The Kafkaesque logic of the Paperwork Reduction Act

The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 probably wins the prize for “most Kafkaesque US federal law.” Whatever else it does, the PRA dramatically increases the amount of paperwork federal workers have to do. In theory, this is meant to save the public time on paperwork, by requiring that “information collections” by the federal government undergo extensive internal review. In reality, as former CHIPS Program chief of staff Sara Meyers explains in a new piece, the law means that if you want to, say, put up a voluntary survey on a government website, you have to produce “a 20-page document with annotated screenshots to show every permutation of the data entry page; a 7-page Supporting Statement defending the collection” and three more documents besides. Not great!