Last summer the vast majority of American families with children saw money appear in their bank accounts without doing anything at all. Thanks to legislation passed by Democrats earlier in the year, an expanded Child Tax Credit automatically sent out $300 each month through the rest of the year for every child under 6 and $250 for older ones to people who regularly file taxes. It showcased what government can do when it works at its most efficient: seamlessly deliver meaningful benefits without requiring people to take much, or really any, action.
But for the roughly 2.3 million children whose families hadn’t recently filed income taxes, the Child Tax Credit showcased all the worst instincts of governmental bureaucracy. The I.R.S. needed to know how many children they had, how much they earned and where they lived in order to send these families their money. Other government agencies probably had at least some of that data. But at first the I.R.S. wanted to make this group of people file tax returns instead of hunting down the information itself. It was eventually swayed to track it down, and yet when it launched a portal for anyone it didn’t find, the form didn’t work on a cellphone, was only available in English, required an email address and came with densely written instructions.
The expanded Child Tax Credit payments substantially reduced hardship, lowering the monthly child poverty rate by 30 percent, which meant 3.7 million fewer children lived in poverty in December — one of the most significant reductions in child poverty in generations — after which the payments stopped, thanks to congressional inaction. But it had been projected to cut child poverty in half. To achieve that goal, it would have had to successfully reach all the parents who were owed a payment.
The excitement around policymaking is almost always in the moments after ink dries on a bill creating something new. But if a benefit fails to reach the people it’s designed for, it may as well not exist at all. Making government benefits more accessible and efficient doesn’t usually get the spotlight. But it’s often the difference between a family getting what it needs to survive and falling into hardship and destitution. It’s the glue of our democracy.
President Biden appears to have taken note of this. Late last year, he issued an executive order meant to improve the “customer experience and service delivery” of the entire federal government. He put forward some ideas, including moving Social Security benefit claims and passport renewals online, reducing paperwork for student loan forgiveness and certifying low-income people for all the assistance they qualify for at once, rather than making them seek out benefits program by program. More important, he shifted the focus of government toward whether or not the customers — that’s us — are having a good experience getting what we deserve.
It’s a direction all lawmakers, from the federal level down to counties and cities, should follow.
One of the biggest barriers to government benefits is all of the red tape to untangle, particularly for programs that serve low-income people. They were the ones wrangling with the I.R.S.’s non-filer portal while everyone else got their payments automatically. Benefits delivered through the tax code, which flow so easily that many people don’t think of them as government benefits at all, mostly help the already well off. Programs for the poor, on the other hand, tend to be bloated with barriers like income tests, work requirements and in-person interviews. It’s not just about applying once, either; many require people to continually recertify, going through the process over and over again.
The hassle doesn’t just cost time and effort. It comes with a psychological cost. “You get mad at the D.M.V. because it takes hours to do something that should only take minutes,” Pamela Herd, a sociologist at Georgetown, said. “These kind of stresses can be really large when you’re talking about people who are on a knife’s edge in terms of their ability to pay their rent or feed their children.”
The barriers are terrible because they separate people from the help they desperately need and are technically owed. But the trouble runs deeper. “If you have negative interactions with the government, you’re going to think negatively about the government and the government’s capacity to actually meet broader social needs,” Dr. Herd said.
Why would Americans believe politicians who say they’ll create new ways to help them if past promises ended in frustration and empty hands? That distrust, in turn, weakens our democracy, the notion that we elect people to lead us who will listen to us and improve our lives.
“Every interaction that a person has with their government, whether that’s a traffic stop or going to the D.M.V. or getting access to SNAP — that’s where democracy is happening,” Elizabeth Linos, a behavioral economist at Berkeley, told me. “If we get all of those small interactions right, then we have created a society where the government is responsive to its citizens, and citizens trust that it will deliver when it says it’ll deliver.”
Mr. Biden’s executive order notes that it is about both getting people what they need and proving that “democracy still works.” And yet it’s clear his administration has only partly learned its own lessons. Just look at its two approaches to free at-home Covid tests. All Americans can go to a Postal Service website, enter their addresses, and sign up in minutes to receive four free tests per household.
But when a household runs out of its four free tests, its members have to wrangle with the other option the administration has set up. Insurers have been ordered to cover eight tests per month for free. That of course leaves out the 27.4 million people without insurance. Even if you have it, if you don’t buy the tests at your insurer’s preferred pharmacy you have to pay up front, hold on to your receipt and maybe even the test box, and submit a claim for reimbursement, then fight to get it processed.
There are trade-offs, given which goals are prioritized. Is it most important to reduce the use of government resources? Is it most important to keep the supposedly undeserving from sneaking in? Or is the goal to ensure that as many people who are eligible get the benefits they deserve as soon as possible?
It used to be that experts believed those who needed help the most would work the hardest to get it, overcoming any barriers thrown in their way. But that isn’t true. Work requirements, for example, have mostly kept people off welfare and further impoverished them, and when briefly instituted in Arkansas’s Medicaid program, a work requirement kicked people off — many of whom actually qualified — without increasing how many worked.
“The pandemic gave us an opportunity to rethink whether or not all of those hurdles were necessary,” Dr. Linos said. More people were made eligible for unemployment insurance. Stimulus checks were sent to most Americans with no strings attached. Rental assistance rules were loosened to get the money flowing faster.
The organization Code for America has long been focused on how to make it easier for people to get the benefits they’re eligible for. So when Democrats expanded Child Tax Credit payments, it built a simple site for non-filers to claim them. The site only sought information the I.R.S. wasn’t able to get itself, like bank account details, and didn’t require people to track down a bunch of documents. The questions were simplified. It was available in Spanish as well as English. Families were able to fill out the form in 10 to 15 minutes and virtually all of them didn’t need help. More than 115,000 households used the website to claim $438 million in less than three months, about a quarter of whom had never filed taxes before.
Ultimately, the smartest thing isn’t to create better portals for each and every benefit. “How do we get them to do one-stop shopping?” asked Nina Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. Instead of the government offering a navigator for Affordable Care Act coverage and a case worker to get housing assistance and I.R.S. outreach workers for Child Tax Credit payments, there could be a single place to sign up for everything at once.
That’s just what Code for America helped set up in Minnesota. It worked with the state to create a new, simplified website where residents can apply for nine programs at once — including food stamps, child care subsidies and housing assistance — that has reduced the time involved from over an hour to less than 12 minutes. It works on a mobile phone, is available in Spanish, makes uploading documents easier, and doesn’t require a log in. The questions it asks are in clear language and redundant ones are eliminated. Ninety-four percent of people using the new site say they had a positive experience. The organization plans to work with a number of other states to do something similar in the next few years.
The simpler the requirements of a program — making it universal so that people don’t have to verify their incomes over and over, say — the fewer hurdles people will have to clear. When programs must include eligibility requirements, more of the burden of deciphering whether each person meets them should be placed on the government instead of the individual. Social Security, for example, tracks our incomes, so that when it comes time to claim benefits we’re not submitting pay stubs from a lifetime of work.
Something as small as requiring a log in for a government website creates a barrier for people without computers who can’t remember and juggle a bunch of passwords. “Any kind of barriers are amplified when people are stressed,” Eric Giannella, the organization’s data science director, noted. Instead, Code for America uses smart links that allow people to authenticate themselves without a log in.
But Code for America “does want to put itself out of business,” Mr. Giannella said. The point is not to do it for government, but to push government to do things better. “Sometimes,” Tracey Patterson, the vice president of Code for America, told me, “the idea that everything needs to change in order for it to be better is the easiest way for nothing to get done.”
Bryce Covert (@brycecovert) is a journalist who focuses on the economy, with an emphasis on policies that affect workers and families.
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