Federal managers are under intense pressure to prove accountability. That is reasonable. But in practice, too many government systems now treat process compliance as a substitute for actual public results. The result is an administrative paradox: the more aggressively agencies try to document fairness, precision and oversight, the more they risk making programs harder to use, harder to manage and less effective for the people they are supposed to serve.
This problem is especially visible in benefit administration. In 2025, the Government Accountability Office reported that, according to an estimate cited by the Office of Management and Budget, eligible Americans forgo claiming more than $140 billion in federal benefits each year, in part due to administrative burden. GAO also found that federal requirements often do not consistently capture the learning, time and psychological costs imposed on the public. In other words, the state often measures what is easy to count rather than what matters most to citizens: whether they can actually access services without being worn down by the process.
Federal agencies are not blind to this. In 2024, GAO found that the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration had created customer experience offices and had begun integrating burden reduction into some strategic and performance goals. That is a positive development. But it also reveals the deeper problem: administrative burden has become so normalized that agencies now need separate institutional machinery just to reduce the friction created by their own rules.
The lesson for federal managers is larger than customer service. Government performance systems often reward activity, documentation and procedural defensibility more than real-world impact. A program can meet reporting deadlines, clear internal reviews and generate favorable implementation statistics while still failing the public. A process can be legally sound, procedurally complete and operationally dysfunctional at the same time.
That same problem is visible in current federal workforce management. In March 2026, the Office of Personnel Management moved to centralize HR services through a new shared service center in the name of efficiency and stronger execution, while GAO reported that OPM and most of the agencies it reviewed were not using the cyber workforce dashboard that had been created to support evidence-based workforce planning. That combination matters because it captures the article’s central concern in concrete terms: federal systems often continue adding structure, tools and administrative layers even when the underlying information is not being used well enough to improve decisions, performance or execution. Federal managers should take that lesson seriously across government, especially in programs and operations that depend on usable data, public uptake, repeated eligibility decisions or coordination across agencies and contractors.
This is why today’s debate over federal management should not focus only on head count, compliance or tougher performance rules. The more important question is whether agencies are measuring outcomes that citizens actually experience. OPM’s recent push for stronger performance distinctions and alignment with organizational results points in the right direction in one respect: performance management should be connected to outcomes, not administrative rituals. But if agencies translate that goal into more checklists, more documentation and more internal signaling, they will deepen the same problem they are trying to solve.
Federal managers need a more disciplined standard for deciding when a process has become counterproductive. Three questions should guide that assessment:
- Does the requirement produce information that supports meaningful decision-making, or does it mainly protect the organization from criticism?
- Does the step improve service quality and delivery efficiency, program success or public trust enough to justify the burden it imposes on citizens and staff?
- If a requirement were to disappear tomorrow, would mission performance decline in a measurable way?
If leaders cannot answer those questions clearly, the requirement should be redesigned, simplified or eliminated.
GAO’s broader work on evidence-based policymaking reinforces the same concern. Federal decision-makers need credible evidence about whether programs are producing intended results, yet the government has made only uneven progress in building that evidence and using it well. That weakness has practical consequences for management. When agencies cannot reliably show what is working, the process becomes a stand-in for proof.
The federal government does need accountability. It does need oversight. But it also needs the confidence to admit that every layer of procedure is not a public good. Sometimes the most responsible act of management is to stop measuring what is convenient, stop defending what is performative and start removing the barriers that prevent programs from working as intended.
Robert J Choi is a former government executive and public-sector consultant. He previously served in the Central Intelligence Agency and as deputy chief people officer at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
