A long-delayed administration report on the cost of governmental red tape on the nation said that it took Americans 9.7 billion hours to fill out and complete federal paperwork in 2015, a monumental burden that the White House had hoped to cut over the past eight years.
The Office of Management and Budget’s “Information Collection Budget” said that the 9.778 billion hours required to deal with federal red tape was up nearly four percent over fiscal 2014.
For perspective, it would take every single full-time worker in America two weeks, or 80 hours of work, to complete the paperwork burden.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which charts the burden, put it a different way. Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Institute, said that it would take up every single breathing moment of nearly 14,000 Americans.
In his report on the OMB review, Crews wrote:
How does one visualize 9.778 billion hours? Few can, but there’s this. An 80-year human lifespan is 29,200 days. That’s 700,800 hours.
That means the December 2016 OMB report’s 9.778 billion hours of paperwork took up the equivalent of 13,953 full human lifetimes.
The government figures the value of an hour of work at $20, and Crews estimated that the new report reveals a cost to the country at $195 billion.
Not surprisingly, the bulk of the paperwork requirement came from Treasury and IRS documents.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
