Death by a Thousand Papercuts

Since last April, according to government data, the number of people getting help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—often referred to as food stamps—has dropped by more than 5.3 million people, including more than 1.5 million children.  

In Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, the declines have been greater than 20 percent, and in Arizona, the number of beneficiaries has plummeted by more than half.  

No, the nation has not miraculously solved its hunger problem. If anything, food insecurity has worsened in the last year, thanks to persistent inflation and economic uncertainty resulting from the Trump administration’s policies. In a July Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 66 percent of Americans said groceries are “unaffordable.”  

The real reason for this precipitous drop in food aid? Paperwork.  

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed by the GOP-led Congress last year, dramatically expanded work reporting requirements on SNAP beneficiaries and imposed harsh penalties on states with high “error rates” in approving or calculating benefits. One analysis concluded that as many as 41 states could end up losing federal SNAP funding under these new rules. In response, states have built a thicket of bureaucracy to shield themselves from punishment. Applicants and beneficiaries now face mountains of tedious, high-stakes paperwork to document their eligibility. “Everything is just 10 times more difficult,” one SNAP recipient who lost her benefits due to a paperwork error told The New York Times. 

According to the proponents of these requirements, this additional documentation safeguards against the “fraud” that President Donald Trump and his Republican allies allege is widespread, ensuring that benefits flow only to the “deserving” (or so the argument goes).  

The Time Tax: How
Government Wastes Our Time
—And How to Fix It
by Annie Lowrey.
Ecco, 352 pp.

In reality, the new rules are a shabby cover for drastic cuts to the public safety net. The OBBBA’s changes to SNAP will reduce federal spending on the program by about $186 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But rather than cut benefits directly—thereby risking accusations of cruelty—Republicans in Congress resorted to the subterfuge of bureaucratic hassle. It’s a common ploy, writes the journalist Annie Lowrey in her important new book on the uses and abuses of bureaucracy to control citizens’ access to government services. “Politicians use administrative burdens to discourage, dissuade, or preclude activities they cannot or do not want to ban through the legislative process,” she writes in The Time Tax: How Government Wastes Our Time—And How to Fix It.  

Using a wealth of anecdotes gleaned from interviews with ordinary citizens, Lowrey, a staff writer at The Atlantic, catalogs the endless variety of soul-sucking bureaucratic humiliations heaped on Americans in their interactions with government, whether it’s filing taxes, starting a business, accessing medical care, or registering to vote.  

This is what she calls the “time tax”— “a levy of paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation imposed on citizens in exchange for rights and benefits that are putatively theirs.” Cumulatively, Lowrey reports, Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms. “At prevailing wages, this uncompensated labor is worth $430 billion a year,” she continues. These burdens fall disproportionately on low-income Americans, whom the government only grudgingly seeks to help. “Administrative complexity is a way the government creates and conveys stigma,” Lowrey writes. “The paperwork burden imposed on an applicant acts as a proxy for the financial burden an enrollee supposedly imposes on the state.”  

As one of the nation’s foremost journalists covering poverty and inequality, Lowrey masterfully shows how the time tax helps to trap low-income Americans in poverty. Her subjects spend hours applying for benefits, only to be denied for making insignificant errors or mistakes made by the state. In one instance, Lowrey tells of a single mother, Marcella Patino, who, without reliable Internet access, struggled to fill out complex work reporting forms online. Patino lost her Medicaid benefits when the state of Utah mistakenly logged a job switch as her holding two jobs at once. Another paperwork snafu led to her losing cash assistance, and she ultimately fell behind on her rent.  

Citing the sociologists Pamela Herd and Daniel Moynihan, Lowrey identifies four distinct costs imposed by administrative burdens. First are research costs, meaning the time it takes to figure out how a program works or the obligations that are due. This could include, for instance, researching eligibility requirements for a tax benefit, or how to apply for a Pell grant. Next come compliance costs, such as the hours recipients spend filling out work reporting forms so they don’t lose access to food stamps or Medicaid. There are also “redemption” costs, or the time it takes to access a benefit or exercise a right. Getting a tax refund, for instance, is surprisingly difficult for people who do not have bank accounts and can’t get direct deposits. In many instances, taxpayers end up paying a tax preparation company to open a temporary account to receive a refund. (This is something I wrote about in my book, Poverty for Profit.) The final category of costs is psychic—the despair and rage people feel in dealing with a rigid, uncaring bureaucracy. These costs, Lowrey theorizes, are a significant contributor to the public’s mistrust of government.  

Lowrey reserves the bulk of her condemnation for conservatives and their weaponization of bureaucracy against the poor. She also calls out the GOP for its hypocrisy in railing against “big government” while at the same time expanding its reach into the intimate details of low-income Americans’ lives.  

Yet liberals, prodigious time tax creators themselves, don’t escape unscathed. Democrats, Lowrey argues, “love too-complicated-by-half means-tested measures, like tax credits for rural broadband users and grants for people struggling with the cost of air-conditioning. They load straightforward initiatives up with so many conditions and chokepoints that they fail to deliver, if they ever get off the ground.” (In this regard, The Time Tax echoes the argument of Abundance, the blockbuster book by Lowrey’s husband, The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, about the growth-choking impacts of often well-meaning regulation. Where Abundance looks at the macro-economic impacts of over-governance, The Time Tax takes this problem to the micro level of individual and household burdens.) 

But if anyone is especially guilty of hiking time tax, it is Trump. When Elon Musk rampaged through government with his “Department of Government Efficiency,” the billionaire’s stated goals were to improve government performance and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy. Trump and DOGE have, in fact, done the opposite, Lowrey argues. The administration eliminated promising efforts like the IRS’s Direct File initiative and increased paperwork burdens on citizens and corporations. Even goodies like “no tax on tips” (which is not even accurate) have “made the tax code more complicated and contingent,” Lowrey writes.  

Lowrey concludes The Time Tax with a bold agenda for reducing time taxes. She argues, for instance, that Medicaid should operate as a single federal program, like Medicare, rather than be administered by the states. She also calls for ending work requirements and automatic income verification so people can easily “cross-enroll” in programs for which they’re eligible.  

Perhaps paradoxically, this agenda’s very boldness causes it to fall short. The forces that Lowrey identifies as having led to the creation of the time tax—Congress’s love of complexity, our parsimony toward the poor, our fixation on who is “deserving”—seem impossible to dislodge in this moment.  

Nevertheless, Lowrey does the nation a great service in identifying a root cause of government dysfunction and public distrust. While Congress is often conscious of the more obvious fiscal burdens it demands of taxpayers, policymakers all too often ignore the invisible tax on time. 

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