Trump used this waiver authority liberally during the COVID-19 pandemic. If legislators know they have to exempt a program from the PRA in order for it to work, why is it still subjecting us to such heavy-handed bureaucracy?

User Research

Ironically, despite mostly being an enforcement mechanism for public comment, one of the main harms of the PRA is that it firmly stands in the way of getting feedback from constituents that could improve service delivery and make forms simpler.

When I was at the V.A., data showed that almost no veterans applied for health care online; virtually everyone applied on paper. (Paper which, as mentioned earlier, was piling up in a warehouse while veterans died.) The V.A. took this as evidence that veterans didn't use the internet—and, they argued, they had the data to prove it.

Rather than argue about it, my team went out and talked to actual veterans who needed health care. This led us to Dominic, a veteran trying to access health care who, it turns out, could use the internet just fine. It was the V.A.'s form that was the problem. He described the OIRA-approved form as "trying to lead you in a back door that's blocked with spikes and IEDs."

We designed a new, extremely simple version of the health care form and asked Dominic to give it a whirl. He declared he'd use it "over anything the V.A. had to offer." This was enough for us to launch the form publicly, but we didn't stop there. Further research with more veterans uncovered more challenges. For example, many abandoned the form when asked for their adjusted gross income for the prior tax year. In response, we worked to get that number directly from the IRS and alleviate the need to ask veterans for it in the first place. The ultimate paperwork reduction!

As we did this, we were regularly warned that we were breaking the law—violating the PRA by asking questions of the public without running those questions by OIRA first. Many—I would estimate most—government employees would tell you that getting feedback from the public is firmly not allowed without an OMB control number for the conversation. Fear of being sent to "PRA jail" (which is not a thing) for talking to users is regularly mentioned in conversations.

Why Not Tweak It Instead?

I'm a big proponent of change from within. I'm proud of the work we did to improve the veteran experience when I was CTO, including an award-winning digital overhaul that couldn't happen from the outside. I also wrote a book about bureaucracy hacking success stories, most of which recount strategies deployed inside the world's gnarliest bureaucratic behemoths.

You might think that sharing stories about the positive, burden-reducing effects of user research would result in OIRA encouraging the practice. You might also think that demonstrating what's possible if burden reduction is really your goal—holistically considering and aligning all information collections, using wizards, thoughtfully reusing known information, ensuring systemwide address updates, and even better accounting for people's real names—would change how the PRA is implemented.

But it hasn't. A quiet attempt was made in 2014 to exempt "direct observation" from PRA authority, which changed no one's behavior. Ten years later, OIRA issued a memo, insisting it had been a fan of user research all along. But this memo is meaningless progress; you can see that agencies are still submitting user research plans for OIRA approval as of April 2025. This marks over a decade of internal battles for only one of the many improvements the PRA implementation desperately needs, with virtually no progress—and a great deal of harm—to show for it.

Changes from the inside didn't work. Chipping away at the margin didn't work. The PRA has to go.

Ultimately, Congress should repeal the PRA entirely. In the meantime, the current legislation includes pilot and delegated authority that would allow the OIRA administrator to declare that as long as agencies self-attest to testing their information collections with their end users, and streamlining information collection when possible—both of which the PRA's current implementation makes virtually impossible—then they are exempt from OIRA review.

There is tremendous danger right now that half the country views any activity in the current administration as something to fight against. This should not be one of them. The only proponent of the PRA is inertia.