President Donald Trump loves to talk about cutting red tape. In truth, he’s actually fine with tying the average American up in it.
Along with his GOP allies in Congress, Trump regularly bemoans the federal government’s allegedly onerous burdens on businesses, such as mandating that a bank ensure it has enough assets to avoid crashing the economy, say, or requiring a logging company to avoid killing an endangered species when working in critical habitats.
But when it comes to average Americans, the president and his allies in Congress are fine with making it harder to file your taxes, receive benefits, access government services or register to vote.
Consider a few recent examples:
• The Trump administration plans to end an IRS pilot program that allowed some taxpayers with simple returns to file their federal taxes online for free.
• In the megabill comprising much of Trump’s first-year agenda, House Republicans are moving ahead with new work requirements to qualify for health insurance through Medicaid.
• The Trump administration developed a plan (since rescinded) to require more Americans applying for Social Security to visit offices in person to prove their identities.
• Another Republican bill would require ID such as a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote (and a marriage certificate, too, if you’re a woman who changed her name).
This is needless box-checking, form-filling and drudgery that accomplishes nothing.
Let’s call this what it is: red tape — needless box-checking, form-filling and drudgery that accomplishes nothing except making it harder for Americans to get what they need.
Americans have long hated red tape. An AP-NORC poll in January found that 59% of adults said that “red tape, such as government regulations and bureaucracy,” is a major problem and 34% thought it was a minor problem. Only 6% thought it wasn’t a problem at all.
Republican presidents from Warren G. Harding to Ronald Reagan have campaigned on cutting federal spending and reducing regulations, but Trump has taken to the cause with abandon. In his first term, he posed in front of a giant stack of papers representing the growth in regulations since 1960 and symbolically cut a red ribbon with a pair of oversized gold scissors.
As was often the case in Trump’s first term, he didn’t succeed. One study from the libertarian Cato Institute found that whether you look at the total number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations or the number of restrictions (as indicated by keywords), the upward trend in federal regulations plateaued, at best, during his first four years in office. By both counts, there was a slight increase from the last year of Barack Obama’s administration to the last year of Trump’s. Many of the latter’s administrative cuts were quickly undone by President Joe Biden.
A lot of this red-tape cutting was for the benefit of major corporations, however. Ironically, they’re the institutions most able to respond to new regulations, as they already have teams of lawyers, accountants and compliance officers at the ready to tackle the ever-changing requirements.
But when average people think of red tape, they are thinking more about their own interactions with government: getting driver’s licenses, registering to vote or filing their taxes. When they vote for candidates promising to cut red tape, they imagine a more streamlined government that makes it easier to pay off student loans or sign up for mortgages. That’s where Trump is making things worse. Apart from adding requirements, the administration has also sought to cut experienced staffers from various government agencies and shut down programs. Veterans hoping to enroll in potentially lifesaving clinical trials have lost access to therapies while the trials have been stalled. Social Security recipients hoping to talk with a live person now wait on hold for as long as 2½ hours. College graduates looking to start paying off student loans face a chaotic repayment process. Meantime, federal workers have wasted tens of millions of dollars of work time sending required emails listing what they did each week. For too long, we’ve assumed these kinds of cuts make government more efficient and these kinds of requirements fight fraud. But we should really just think of them as adding red tape for federal workers and everyday Americans while making government less efficient and doing little to stop fraud. Earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency detailed startup CEO Sahil Lavingia to the Department of Veterans Affairs as a part-time unpaid contractor. Lavingia, a software engineer with no government experience, was supposed to help streamline the VA. But as he candidly admitted in an interview with Fast Company, there weren’t nearly as many “easy wins” as he expected. “Honestly, it’s kind of fine — because the government works,” he said. “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest.” If only others at DOGE and in the White House would show the same humility.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. 
