By David Wojick
The infamously glorious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is scouring the federal government and finding many billions of dollars’ worth of stuff to cut. Their total claimed savings to date are $180 billion, with just under $30 billion of that in regulatory costs.
Looking at their big ticket list, I see they have missed a potentially huge source of regulatory costs. The likely reason is because it is a truly obscure critter, but I helped build it, so here it is.
It is called the Federal Information Collection Budget (ICB). Sounds like nothing, but it is the estimated sum total of all the information-related work that American people do because of federal regulations. Keeping records and doing your taxes, for example. This is not about filling out forms; it is about all information activities required by a federal regulation.
This work is called regulatory “burden,” and it sure is that. It is estimated by every federal agency, for every regulation they have or propose, in two forms — hours and dollars. Few people know the federal government actually tracks in a general way all this free work people are required to do for them.
The tracking is done by OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which I helped set up back in 1980 under the new Paperwork Reduction Act. Each regulatory requirement gets a separate OMB control number, which is printed on every form.
The estimated numbers are huge, but they are also ridiculously low to the point of fraud. First, here are the official estimates, which are certainly big enough for DOGE to take a whack at.
Government-Wide Totals for Active Information Collections
ACTIVE OMB CONTROL NOS.
10,704 – call it 11,000 for a round number
TOTAL ANNUAL RESPONSES
136,143,659,968 – call it 136 billion
TOTAL ANNUAL HOURS
11,529,625,471 – call it 11.5 billion
TOTAL ANNUAL COST
$203,090,046,782 – call it $200 billion
So 11,000 regulatory requirements require 136 billion responses a year, taking 11.5 billion hours and costing 200 billion dollars. Surely some of this is wasting the American people’s valuable time, so DOGE should look into it.
Given a reported annual cost of over $200 billion, DOGE ought to easily match their $30 billion in regulatory cost savings to date. That is just a 15% cut.
But the numbers are really much bigger; in fact, these official numbers are ridiculously small. Taking 11.5 billion hours to do 136 billion responses gives an average response time of 0.085 hours, or just 5 minutes.
In the 11,000 cases, there might be one or two that only take 5 minutes, although I cannot imagine one. We are not talking about simply filling out a form. This is about everything involved in dealing with the form (or record keeping) over time.
The cases I am familiar with typically take hours; some take days. For example, for the business meal’s deduction, you have to make and keep a detailed record of each meal, which over a year can add up to a lot of time.
Let’s say the average response work is just half an hour, or five times the OIRA figure. That already puts the annual cost over a trillion dollars. If the average is an hour, then two trillion dollars. These are enormous numbers, which are not being revealed.
Note too that if the cost is just the hours of work, then the average wage is $17.39 an hour. The national average wage is reportedly $36.24, or roughly double what the agencies are using. If the cost includes capital costs, then the agency wage rate is even smaller.
I do not know how much DOGE looks into cooking the books to hide regulatory costs, but that is clearly what is going on here. The agency burden estimates are preposterously low, hiding the huge burden cost of their regulations.
These fraudulent agency estimates of regulatory burden on the American people are government-wide, so Congress should be looking hard at them.
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DOGE is missing a trillion dollars a year in regulatory costs
Have they looked down the back of the sofa, or behind the fridge? It’s usually there, somewhere. From little acorns…
Reform councils try to get ahead of DOGE reviews
Two Reform-led councils have started their own DOGE-style efficiency reviews ahead of a visit from the party’s national team tasked with scrutinising local government finances.
https://www.localgov.co.uk/Reform-councils-try-to-get-ahead-of-DOGE-reviews/62535
It’s a start.
Starting a DOGE is good but are they looking at regulatory burden?
Local authorities have limited powers in that they can set local regulations, parking, building etc etc but they cannot override national regulations. Nobody has tried this before so it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
If you’re interested:
https://www.local.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/local-government-structur-634.pdf
The problem is how to go about reversing this burden when it’s not funded directly by the tax payer or is part of the federal budget. Presumably it would require rescinding thousands of regulations and reducing burdensome requirements of thousands more. Every regulation will certainly have a contingency fighting to keep it and likely only a few directly impacted businesses lobbying to remove it. Sadly, politicians seem to always prefer doing nothing if doing something can be used against them in the next election.
Perhaps the best approach would be legislation that would sunset all regulations after 5 or 10 years. (Good luck getting that through congress.)
But even if regulatory burdens are reduced it won’t affect the debt or deficit.
Is not the bulk of the federal budget tax payer funded?
Excellent reveal!
Take care that measuring and tracking costs don’t exceed the true cost/value of regulations themselves (Saw that in ’80’s, too.)
Control the inputs to calculations…eg.Congress should regularly review and set government median wages for monitoring data and resultls (or ranges of wages), for staffs with total overheads (healthcare, retirement, building maintenance, etc), and use full cost of capital not just as budget expense ( as long as have deficits).
Do the same for all the state and federal costs to implement a regulation.(DOGE is doing that, I hope).
Congress and the President should issue on a regular basis a summary of findings and actions needed to lower administrative costs or increase regulation results.
Prioritizing and choosing only the most valuable or necessary regulations and showing the ones that must be reduced or eliminated.
DOGE must be permanent, effective and efficient.
Thanks for article.
Way too much regulation in some states too. DOGE should set up offices in those states. As a forester in Wokeachusetts for 50 years, I spent maybe half my time in the office and most of that was preparing papering paper work to keep the state burros in their overpaid jobs. Mostly forest management plans and timber harvesting plans. Of course that planning needs to be done- but when I started, the plans were bare bones- mostly just a few pages. Now these plans are 10 times longer and sometimes much more. But are they any better in protecting the resource and the interests of the owner and the public. Absolutely not. I’ve been fighting against the annual “new and improved” regulations and forms for years. Did me no good because the rest of the profession are too timid to speak against the state.
Nevada has established a DOGE here. Not sure how much they can accomplish. The Governor applauds them but doesn’t support them as whole-heartedly as Trump supports Musk’s DOGE.
“burden” is a term invented by bureaucrats to hide the actual thing(s) they are either unable or unwilling to focus on. “Flu burden” is one such thing and includes “the number of illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by …” [Learned during the Covid fiasco]
“regulatory burden” should be much better understood by citizens than it currently is.
Thank you for your explanation.
I like “parasite load”.
(Which, to be fair, isn’t quite the same thing. Regulations do exist which give more benefit to the governed than they cost to follow and enforce. But all the others considered together…)
I hope someone with a truthsocial account will pass this on to the team!!
Me too! DOGE has no public contact that I can find.
Amy Gleason is the Acting Administrator of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
You can join here:
Join the U.S. Digital Service (DOGE) | DOGE: Department of Government Efficiency
Yes, thanks, but that is just to apply for a full time office job in DC. I will use it to try to send Gleason a message but it is a long shot. They should have a hot line for reporting waste as GAO does.
I posted this article as a link to the DOGE Comittee on Truth Social.
Just your 2 cents.
/humor
It is pervasive. Example:
I worked for an IT company a while back. My job was to support a science & technology agency of the Federal Government. I am not at liberty to disclose details, even today.
I went on a business trip. I made a $1.50 error on my expense report.
An IT company. Expense reports are done online. Time sheets are completed online.
The process required printing out the time sheet and the expense report, taping all receipts to blank sheets of paper, and sending, by courier, the documentation to the corporate office 4 States away.
Accounting had access to the timesheet and expense report. They were not permitted to make the correction. Instead of pushing the error to a future expense report, I was required to correct it. Get all the signatures, etc. 8 hours were spent on a $1.50 error.
We are allowed to use digital signatures on contracts but expense report still have to be paper copies hand signed.
And this is not the Government, it is a commercial corporation that has to genuflect to government regulations.
We need far more than $1 trillion. We need 35 $trillion. We will not get it.
Here is how you get ride of the debt to the FED reserve.
Americans get up one morning, put on their big boy and girl pants, and take the federal reserve back and wipe the debt. The debt is simply numbers on a screen, not physical stuff like gold etc.
And if the big private bankers don’t like it, tell them to leave the country.
Sorry I forgot, they run and control your country.
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
I’ve given up traveling for a living (thank god) but expense reports….I would spend an obscene amount of time every week on just expense reports. Then I had to send off my expense report for approval where my boss would have to go through every line item then approve the report. Report then headed to accounting where they had to pay their pound of flesh and so on. Depending on the size of a company that can be multiplied a few times to hundred and maybe thousands of time per week. All of this so they can account for all their costs when it comes to tax time. Truly can add up to an astounding amount of money tied up in regulatory costs.
Lets toss a second one in there. When Obamacare was implemented even small Doctor offices had to hire half time to a full time employee just to comply with regulatory requirements according to reporting from various news agencies. Imagine how many employees had to be hired for large clinics and hospitals to meet regulations. That right there took the affordable out of the affordable care act.
Yes sizable firms spend thousands of annual hours on burden work. And travel cost is just a single line item on their schedule C. On the med side the head of my local clinic says he has more paper-workers than nurses. This is why the 5 minute average is pure federal fraud.
Thanks.
I’ve taken a glance at the justifications for change in aviation laws, several times over decades, but did not examine.
Two additional costs especially of the one scare resource – time alive, are:
‘confused’ bureaucrats. In one employer a jerk clerk hassled me about which category I put fax sending charges in on my expense account claim (telephony or services, logic for both). I had to talk to her boss to put them straight.incompetent bureaucrats, such as income tax people in Canada and USTakes a huge amount of time to make contact among the silos and fobbing off paths to get them straight.