For many people who have served in the executive branch, the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) encapsulates why government is broken. Risk aversion, policy cruft, and the cascade of rigidity — the dysfunctions described in our foundational state capacity report — all contribute to a process of “paperwork reduction” that often does quite the opposite.

The White House office charged with overseeing the act made some notable improvements in recent years, but there is growing support for more far-reaching change. The question now is not whether or not to act, but just how far to reach and what tradeoffs a reform push will face at a moment when the Trump administration has certainly proved willing to disrupt the status quo, but often recklessly and without regard for Congress. In a moment of promise and peril for reworking government, we coordinated with several authors to provide distinct perspectives on what we should do about the PRA:

A successful PRA reform would achieve two primary goals: 

  1. Reduce the burden on the public. This is the original intent of the PRA, and anybody who has interacted with the federal government knows we have a long way to go. In principle there are two ways to do this: 
    • Only collect necessary information 
    • Collect that information in the least burdensome way 
  2. Reduce the burden on government offices. We can’t shackle the government and expect great outcomes. To properly deliver public services, government offices have to collect information and do so in a timely enough manner to actually inform decision making and improve outcomes. Again, there are two ways to do this: 
    • Simplify and speed up (or get rid of) approvals 
    • Ensure any review process adds real value 

There is no perfect system and there will always be pain points and failures. As with many questions of state capacity, there are two tensions at the heart of making this process better: 

  1. Centralization vs. decentralization
  2. Mandates + controls vs. enablement

More centralization allows for greater oversight and coordination across agencies, but inevitably slows things down. Using more mandates and controls tries to protect against mistakes, but can ultimately undermine the very outcomes we seek. The “right answer” to PRA reform is subjective and comes down to your priorities. What we ultimately end up with also depends on political viability in Congress. 

This is what makes PRA reform, the wonkiest of issues, super interesting! And this is why everyone should read the pieces by Alex, Jen, Kevin, and Marina. 

Alex offers a thoughtful set of reforms to improve the information collection process within the current construct. His reforms keep the centralized process, but make several important changes to better focus review on just the most important information collections. 

Kevin once again brings history to life on his substack by describing successful approaches by the U.S. government in the past to simplify and improve information collections. He calls for more investment in training over punitive requirements and provides excellent examples of how this used to be done.

Jen and Marina challenge us to think about what a more transformative approach would be. Both argue to remove centralized review altogether and build up better capabilities at the agency level for more responsive, more effective collections.  

The PRA debate may seem narrow, but it’s a window into the bigger story of state capacity in the United States. Reforming the PRA forces us to wrestle with real tradeoffs, institutional constraints, and political realities. These authors don’t all agree, but together they offer a sharper understanding of what’s broken and what could come next.