The Paperwork Reduction Act Doesn’t Reduce Paperwork

You know what they say about good intentions?

This is a crossposting from Eating Policy, a publication about state capacity and policy implementation from Jen Pahlka. Jen is the board chair of the Recoding America Fund, a six-year, $120 million philanthropic initiative aimed at reforming governments at both the federal and state levels. You can subscribe to Eating Policy here.

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Many fear that, left to their own devices, many government agencies would likely expand needless forms, reporting requirements, and surveys. The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) attempts to throttle this reflex by subjecting any request for information from the public to lengthy review. The aim is to protect citizens, businesses, grantees, and nonprofits from having to provide information the government doesn’t truly need. It’s all well-intentioned, but the resulting choreography is a nightmare.¹

In attempting to reduce burden and paperwork, the PRA paradoxically creates more of it within government. Compliance requires agencies to comprehensively detail and justify every bit of information they plan to collect from the public. Because of the long procedural timeline, agencies are often forced to submit this documentation well before critical program and implementation details are ironed out. The process obstructs iteration and comes with an opportunity cost, wasting effort that could have been directed at meaningful program development.

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I’m not alone in wanting to sidestep PRA — Recent years have seen increased legislative attempts at establishing exemptions.

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During my time at the CHIPS Program Office (CPO), we needed to clear the PRA process 15 times to get approval for 10 different information collections (the official term for any type of form). I estimate that this forced our team to create about 60 new documents — some short, and some in excess of 20 pages. While we met our mission, who knows what more we could have done with that time?

I could live with a tedious process that achieves its intended outcomes, but it seems clear that that’s not the case with the PRA. It’s time for a factory reset.

Securing PRA approval

PRA review is overseen by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The process requires following a highly structured sequence that takes a minimum of six months.

When an agency designs any form or data collection, it must prepare an information collection request (ICR) for multiple layers of internal review. The ICR is a comprehensive package that details and justifies the collection, and must include estimates of the burden on the public and the cost to the government, both clumsy things to compute and based on estimated effort and national wages.² The PRA guidance is helpful, but misleadingly makes it sound trivial to compile.

Once the ICR is approved internally, the agency has to publish a 60-day notice in the Federal Register to solicit public comment. During this phase, the agency is in a holding pattern to allow for input on whether the collection is necessary, understandable, and minimally burdensome. The agency then determines how to handle each comment — which can include grouping similar comments or ignoring specific ones — and must document every decision for OMB review.

After any revisions, there’s another Federal Register notice to invite another round of public comment, though this time for only 30 days. At the same time, the agency submits the full package to OIRA for review. The documentation must include the instruments themselves, the guidance provided to respondents, detailed justification for all decisions made during the comment period, and screenshots or mockups of any system interfaces (often requiring dozens of pages capturing every field, dropdown, upload, and attestation).³ OIRA has up to 60 days to review the submission, but must wait at least 30 to account for any public comments. Upon approval, OIRA issues each collection an OMB Control Number. Without it, an agency cannot legally collect information. The control number typically expires after three years, at which point the agency needs to go through the whole ordeal again.

Let me give you an example of this process in practice. Early on, we knew we’d need to systematically track and manage meeting and engagement requests from the public, applicants, and other government officials. To handle that onslaught, we built the AskCHIPS portal, which helped us gather information upfront and ensured that meetings and speaking engagements were properly vetted and staffed.

The form on the portal is voluntary and takes less than five minutes to complete. Despite getting clearance for an expedited emergency process (more on that below), we still needed to produce:⁴

• a Federal Register notice;

• a Privacy Act notice explaining how the data would be used;

• a 20-page document with annotated screenshots to show every permutation of the data entry page;

• a 7-page Supporting Statement defending the collection; and

• an emergency justification letter to make the case for an expedited review.

Even though this felt like overkill for a voluntary meeting request form, we had no choice — agencies are not allowed to collect information from ten or more members of the public unless the form displays a valid control number. Without it, the PRA’s public protection provision kicks in: if respondents fail to comply (whether by not filing the form, or leaving out fields), agencies cannot penalize non-response or deny a benefit on that basis. Though that legal backstop was largely irrelevant for a voluntary form like this one, the consequences would be much more significant for all of our other collections. That legal risk is the core motivator for bothering with the PRA process at all.

The sequencing problem and how we handled it

The core PRA implementation challenge is sequencing. The standard review process requires managing three distinct and complicated timelines:

• The first is the policy timeline, which is a function of program urgency. Ideally, this would set the pace of the rest of the system. In our case, Congress had issued a mandate,the Department of Commerce had public commitments about when funding opportunities would open, and industry needed us to move quickly — the expectations were clear.

• The second is the product timeline, which needs to allow for iteration and refinement. We were building a digital application system that needed to handle complex, conditional workflows; large financial uploads; multiple projects per applicant; and sensitive information tied to national security and supply chains. Product work is inherently iterative. You test your system, realize that the instructions are confusing, adjust, and learn.

• All of this is frustratingly slowed down by the PRA timeline. The standard review procedure needs to start at least six months before program launch to get approval in time. The process also assumes that you know exactly what information you need to collect and how, and that you can lock the details in early enough to publish for comment and review. The screenshot requirement is particularly annoying, occasionally forcing teams to build wireframes before they’ve had the chance to figure out what the product actually needs to do.⁵

On the whole, the PRA requires designing your system around the compliance timeline — it’s like allowing your slowest runner to take the longest leg of the relay race. What’s worse, the process almost certainly discourages agencies from collecting information to get the insight they need.

When I arrived at CHIPS in early January 2023, we were careening toward the NOFO publication date in late February. As soon as we published the NOFO, we would need to start collecting information via the Statement of Interest, but neither that nor any of the other applicant-facing interfaces were designed yet. We were developing policy, and the portal through which applicants would eventually submit all materials would need to reflect those changes. CHIPS was signed in August 2022; even if we kicked things off immediately (which would have been impossible without leaders or a programmatic vision in place), we’d have been behind.

Because of these constraints, we had no choice but to pursue emergency PRA approvals. The emergency procedure is intended for high-stakes circumstances like ours: the statute allows OMB to approve a collection for up to 180 days if waiting for the standard process would cause “public harm.”⁶ In emergencies, OMB also has discretion to modify or waive parts of the public comment process. But emergency PRA is ultimately not much of a shortcut. In our case, it still required fulsome packages — Supporting Statements, instruments, screenshots, instructions — and came with an explicit expectation that we would immediately begin the standard clearance process to replace the emergency approval before it expired.

In practice, the emergency PRA process can increase the effort needed to produce a collection. You do everything once to launch, and then repeat the process just to check the box. Although we managed to submit some forms early enough to run the standard process, half of our collections — including the AskCHIPS form — required the “shortcut” and the redo in order to remain in place. This felt like compression rather than flexibility.

Another case of misaligned incentives

The PRA comes with its own institutional ecosystem of staff who are tasked with shepherding collections through the review process. For CHIPS, it was the NIST PRA officer, the Commerce Department’s PRA lead, and the OMB desk officer within OIRA who ultimately approved our collections. Every collection had to move through that chain, in that order.

The incentives of the PRA stewards are often in tension with program urgency. Stewards need to be faithful to the process and to protect their relationships. Each person in the chain wants to ensure that what they send to the next can withstand scrutiny, and OMB must maintain consistency across the federal government. No one is trying to make your life difficult — they’re just preserving the system and their credibility within it. But in effect, even trivial edits must clear a process hellbent on procedural integrity. In our case, everyone was maximally helpful, but the process does not optimize for outcomes.

Institutionalization is a sensible response to volume and complexity. You need to ensure consistency, defensibility, and fidelity to the rules; hiring, procurement, and financial reporting, among other things, all depend on it. But unlike other systems that incentivize process, the value of PRA is seriously in doubt. Hiring and procurement at least promise new capacity. Even if the process sucks, you still stand to benefit. With PRA, the promised benefit is burden reduction for the public and improved information quality. The methods used to evaluate that are inaccurate, and in my experience, PRA most zealously protects process itself — proper notice, proper documentation, proper sequencing, proper review. I do not recall getting any meaningful feedback on any of our collections from anyone in the review chain.

The PRA might spare the public of burdensome paperwork, but it imposes hidden costs on the taxpayer. The staff having to navigate the PRA procedure could have applied their time and capacity to far more strategic efforts; the senior folks tasked with overseeing the process would be put to much better use designing the investment strategy, negotiating awards, or supporting applicants. The PRA did nothing to improve our outcomes but it did drain significant mindshare from the program during its early days. And ultimately the public pays for it. We managed to achieve our goals, but who knows what else we could have done with all of that misdirected effort?

It’s time for a factory reset on the PRA

The spirit of the PRA is defensible — it’s good for the government to minimize unnecessary burden where possible. But the law and process need an update. A wholesale reimagining could preserve the spirit and improve the machinery, allowing public servants to focus on what actually matters.

There has been underwhelmingly limited study of the value of the PRA, but it’s already clear that it falls short of its aims. Reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Administrative Conference of the United States call into question the utility of the redundant comment periods. The GAO report found that only a small fraction of collections received any comments at all, and that the resulting changes were typically clarifications rather than substantive changes or reductions in burden. This was true in our case as well: we received mostly clarifying questions on the application materials and only a handful of substantive comments across all of our collections.⁷ If the point of the comment period is to understand and reduce burden, that process is demonstrably not delivering.

GAO has also documented the brittleness of the burden estimates themselves. Per the report, one ICR underestimated burden cost by as much as $270 million, while another overestimated burden time by over 12 million hours. It comes as no surprise that agencies can’t reliably estimate something so abstract — our own burden and cost estimates were inevitably a shot in the dark and likely wrong. The one metric of PRA’s efficacy is impossible to measure accurately.

At the very least, it’s obvious that we need to either pare down the redundant comment periods, or remove them altogether in all but the most sensitive or complex collections. In general, the procedure should distinguish between low-risk, low-burden collections and high-burden, high-stakes reporting or statistical regimes. Other process improvements could include delegating authority to agencies and not penalizing system fixes or redesigns that enhance user experience but do not come with substantive changes.

Recent years have seen limited attempts at reforming the PRA, including the creation of generic clearances for customer experience and service delivery feedback, which allow agencies to operate under a pre-approved umbrella rather than seeking full PRA clearance for each individual collection. But these reforms are too narrow. CHIPS wasn’t trying to run a customer satisfaction survey. We needed to stand up a national industrial policy program with a digital application system and responsible oversight. The PRA gets in the way where the government most needs speed, competence, and insight. And I suspect that there’s an added cost of agencies deciding to not collect data and information that could meaningfully improve a program’s outcomes, just to avoid the PRA process.

Statute, regulations, and agency norms would all need to be rethought to break the PRA paradox. In the 30 years since the last revision of the PRA, it has arguably failed to reduce burden (indeed, burden has increased in that time!). The PRA’s failure in turn threatens the success of the government initiatives subjected to the process.

From my perspective, the paradox is especially pronounced in a program built at the speed and scale of CHIPS. Across my two years at CPO, there were 25 days (five full work weeks!) where we were dealing with some form of formal PRA transaction — and that of course doesn’t account for the hundreds of person-hours that went into generating the required documentation and managing the process. We got better at managing the cycles as the program stabilized, but there was undoubtedly a cost to our team capacity, especially in the early days, when we could least afford it.

1. Lots of ink has been spilled about how the PRA gums up government — see this Statecraft interview, or Jen Pahlka’s conversation with Ezra Klein.

2. Here are some example estimates we had to produce: a form that takes five minutes to complete once annually and that we expected 250 respondents for would amount to 20.75 burden hours. Multiplied by the mean BLS range of a Project Management specialist, that would cost $981.89. Managing the form would require 2% of the time of an oversight staffer and 5% of the time of two systems engineers and one IT security specialist, amounting to $132,922 in cost to the government. Seems rigorous, but it’s pretty much fiction.

3. This is just the start of it. A full package must also detail the statutory authority, document the public notices, and defend the collection by answering a list of 18 questions that justify its design and purpose. If the collection uses any statistical methods, the package needs to defend those too.

4. You can review all of the documents needed to obtain PRA approval for AskCHIPS in this public Google Drive.

5. Because the PRA process requires Federal Register notices, agencies are also subjected to the Federal Register timeline, which has its own uniquely arcane and rigid processing rules. These notices are not handled through OMB’s systems; they go through the Office of the Federal Register at the National Archives and Records Administration, using a different portal, different formatting rules, and different timelines.

6. The statute doesn’t clearly define public harm, leaving it to OMB discretion.

7. Notably, some comments came from labor groups urging us to collect more information from companies.