Even if we don’t know it by name, we’re all familiar with administrative burden. We know it for its annoyances and frustrations. It’s the requirement to go to the DMV to provide your cable bill in person—and then come back again when they say you need the February bill, not the January bill. It’s the impossible-to-understand tax deduction that leaves you wondering who thought income tax returns were a good idea in the first place.
But administrative burdens—or the costs and obstacles that people confront as they navigate public services—aren’t just petty inconveniences. They can have serious consequences. They can prevent a family from accessing food assistance or health care, or keep a child from enrolling in a preferred school. And administrative burdens tend to fall hardest on the most marginalized families, who often must navigate more government programs with fewer resources and less flexibility.
We, along with colleagues, have been studying the barriers families encounter when seeking public services for their children. We have focused especially on the experiences of low-income families in New Orleans who are seeking early childhood or school placements. If there’s a theme to our findings, it’s that enrolling in a program often requires families to complete a series of (needlessly) complex steps without missing anything along the way. It’s like climbing a tall, winding ladder, where one misstep—an incomplete form or missed deadline—can land a family back where it started.
For a newly released study, we broadened our view to examine administrative burden in the application process for public assistance programs (not just schools) across Louisiana. We interviewed people with different perspectives of these burdens. We also conducted a randomized experiment to see if addressing some barriers might help more people obtain services. Specifically, we looked at whether Louisiana could increase take-up rates for WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) or free early childhood education (ECE). What we found is encouraging. It’s also a reminder of how stubbornly burdensome and flawed these enrollment processes can be.
Designing an RCT to test the effects of reducing administrative burden
Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan describe administrative burden as a set of costs. There are the costs of searching for information (learning costs), complying with rules and requirements (compliance costs), and dealing with the stresses and stigmas of the experience (psychological costs). Other researchers have built on this framework.
The process of enrolling in benefits programs is rife with these costs. That’s partly because of the splintered nature of government programs. In many states, different agencies administer programs like SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, and WIC. This means that a low-income parent of a young child might need to submit a separate application to each agency—with mismatched deadlines and requirements—even if the eligibility criteria for these programs are overlapping. The costs and frustrations multiply, and their collective magnitude can be hard for anyone but the parent to see and understand.
In Louisiana, some community and government leaders have been concerned about this problem and looking to address it. Through this study, we partnered with several of those leaders. Louisiana’s Department of Children and Family Services was in the process of piloting a new, streamlined online application portal for SNAP when we proposed an idea: Maybe they could use that pilot application to help families not only with accessing SNAP but also other public assistance programs. We had been working on issues facing low-income families with young children, so we were especially curious about WIC and free ECE. These programs had been flagged by community leaders as having frustratingly low take-up rates.
We proposed a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that would allow the state to test whether it could help more families access these services (while potentially reducing government inefficiencies). During the state’s testing period for the new application portal, those who used the new portal—and had a young child in their household or a baby on the way—were randomly assigned to one of three groups:
- Control. This group saw the pilot SNAP application without any modifications related to this study.
- Information (only): This group saw the pilot SNAP application and was notified that if approved for SNAP, they would also be eligible for WIC (a statewide program) or free ECE (local programs in Orleans and Jefferson Parish). These applicants were provided with a link to the online application, which they could complete on their own (see Figure 1).
- Support: This group saw the pilot SNAP application and the note about their likely WIC or ECE eligibility (similar to the Information group). However, these applicants were also invited to transmit the relevant information from their SNAP application directly to the agencies that run WIC or ECE (see Figure 2). This would reduce the work required to apply for those programs and connect applicants with agency staff. Applicants would then need to complete the remaining program-specific steps, such as being interviewed by WIC staff or requesting specific ECE programs.
Overall, our analysis sample consists of 1,443 households—all of whom had at least one young child or a child on the way (and had not previously enrolled in WIC).1 Everyone saw the SNAP application as they would have otherwise. The intervention groups just received some additional information or support regarding other programs that might interest them. The information intervention mainly targeted “learning costs,” while the support intervention also targeted “compliance costs.”
We drew inspiration from a 2012 study of FAFSA assistance. In that study, researchers provided randomly selected H&R Block tax filers with either information (one treatment group) or information and support (another treatment group) to help them complete the FAFSA. The researchers found evidence of increased FAFSA participation and college persistence for the group that received support. They did not find effects from the information-only treatment.
Our context is a bit different. Our primary focus for this experiment was WIC, since WIC is a statewide program. WIC may not be as visible—and its benefits may not be as widely known (e.g., breastfeeding support, nutrition education, healthy foods, and infant formula)—as the FAFSA. Therefore, we thought that an information-only intervention could work. At the same time, we were mindful that our support intervention could only get families so far. Families that requested a link or submitted information would still have additional steps ahead of them. This includes in-person appointments both before and after enrolling in WIC.
Large effects on application rates, smaller effects on enrollment rates
Our findings for this RCT are consistent with findings from our past work on burdensome application processes. Simplifying these processes helps people along the path to enrolling in a program. However, fixing a few steps in a many-step process probably isn’t enough to get everyone to their desired destination.
We found significant effects on WIC application rates for both the information and support groups. Interestingly, the effects of the two interventions were similar. About 29% of the control group later started a WIC application. That is, 29% of SNAP applicants initiated the WIC application process—and got far enough along for a local WIC clinic to capture a record of their activity. Relative to that baseline, the information group saw an 8.9 percentage-point (31%) increase in application rates to 37.9%. The support group saw an 8.0 percentage-point (28%) increase to 37%. These differences are statistically significant (p. The results appear in Figure 3.
Notable but not pictured: The effects on application rates were especially large for certain subgroups of applicants. This includes families with children older than 1 year—who, we suspect, might not have been aware of the WIC benefits for non-infant children. We also saw particularly large effects for Hispanic applicants. (More detailed subgroup findings are available in the working paper.)
The effects on WIC enrollment rates were more muted (and, at most, marginally significant). Relative to a 23.5% enrollment rate for the control group, we saw an increase of 4.3 percentage points for the information group and 4.2 percentage points for the support group. In percentage-point terms, these effects are roughly half the size of the increase in application rates. This indicates that families still face significant barriers between application and full program enrollment.
As for the study’s ECE component, we did not have the statistical power to detect anything but very large effects (which we don’t see). However, we had anticipated this, so the ECE portion of the study—like the WIC portion—featured qualitative interviews that illuminated the many reasons why a family seeking an ECE placement might come away empty-handed. This includes burdensome requirements as well as human error in understaffed government offices.
Through these interviews, respondents expressed optimism about the potential benefits of more streamlined application processes. The interviewees saw redundancies and liked the idea of reducing administrative burden. However, they also expressed reservations about the likely costs and coordination challenges. Some particularly stressed the importance of retaining a direct line of communication between applicants and program staff. While technology can help, many of the issues families confront still might be best addressed by a sympathetic person who listens and learns before offering help.
Rooting out administrative burden (while mindful of unintended consequences)
Administrative burden creates needless complexity for time-strapped parents and caregivers. It can keep low-income parents from accessing valuable resources—and, in some cases, can be low-hanging fruit for policymakers to address. That’s because many of these burdens may be hard for policymakers to see, at least until they try to look through the eyes of the people they serve.
At the same time, we think it’s important to note that some of these burdens don’t exist by accident; they reflect deliberate attempts to keep people from accessing benefits. We were struck by our interviewees’ comments about the potential unintended consequences of creating a unified application for government programs. If a unified application makes life easier for applicants, it could help to improve families’ access to services. However, if that unified application is, in effect, designed to keep people out (e.g., with stringent paperwork requirements that apply across programs), then families could find themselves locked out of programs that were previously easier to access.
Addressing problems of administrative burden isn’t always easy, practically or politically. However, government leaders clearly have opportunities to make life easier for those they serve.
