Federal estimates put the annual paperwork burden on Americans at more than 12 billion hours, nearly six full workdays per adult, and a new book argues the waste is a feature of the system, not a bug.
Journalist Annie Lowrey calls it the "time tax": the maze of forms, redundant filings, identity checks, and bureaucratic dead ends that Americans must navigate to exercise rights and collect benefits they are already owed. Her book, "The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time, and How to Fix It," due out August 25 from Ecco, catalogs the damage with case studies that read less like policy analysis and more like horror stories about what happens when government treats citizens as an afterthought.
The scale is staggering. Lowrey counts at least 91,476 separate governments in the United States, federal, state, county, municipal, tribal, school district, and special-purpose entities, each with its own forms, its own portals, and its own demands on residents' time. The American Action Forum, a center-right policy group, values the labor cost of all that compliance at roughly $430 billion a year.
In 2001, a writer named Jeff Miller walked into a Massachusetts DMV to transfer his driver's license. The system flagged him as a convicted felon. The problem: another Jeff Miller, born the same day in the same state, had committed crimes Lowrey describes as "in the penumbra of attempted murder." The government's databases could not tell the two men apart.
Miller gathered his original passport and birth certificate. He replaced his Social Security card. He obtained a letter from New Jersey confirming that he was not, in fact, the other Jeff Miller. He thought the matter was settled.
It wasn't. Oregon's DMV flagged him again. Border officials detained him after a trip to Canada. Airbnb suspended his account because the company does not rent to violent felons, and its system still linked Miller to someone else's record.
Miller put the absurdity plainly:
"It would be nice if they would take the effort to figure out that I am not actually Jeff Miller, who is a felon, instead of putting the onus on me."
No government agency took ownership of the error. Every agency made Miller prove himself again. That is the time tax in miniature: the citizen does the work the bureaucracy refuses to do.
Lowrey's second case study is harder to read. Marcella Patino, a Utah single mother of three earning $300 a week, relied on Medicaid, food stamps, and cash assistance. Her caseworker demanded documentation nearly every week. Patino had no computer and tried to manage the state's website on her phone.
When Patino changed jobs, Utah's system mistakenly recorded her as holding two jobs at once, doubling her apparent income on paper. The state dropped her from Medicaid. She found out in the emergency room.
Patino described what the paperwork gauntlet looked like from her side:
"It takes me hours. Sometimes, if I submit an application to one program, it messes up the whole entire other set. Then I have to go back and fix all of it."
Lowrey frames the dynamic bluntly: the system makes "getting out of poverty the job of the impoverished." People who can least afford to lose hours, single parents, hourly workers, the elderly, are the ones forced to spend the most time fighting paperwork errors they did not create.
Not every case study in the book is a failure. Michigan's old benefits application ran more than 40 pages, contained 18,000 words, and asked more than 1,000 questions. It demanded applicants' weight and hair color. Pregnant single applicants were asked to provide the date, city, state, and country where their child was conceived.
Lowrey writes that she "cannot comprehend why Michigan would ask for this information. Nor can I imagine that many parents were able to provide it."
In 2018, Michigan replaced the form with a version containing 80 percent fewer words. The results were immediate and measurable. Average completion time fell from 40 minutes to 16. Successful applications rose from 72 percent to 94 percent. Government processing time dropped 42 percent.
Robert Gordon, a former Michigan health official, summarized the outcome:
"It worked. It worked to get more people their benefits, faster."
So the fix exists. Shorter forms, fewer irrelevant questions, and a system that does not treat every applicant like a fraud suspect. Michigan proved it. The question Lowrey's book poses, and does not fully answer, is why the other 91,475 governments have not followed suit.
Lowrey points to Estonia as a contrast. The small European nation offers nearly every public service through a single secure digital portal. Its government operates under an "only once" policy: when a resident provides a piece of information to one agency, other agencies can access it without asking the citizen to submit it again.
Lowrey acknowledges the comparison is imperfect. Estonia has far fewer people, simpler programs, and less generous benefits than the United States. But the underlying principle, that government should not ask citizens the same questions over and over across dozens of disconnected systems, is not a matter of national scale. It is a matter of political will.
And that is where the conservative case writes itself. The 12 billion hours Americans spend on government paperwork every year are not an accident. They are the predictable result of a system that has no incentive to value citizens' time. Every layer of government, all 91,476 of them, adds its own forms, its own portals, its own verification demands. None of them bear the cost. The citizen does.
Lowrey describes the time tax as "a levy of paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation imposed on Americans in exchange for rights and benefits that are putatively theirs." She adds that "time taxes comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted." On that much, left and right can agree: the burden falls hardest on people who have the least margin for error.
Where the agreement ends is on the remedy. Lowrey, writing from a progressive vantage point, frames the problem largely as one of access to benefits. But the deeper issue is structural. A government sprawl of 91,476 overlapping entities, each demanding its own paperwork, is not a system that needs better customer service. It is a system that has grown beyond any rational justification, and that protects its own complexity because complexity protects bureaucratic jobs.
Lowrey closes the book with a broad appeal: "We've got to reclaim our time so we can spend it on things that are truly important." She is right about the problem. Whether her proposed fixes match the scale of it is another question. Michigan cut its application by 80 percent and watched success rates climb from 72 percent to 94 percent. That reform did not require a new agency, a new program, or a new mandate. It required someone in government to look at a 40-page form that asked pregnant women where their child was conceived and decide that was absurd.
Lowrey's own summary of American governance lands hard: "Somehow, we all live in a continent-spanning DMV." Anyone who has spent an afternoon on hold with a state agency, resubmitting the same documents for the third time, knows exactly what she means.
Ninety-one thousand governments, $430 billion in lost productivity, and 12 billion hours a year, and the citizen is still the one expected to fix the paperwork.