US federal agencies are responsible for enacting important administrative actions, including regulations affecting safety and health, as well as paperwork governing access to benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and food assistance. Indeed, federal rule making has become a primary mode of domestic economic and social policy making in the United States (Carey Reference Carey2013). When developing administrative proposals, federal agencies are typically required to seek public comment and then to consider and address comments they receive through the “notice-and-comment” process (Carey Reference Carey2013).
In theory this commenting process is open to anyone, and scholars note the commenting power given to “ordinary individuals” through notice-and-comment “is rather extraordinary” (Kochan Reference Kochan2018, 601) and have praised the “highly democratic character” of its requirements (Sant’Ambrogio and Staszewski Reference Sant’Ambrogio and Staszewski2018, 1). In practice, however, political science research shows that notice-and-comment policy making is often heavily tilted toward advantaged interests (e.g., Carpenter et al. Reference Carpenter, Dagonel, Judge-Lord, Kenny, Libgober, Rashin, Waggoner and Yackee2023; Haeder and Yackee Reference Haeder and Yackee2015; Yackee and Yackee Reference Yackee and Yackee2006; but see Judge-Lord Reference Judge-Lord2021). Moreover, many statutes and regulatory agencies are designed in ways that discourage mass participation in the regulatory process (SoRelle Reference SoRelle2020). This bias has many sources, and may in part reflect the federal government’s historical preference for scientific, technical, and legal inputs during policy making (Sant’Ambrogio and Staszewski Reference Sant’Ambrogio and Staszewski2018).
Recognizing these inequalities in administrative democracy, President Joseph R. Biden announced a presidential initiative to expand “equitable and meaningful” participation in administrative policy making, focusing on underserved communities that had experienced economic or social disadvantage with firsthand experience interacting with government programs.Footnote 1 A new Executive Order on Modernizing Regulatory Review, issued in April 2023, called on agencies to “proactively engage interested or affected parties, including members of underserved communities” (Biden Reference Biden2023).
In tandem, the Biden-Harris administration launched a new government-wide effort to use its regulatory review office to streamline access to public benefits and services, especially for underserved communities (OIRA 2023; 2024a; Young and Mancini Reference Young and Mancini2022). Building on the regulatory modernization executive order, the burden reduction initiative prioritized close engagement with affected communities to better understand the obstacles those communities faced to accessing benefits, and steps to reduce those burdens.
Both the regulatory participation and burden reduction efforts aimed to reshape the relationship between the American public and the federal administrative state, democratizing elements of the federal government and increasing its responsiveness to citizens—especially those from underserved communities. Both of these initiatives also built heavily on literature in social sciences, especially political science, on administrative burden, policy feedback effects, public participation, and interest group advocacy (see especially Barnes Reference Barnes2020; Campbell Reference Campbell2003; Carpenter et al. Reference Carpenter, Dagonel, Judge-Lord, Kenny, Libgober, Rashin, Waggoner and Yackee2023; Gilens Reference Gilens2012; Haeder and Yackee Reference Haeder and Yackee2015; Herd and Moynihan Reference Herd and Moynihan2018; Mettler Reference Mettler2011; Michener Reference Michener2018; Page and Gilens Reference Page and Gilens2017; Pierson Reference Pierson1993; SoRelle Reference SoRelle2020; Yackee and Yackee Reference Yackee and Yackee2006, and the discussion below). Scholarship from political scientists in particular helped to define the problems the initiatives were trying to address, the language and framing of the proposals, and the strategies for implementation within the broad mandate created by political leadership.
In this piece, I reflect on my experience helping to launch these efforts during my time serving as a presidential appointee in the Biden-Harris regulatory review office, describing the ways that academic scholarship—particularly from political science—informed our work. I aim to open the “black box” of how policy makers in the federal government use social science outside economics, especially political science, to design and implement new policy initiatives. I strive to make clearer how specific theories, concepts, and research agendas within our discipline can be helpful to policy makers and how they are translated into substantive policy work (Hacker Reference Hacker2010; Kersh Reference Kersh2010).
By doing so, I aim to show how and why political science can be helpful to policy makers—and how political scientists can be policy makers themselves—at a time when many leading scholars in our discipline bemoan political science’s lack of engagement with governance and policy making (Stoker, Peters, and Pierre Reference Stoker, Peters and Pierre2015). As others have argued, political science, especially American politics, has in recent decades neglected the study of policy, making its findings less relevant to those in government (e.g., Hacker Reference Hacker2010; Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2014). At the same time, other disciplines—particularly economics—have succeeded in constructing durable institutions inside and outside government to help connect scholars and their findings to the policy-making process in ways that far exceed political scientists’ involvements (e.g., Berman Reference Berman2022; Fourcade Reference Fourcade2009; Kersh Reference Kersh2010).
Describing the use of social science research, especially political science, in these two initiatives, I highlight several conclusions. First, there was not one type of research most relevant to our work—and we drew heavily from descriptive, theoretical, and analytical research. Moreover, both qualitative and quantitative work was valuable, as was behavioral and institutional research. Studies did not have to be causally identified to be relevant to our efforts, and new theoretical frameworks or descriptive facts were just as important as randomized control trial evidence at different stages of the policy-making process. Instead, what mattered more was that the work was policy focused, taking as either an outcome or an explanatory variable government agencies’ operations. This required scholars to have a deep understanding of underlying public policy designs. Lastly relevant was having both political leadership and career staff who had trained as political scientists. What I took away from this experience was that social science research beyond economics, especially political science, can be incredibly valuable to federal policy—and can have just as much relevance as economics when focused on public policy and when staff had training in those relevant disciplines.
Still, given that these are only two episodes of federal policy making—albeit government-wide efforts—I make no strong claims about the generalizability of the mechanisms and examples I document in this piece to all federal policy making. Instead, my goal is to approach this case as rich description, and one that others can use as a model to approach their own engagement with the policy-making process and with policy-relevant research.
In addition to the limits to generalizability, I also acknowledge that both initiatives were limited in scope and time. Both aimed to introduce government-wide change in federal agency practices but given the lack of new resources, other priorities competing for scarce attention, and the limited time available to the Biden-Harris administration, progress on both initiatives was incremental. The most significant accomplishments were on an individual agency and program basis (for summaries, see OIRA 2023; 2024a; 2024b). Moreover, given the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to “deconstruct” the administrative state, including through cutbacks imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, none of these efforts endured past the Biden-Harris administration (Murray, Kim, and White Reference Murray, Kim and White2025). In addition, the Trump-Vance administration has taken active steps to limit the use of academic evidence and expertise in the policy-making process and reduce public participation, including in rule making (Hiller and Jarcho Reference Hiller and Jarcho2025; Mueller Reference Mueller2025), and increase the administrative burdens faced by applicants to social programs (Hacker and Sullivan Reference Hacker and Sullivan2025).
Despite these limits, both case studies provide support for recent efforts within our discipline—such as the nascent field of American political economy—to encourage scholars to focus more closely on public policy, including as an explanatory variable shaping the experiences, resources, and actions of the mass public and interest groups, as well as an outcome in its own right contested over by competing factions (Hacker et al. Reference Hacker, Hertel-Fernandez, Pierson and Thelen2022; Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2014). They also suggest that efforts by political scientists to serve in government themselves can provide important conduits for political science research to shape public policy, as well as a greater understanding among political scientists of policy-relevant research topics and questions (complementing engagement of government by academics outside government, e.g., Hacker Reference Hacker2010). To embed more political science work within federal policy will require building more pipelines into government for leaders and staff trained in political science, as the economics discipline has done over many decades. These lessons should be part of efforts to rebuild the administrative state in the years following the Trump-Vance administration—not just to where the administrative state stood at the end of the Biden-Harris administration but in a form that could address more long-standing issues with participation and engagement with the federal government.
I close this piece with an agenda of future political science research that could be helpful for advancing these initiatives, as well as a case study of such work. I focus on administrative policy making in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the largest anti-hunger program in the American welfare state, administered by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2022). Given the size and importance of SNAP to the social safety net and the volume of its administrative activity, I believe it makes for an informative case study of administrative democracy—and certainly one program on which federal policy makers were very focused in our burden reduction and participation efforts (OIRA 2023; 2024a).
I report on an original survey of 1,492 SNAP applicants, exploring their opportunities for, and barriers to, participation in SNAP administrative policy making by sharing their lived experiences with government. The measures on the survey come from specific questions that federal agencies, including the USDA, posed about how best to engage recipients of social benefit programs. Together, these results provide a relatively unique window into the specific barriers faced to greater participation in administrative democracy by underserved communities within an individual government program, which was missing for us in government when we were developing the initiatives around regulatory participation and burden reduction. Future work by political scientists ought to build on these efforts to continue to identify ways to deepen the responsiveness of the federal administrative state to the public and especially underserved communities, particularly in the wake of the hollowing out of the federal government during the Trump-Vance administration and the large cutbacks to federal safety net programs, including food assistance, implemented in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 (Hacker and Sullivan Reference Hacker and Sullivan2025).
The Biden-Harris Administration’s Efforts at Democratizing Regulatory Review and Reducing Burdens in Access to Social Benefit Programs
President Biden signaled early on that a key priority would be overhauling the process through which the federal government develops and reviews regulations, issuing a “day one” Presidential Memorandum on Modernizing Regulatory Review (Biden Reference Biden2021). Developed during the presidential transition by administrative law scholars who would go on to staff the White House regulatory office, the timing of the memorandum signaled the importance with which Biden’s administration would approach the work (Kuttner Reference Kuttner2022). In response, the White House regulatory office—the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—launched a multiyear effort to meet the goals of the presidential memorandum, including as key pillars the reforming of how members of the public interacted with the federal government during the process of promulgating regulations and accessing social programs. In the following sections, I discuss how social science research, especially from political science, was critical in the design of these two initiatives.
Democratizing Regulatory Development and Review
OIRA’s public participation initiative involved a five-step process (for overviews, see OIRA 2024b; Revesz Reference Revesz2023a). First, OIRA sought to model a participatory process in developing the guidance, collecting feedback from the public about their perceptions of the regulatory process and barriers to deeper participation—especially among low-income communities, communities of color, and other underserved communities—through written comments, virtual listening sessions, and proactive outreach to various associations and civic organizations representing different constituencies. At the same time, OIRA conducted a parallel listening-session process inside government, collecting from federal agencies staff experiences with public engagement and participation, efforts to date to broaden participation, obstacles staff had encountered to broadening participation, and where the White House could better support such efforts.
Based on public and agency feedback, OIRA developed draft guidance, which it published for comment from agencies and the public, and then ultimately released to agencies and the public in a final form in July 2023. That guidance included direction to federal agency heads to, wherever possible, broaden their proactive outreach to the public when developing regulations; issue new requirements for agencies to document how they had conducted public outreach and engagement; implement a legal framework from the OMB general counsel’s office for agencies to consider proactive engagement of the public and especially underserved communities, rather than waiting passively for public input; and develop a comprehensive set of promising practices for agencies to use.
To implement the final guidance, OIRA regularly convened a working group of agency representatives—including both political and career staff—to share resources, experiences, and advice with one another and recognize exemplary agency work. While not public, the working group did invite outside experts, including representatives of community-based organizations interested in engaging with the regulatory process and researchers studying best practices in engagement, to present to the group. In parallel, OIRA workshopped and wrote guidance for its own public-facing activities to broaden engagement through so-called Executive Order (EO) 12866 meetings—meetings that any member of the public can request with OIRA when a regulation is with the office for review. Federal agencies and White House staff often attend EO 12866 meetings to hear outside perspectives—though neither they nor OIRA staff can respond substantively to members of the public or share any nonpublic information. Last, OIRA has also committed to share its progress with the participation initiative publicly, and in the summer of 2024 released a report summarizing the experience of implementing the guidance, including lessons learned and specific examples of agencies proactively engaging the public and how that engagement informed agency regulations (OIRA 2024b).
In response to the OMB initiative, a number of federal agencies undertook agency-wide efforts to expand their outreach and engagement during the process of drafting regulations, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the USDA (OIRA 2024b). In addition, agencies such as the OMB, the Small Business Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and the US Department of Labor were able to point to specific proposed rules where they deployed new and expanded practices for meaningful public engagement.
How Political Science Research Informed the Participation Initiative
At OIRA, the motivation for including public participation as a core pillar of the broader modernizing regulatory review initiative was a close reading of several separate but related literatures in political science. The first literature, rooted in long-standing studies on participation, has documented systematic inequalities in political engagement for individuals and organizations, showing that more advantaged individuals and groups are much more likely to participate in politics than less advantaged interests (e.g., Rosenstone and Hansen Reference Rosenstone and Hansen1993; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady Reference Schlozman, Verba and Brady2012; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995).
The second literature built on those findings to identify gaps in policy representation—between public preferences and policy outcomes—by class, showing that higher-income individuals and businesses were more likely to have their preferences reflected in federal policy outputs, especially when their views conflicted with those held by less affluent individuals and groups representing the public or mass interests, including in the regulatory process (e.g., Gilens Reference Gilens2012; Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2010; Page and Gilens Reference Page and Gilens2017).
The last literature—most closely relevant to OIRA’s work—documents that despite its ostensible openness to all interests, well-organized groups tended to dominate participation in the federal regulatory process (e.g., Carpenter et al. Reference Carpenter, Dagonel, Judge-Lord, Kenny, Libgober, Rashin, Waggoner and Yackee2023; Haeder and Yackee Reference Haeder and Yackee2015; Libgober Reference Libgober2020; Libgober and Carpenter Reference Libgober and Carpenter2024; Yackee and Yackee Reference Yackee and Yackee2006). Businesses and trade associations, in particular, tended to be more likely to submit comments, attend meetings with OIRA and federal agencies, and see their comments and positions translated into final regulatory language. These findings reflect, in part, the regulatory process’s historical preference for legal and technical comments (Sant’Ambrogio and Staszewski Reference Sant’Ambrogio and Staszewski2018).
Together, these literatures helped to frame the scope of the problem OIRA was trying to address, documenting how federal regulatory policy was often not responsive to mass preferences, especially from less affluent and less organized constituencies. These literatures also pointed to an important mechanism for that gap in output: the lack of participation in submitting comments and requesting meetings with the government from less affluent individuals in the mass public and groups representing lower-income and even middle-class interests—as opposed to businesses, trade associations, and professional associations (Carpenter et al. Reference Carpenter, Dagonel, Judge-Lord, Kenny, Libgober, Rashin, Waggoner and Yackee2023; Libgober and Carpenter Reference Libgober and Carpenter2024; Yackee and Yackee Reference Yackee and Yackee2006).
Beyond framing the problem we were trying to address, political science literature on policy feedback effects was critical to the solutions that OIRA advanced. The relevant policy feedback literature we drew from focused on how the structure of public policies and government agencies can foster or discourage public participation in the mass public and organized interest groups by changing preferences and attitudes, resources, and opportunities for engaging with government (e.g., Mettler and Soss Reference Mettler and Soss2004; Pierson Reference Pierson1993; Skocpol Reference Skocpol1992).
A key insight from the feedback-effects literature that was important to our work at OIRA was that the structure of public programs often impedes public participation in government processes (e.g., Arnold Reference Arnold1990; Mettler Reference Mettler2011). This is especially true when government programs (and their implementing agencies) are designed in ways that are less visible and salient to the mass public. Regulatory policy making—often administered by subcomponents of federal agencies—can be particularly opaque and confusing for the mass public (see especially SoRelle Reference SoRelle2020). Interested members of the public must wade through the Federal Register to find out if a particular regulation is open for public comment, read through hundreds of pages of dense technical and legal language to understand what aspect of the regulation might be relevant to their own lives, establish what aspects of the proposed regulation they will comment on, and navigate to a separate, clunky website to submit their comment. Even if an individual succeeded in submitting a comment, they would rarely if ever receive any notification from a federal agency that their comment had been received, let alone read or considered—something that many individuals told OIRA was demoralizing and discouraged future participation.Footnote 2
To make the regulatory process more accessible to the public, and especially to populations that are particularly likely to be affected by regulations yet have not participated before, OIRA adopted four strategies from the policy feedback and public participation literature. Above all, OIRA stressed to federal agencies the need for proactive steps to solicit feedback and engagement from the public, rather than waiting for interested members of the public to act on their own. While political science research has long recognized that proactive requests are necessary to foster greater participation (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995), such a stance was not typical for federal agencies.
As OIRA’s guidance to federal agencies noted, historically, agencies’ general counsels have tended to advise agency staff to be receptive to any incoming requests for meetings or engagement during regulatory development—but not to proactively reach out to any individuals or groups. Agencies have tended to worry, with good reason, that such proactive outreach could be seen as putting agencies’ thumbs on the scale of participation and producing inequitable outcomes that could be challenged in court. Moreover, agencies have also been concerned that they would not have a rational basis for selecting which groups or communities to reach out to, opening themselves to accusations of arbitrary selections.
Building on the political science research on how agencies have historically fostered greater feedback effects through proactive outreach to build supportive civil society coalitions and collaborators (e.g., Moynihan and Soss Reference Moynihan and Soss2014, 323), OIRA’s guidance stressed that when agencies failed to proactively engage underserved communities, agencies would be propagating historical inequalities in participation—potentially exposing them to legal challenges for not taking action. The guidance also gave criteria for agencies to use to identify communities they sought to engage, asking agency staff to consider communities that might have a stake in a regulation but which have not historically participated in the regulatory process before. This provided agencies with an empirically tractable and legally defensible criteria for outreach. To institutionalize this practice, OIRA recommended that agencies’ general counsels revise the internal policies governing public contact in the regulatory process—known as ex parte communications policies—to reflect this new perspective, and pointed to an important example set by the US Department of Transportation to revise and socialize similar changes within their agency (Putnam Reference Putnam2022).
Next, OIRA encouraged federal agencies to make their regulatory development more visible, salient, and traceable to the public, taking steps to create new institutional “hooks and levers” for members of the public to see relevant steps in the regulatory process and mobilize accordingly (Rahman and Gilman Reference Rahman and Gilman2019, 42). These steps were intended to resurface the “submerged” regulatory process (see especially SoRelle Reference SoRelle2020). They were also intended to provide accountability for federal agencies to the public and to the OMB—asking agencies to “show their work” in engaging the public so that OMB staff and members of the public could both see what agencies had done (or not done) to follow the guidance. OIRA encouraged agencies to start engagement early, before drafting regulations, to ensure that affected communities had an opportunity to weigh in before significant decisions had been made, and doing so through channels that met members of the public where they were. Rather than asking for feedback on specific technical questions, the guidance encouraged agencies to create mechanisms—for instance, town halls or listening sessions—where members of the public could share their experiences with problems or issues they had encountered in their daily lives.Footnote 3 And, especially important, the guidance required that agencies begin to use their submissions to the Unified Agenda—OIRA’s twice-annual publication of regulatory priorities across the government, including regulations that agencies are currently working on or plan to work on—to describe what public engagement they had conducted or had planned, as a tool to help members of the public plan their participation, see how their participation had shaped government decisions, and provide an accountability mechanism for OMB staff and members of the public to track agency progress.
Third, OIRA drew from the political science literature on the political resources necessary for public participation to provide a comprehensive list of barriers to participation that federal agencies ought to tackle when crafting engagement opportunities (e.g., Schlozman, Verba, and Brady Reference Schlozman, Verba and Brady2012; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995). These include the time required for participation, including addressing potential conflicts with work or family care. Many agency events—like town halls or listening sessions—are held during the work day, often making it challenging for full-time workers to participate. OIRA encouraged agencies to consider offering multiple times for events such as these, both during and after the work day, to accommodate these different schedules. The list of barriers to address also included language and communications issues, and OIRA recommended the use of plain language, translation, and sign language interpretation and captioning—depending on the specific constituencies agencies were trying to reach.
OIRA additionally stressed the importance of cultural competency, especially when engaging with communities that might have mistrust in government agencies given past negative or stigmatizing interactions with the state (e.g., Lerman and Weaver Reference Lerman and Weaver2014; Michener Reference Michener2018; Soss Reference Soss2000). For example, advertisements from the US Department of Homeland Security to attend an in-person town hall intended to gather immigrant community input in a proposed regulation may fail to attract much participation on their own, given community distrust in such agencies. But, when partnering with groups that have trusted relationships in immigrant communities, the department might have more success in reaching individuals from those communities. Accordingly, OIRA recommended that agencies partner with intermediaries that communities trusted, which might be able to communicate with those communities in ways responsive to local norms and experiences.
One especially important group of intermediaries that the OIRA guidance recommended that agencies rely on were nonprofit organizations with memberships or relationships in the communities agencies were hoping to reach (what the OMB called community-based organizations). These types of organizations, the guidance explained, can serve as bridges into communities that agencies want to reach, and can also play an important translational role, aggregating problems or issues that they observe in their communities and sharing them systematically with agencies. Moreover, OIRA understood from political science research that even with the federal government’s best efforts, agencies were unlikely to spur greater participation from individuals acting alone without engagement through civic organizations—given all the ways that organizations could better interface with government and in turn channel requests and participation through their memberships. We were especially informed by research in the policy feedback and civic participation literatures that suggests that these organizations can serve as “prisms” between government and local communities—especially underserved communities—aggregating diverse perspectives and views into greater power and representation in government (e.g., Galvin Reference Galvin2024; Han, Campbell, and McKenna Reference Han, Campbell and McKenna2022; Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa Reference Han, McKenna and Oyakawa2021).
To that end, the guidance recommended that agencies ensure that regulatory staff coordinate with their colleagues responsible for public engagement or public affairs, local and regional program administration, or other teams that might have knowledge of the relevant community-based organizations in specific regions. OIRA also attempted to deal with the potential drawbacks of directing agencies to work closely with smaller community-based organizations. OIRA recommended two approaches: first, asking agencies to coordinate among one another for requests to the same organizations or regions, and having one agency serve as the main conduit to particular organizations; and second, where consistent with applicable laws, using federal funds to pay organizations to help compensate community members for participating in engagement activities to help organizations that might be otherwise limited in their capacity and resources.Footnote 4
The Limits of Political Science Research in Informing the Participation Initiative
Not all of the recommendations advanced by political science were feasible to adopt in government. These instances offer insights about the limits of directly translating scholarship into policy. A reading of the magnitude of inequalities in political participation identified by political scientists in administrative processes might have called for more stringent requirements on agencies to incorporate engagement with affected communities into their work. Yet a more stringent, across-the-board requirement was not feasible to implement—either on the part of the OMB or federal agencies. Federal agencies faced competing priorities from other administration activities and the modernizing regulatory review initiative did not come with any additional funding or staff for federal agencies. Relatedly, White House officials and agency staff worried about how more stringent requirements for consultation might slow down the promulgation of time-sensitive priority regulations. The OMB, for its part, did not receive additional resources as part of the regulatory modernization initiative, making monitoring agency compliance with additional requirements challenging. For these reasons, the final directives aimed to encourage more public engagement without creating across-the-board requirements for agencies, less ambitious than what political science research might have called for.
Another case where research was not fully translated into policy involved the subsidization of groups and individuals to support their participation in government processes. Research on policy feedback effects and public participation suggests that these subsidies can help to increase engagement with government and support the creation or growth of mass-membership organizations that could better represent underserved communities (Campbell Reference Campbell2003; Pierson Reference Pierson1993). Yet providing such financial support can be complicated for federal agencies, typically requiring explicit authorization and funding from Congress. Even when agencies may have had more discretion in deciding how to allocate grant funding, agencies were often hesitant to explicitly tie funding to public engagement for fear of appearing to be subsidizing participation from allies. Here the limits on the application of research involved statutory restrictions as well as concerns about legal and political risks.
Reducing Burdens in Access to Social Benefits and Services
In parallel with the efforts around public participation, during the same period OIRA launched a closely related initiative under the banner of regulatory modernization to facilitate access to federal social programs and benefits for eligible individuals and households. The motivation for this initiative was a large and growing body of research from political science, sociology, and public administration documenting the range of costs that individuals and households face in claiming social benefits—including financial, time, and psychological costs (e.g., Baekgaard and Tankink Reference Baekgaard and Tankink2022; Barnes Reference Barnes2020; Herd et al. Reference Herd, Hoynes, Michener and Moynihan2023; Herd and Moynihan Reference Herd and Moynihan2018). These costs, which this literature has labeled “administrative burdens,” deter many eligible individuals from claiming benefits or services to which they are entitled. The “take-up gap,” representing the gap between the number of individuals or households eligible for public benefits and those receiving them, is significant across social programs and contributes to material hardship (Giannarelli et al. Reference Giannarelli, Minton, Wheaton and Knowles2023). In recent years, that gap has ranged from around 20 percentage points for SNAP to 50 percentage points for Medicaid to over 80 percentage points for unemployment insurance (e.g., Forsythe Reference Forsythe2023; Ko and Moffitt Reference Ko and Moffitt2022). These administrative costs also take a serious toll on those who succeed in applying for and ultimately receiving government benefits, forcing individuals and families to expend time, money, and effort.
A group of OIRA career desk officers made the pitch to the incoming Biden-Harris administration that the office was uniquely well positioned to tackle administrative burdens. The organic statute that created the office—the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) of 1980—intended that OIRA would oversee federal agencies’ collection of information from the public, including through forms and paperwork processes intended to establish eligibility for social benefits (Weiss Reference Weiss1989). Under the PRA, federal agencies must submit for OIRA review and public comment new forms or revisions to existing forms, describing the purpose of the form, estimates of the burden the form will impose on members of the public (including how many people will complete the form and the time it will take to complete the form), and how agencies are minimizing that burden. Based on this review, OIRA can request that the agency make changes to minimize the burden or make the form more appropriate for its purposes—and can also request that the agency consult with the public to improve the design of the form. The idea of using the PRA as a vehicle for tackling burdens in access to public benefits served as a clever institutional “conversion” of a much-maligned conservative policy originally aimed at appeasing the business community, redeploying its statutory reach to focus on improving delivery of social benefits and services (Shapiro Reference Shapiro2020; Weiss Reference Weiss1989).
Working together with OIRA’s political leadership, that group of career desk officers launched a burden reduction initiative, beginning with an OMB memorandum to all agency heads in 2022 (Young and Mancini Reference Young and Mancini2022). That memorandum charged agencies with more comprehensively estimating the administrative burdens that agencies might be imposing on benefit applicants, including not just the time it takes to complete a form but also the full range of costs that an applicant might experience. This might include, for example, the time required for an individual to learn about a program and to figure out if they might be eligible; the costs of transportation or childcare needed to visit a government office in person; or the stress, stigma, or disrespect that individuals might experience throughout the application process. Agencies were then charged with systematically reducing burdens on affected communities, focusing on systematic reductions likely to have enduring effects for underserved communities. OIRA made public participation a key pillar of this process, asking agencies to consult with affected communities when designing or revising benefit applications to better understand impacts on those communities, intertwining this initiative with the public participation effort described above.
OIRA followed up on the 2022 guidance with a series of additional resources for agencies, including a “how-to” guide with practical steps for identifying and reducing burdens as well as launching a regular working group of agency representatives intended to highlight replicable practices, share lessons, and lift up successes and champions (Young and Mancini Reference Young and Mancini2022). In 2023, OIRA took the important step of using an annual “data call” for agencies required under the PRA to request that all agencies document their planned burden reduction efforts, and then used those commitments to author a high-profile public document synthesizing those successes in 2023 and again in 2024 (OIRA 2023; 2024a; Revesz Reference Revesz2023b). The report aimed to build excitement and momentum within government, create a sense of friendly accountability and competition between agencies for their victories, and publicly showcase the government’s commitment to advancing burden reduction. Apart from the interagency work, OIRA also began prioritizing administrative burden reduction in its transactional work with agencies, using the office’s statutory authority to review paperwork with a burden reduction lens in collaboration with other OMB and White House staff, as well as encouraging agencies to think about burden reduction opportunities in their regulatory development.
Examples of the most high-impact results from the burden reduction initiative include changes to forms, revised regulations, and new investments in streamlining applicant processes (OIRA 2023; 2024a). For instance, working together with OIRA, the USDA streamlined applications for farm loan assistance, taking 10 different forms with 29 pages of paperwork that took over five hours to complete and consolidating them into a single 13-page document, written in plain language, estimated to take under three hours to complete. The USDA also launched an online assistance tool to guide farmers through the application process with easy-to-follow prompts. The US Department of Education, for its part, worked with the OMB to revise regulations governing the discharge of student loan debt for permanently disabled individuals, simplifying and in some cases eliminating burdensome and duplicative documentation requirements. And working with the US Digital Service, the US Department of Health and Human Services helped states to expand their use of automatic renewals for Medicaid using data that states already had access to, reducing burdensome documentation requirements on Medicaid-covered families at risk of losing coverage.
How Public Administration and Political Science Research Informed the Burden Reduction Initiative
As with the public participation initiative, academic research from social science, including political science and public administration, was critical to the creation of this effort. OIRA desk officers had read the book Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, by public administration scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan (Reference Herd and Moynihan2018), which helped to coin the idea of administrative burdens and laid out the case for why policy makers should focus on reducing these burdens. Guidance from OIRA formally incorporated the typology Herd and Moynihan developed around different varieties of burdens, including financial, learning, and psychological costs, and also added “redemption costs,” an additional category intended to capture the costs associated with accessing benefits requiring the use of third-party intermediaries (such as participating grocery stores with SNAP or doctors with Medicaid; see Barnes Reference Barnes2021). OIRA asked agencies to think about their programs through the lens of these four burdens, and to apply the typology when submitting their paperwork requests to the OMB and the public.
In addition, although research in economics was helpful for learning more about financial and information costs, work from political science was critical for OMB and federal agency staff in better understanding the potential psychological costs of social programs. Scholars such as Carolyn Barnes, Jamila Michener, and Joe Soss, for example, have helped to draw attention through qualitative research to the experiences of stigma, disrespect, and stress associated with different steps in social program applications, as well as how variation in program rules across states for federated programs such as Medicaid or SNAP produces different psychological burdens (Barnes Reference Barnes2023; Barnes, Michener, and Rains Reference Barnes, Michener and Rains2023; Michener Reference Michener2018; Soss Reference Soss2000).
Another important way in which political science research shaped the burden reduction initiative was through the policy feedbacks literature discussing the interplay between collective action, public policy, and political mobilization (Galvin Reference Galvin2024; Han, Campbell, and McKenna Reference Han, Campbell and McKenna2022; Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa Reference Han, McKenna and Oyakawa2021; Hertel-Fernandez Reference Hertel-Fernandez2020). In particular, we drew from policy feedback research on how government agencies could support the growth of nonprofit groups that could mobilize and represent underserved communities (Campbell Reference Campbell2003; Pierson Reference Pierson1993).
One especially promising intervention that OIRA encouraged agencies to consider was whether it was possible to partner with community-based organizations that had trusted relationships in the communities that might be eligible for social programs so that those organizations could offer “navigation” services. These services could include raising awareness about those programs, sharing information about eligibility rules and application processes, translating relevant materials, assisting individuals to complete and submit applications, and helping individuals to contest improper denials of benefits. Navigators can be especially important in overcoming mistrust or distrust in government agencies and in reaching communities with limited English language proficiency (see, e.g., Vargas Reference Vargas2016). In turn, these navigators could then organize new constituencies toward collective action and identify more systematic problems or issues to press government officials to address (see, e.g., Gould-Werth and Hertel-Fernandez [Reference Gould-Werth and Hertel-Fernandez2020] for the case of labor and worker organizations and unemployment insurance). The Biden-Harris administration had several promising experiments with such navigators, including at the US Department of Labor (with partnerships with community-based organizations to help women, especially women of color, better understand their labor rights, as well as partnerships with worker organizations to help workers claim unemployment benefits; see, e.g., Evermore, Hertel-Fernandez, and Madland Reference Evermore, Hertel-Fernandez and Madland2024; Hanks Reference Hanks2022).
A final way in which political science was relevant for the burden reduction effort was through research on federalism and the politics of social programs. Many of the most important social programs for children and working adults in the US are run as partnerships between the federal government and states (and sometimes localities), including Medicaid, SNAP, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance. The federated design of these programs means that states and localities have substantial discretion in designing program rules—and so even if the federal government has committed to reducing administrative burdens, states and localities may still impede such efforts (e.g., Barnes Reference Barnes2020; Herd and Moynihan Reference Herd, Hoynes, Michener and Moynihan2023; Lieberman Reference Lieberman2001; Mettler Reference Mettler1998; Michener Reference Michener2018; Pierson Reference Pierson1995). The large literature on federalism and social policy, in particular, has documented how states with more conservative governments and more diverse populations (especially nonwhite Americans) have tended to adopt stingier access to social benefits (e.g., Hero Reference Hero2000; Kelly and Witko Reference Kelly and Witko2012; Soss et al. Reference Soss, Schram, Vartanian and O’Brien2001). In light of those findings, the administration understood efforts to address burden reduction in federated programs as a challenge to racial equity (e.g., The White House 2022), and talked about the challenges to inclusion they presented.
To address such disparities in access to federated public benefits like unemployment insurance, federal agencies have tended to adopt four complementary strategies that OIRA highlighted for our agency counterparts. First, where possible, agencies have set higher standards requiring all states to reduce burdens in access to benefits, as when the US Department of Health and Human Services implemented new regulations for Medicaid eliminating waiting periods for coverage for children and requiring states to provide applicants with at least 15 days to correct information that might be missing when submitting a first application (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2024). However, most new requirements for states would require changes in legislation, limiting agencies’ abilities to enact such changes on their own using executive authority.
Second, agencies provided funding to states and localities to incentivize the adoption of burden reduction strategies, as when the US Department of Labor provided grants to states to adopt measures that would expand equitable and timely access to unemployment benefits, such as by translating documents, adding plain-language descriptions to program communications, and communicating more regularly with potentially eligible communities (AIR n.d.). This strategy too, however, generally requires appropriations from Congress, limiting discretion by federal agencies.
Third, federal agencies gave states and localities greater discretion to implement programs in ways that reduced burdens, such as when the USDA implemented new regulations permitting more localities to participate in universal school meals programs without requiring applications from students’ families (Food and Nutrition Service 2024).
Last, federal agencies have helped to lift up positive examples of burden reduction by state and local governments, making it easier for policy makers in other states and localities to learn from and adopt those practices, as when the US Department of the Treasury (2024) shared easy-to-use guides on best practices for using recovery funds to implement housing assistance programs. Building on political science work on these dynamics, the federal government thus tried to raise both the floors and the ceilings for benefit access—pulling up laggard localities and states as well as making more options available for the highest-performing states.
The Limits of Research in Informing the Burden Reduction Initiative
Nevertheless, as with the public participation initiative, not all the implications of social science research on administrative burden could be incorporated into our work. Similar to the participation initiative, the OMB’s ability to introduce sweeping, across-the-board requirements for burden reduction were curbed by resource constraints. Neither agencies nor the OMB had received new funding or staff for this work, limiting the ability to set specific targets for each agency. And while scholars had identified numerous burden reduction opportunities for important programs, many of those reforms were not possible to implement. In some cases this was because a program’s underlying statute explicitly required specific burdens (such as recertification requirements or interviews), and would have thus required congressional action to eliminate. In other cases, agencies may have had discretion to reduce administrative burdens but were reluctant to do so because of the political or legal risk that such a burden reduction might have created. There is an important asymmetry for many benefit agencies for program administration errors. Benefits paid out to ineligible individuals or families often were perceived by agency staff to receive much more legal and public scrutiny—from agency inspector generals, the Government Accountability Office, Congress, or the news media—while benefits an agency failed to pay out to eligible individuals were not seen as attracting comparable scrutiny. This is often due to the fact that it is easier to quantify improper payments to ineligible individuals than it is to understand where agencies fell short in reaching eligible individuals based on data regularly collected and reported by agencies and watchdog bodies. This asymmetry is in turn an important limit on burden reduction across government agencies.
Future Research to Expand Public Participation and Reduce Administrative Burden
The preceding discussion makes clear that social science, including political science research, was central to both the public participation and burden reduction initiatives. Future research from political science could continue to be relevant to the OMB and federal agencies. Below I sketch several areas, including (1) how to institutionalize these nascent efforts within federal agencies, especially in light of conservative efforts to curtail the regulatory authority of many administrative agencies—particularly equity-focused regulatory activity—and the hollowing out of so much federal capacity under the Trump-Vance administration; (2) how to better translate individuals’ lived experiences into a form legible to federal agency officials, especially those agency staff who are more accustomed to receiving highly technical public comments on regulations or public programs; and (3) how to identify the program-specific barriers that individual communities might face to participating in the federal government and sustainably overcome those barriers. These are outlined in more detail below.
Institutionalizing Efforts to Democratize Participation in Government as Part of Efforts to Rebuild the Federal Government, Post-Trump-Vance Administration
While the Biden-Harris administration was committed to supporting these two efforts, the Trump-Vance administration has taken a very different posture, seeking both a wholesale retrenchment of many parts of the federal government (Murray, Kim, and White Reference Murray, Kim and White2025) as well as cutbacks to federal activities involving advancing equity (including many of the examples listed above, with the Trump-Vance administration canceling Environmental Protection Agency grants to build community capacity to address environmental justice issues; see Hassanein Reference Hassanein2025), ensuring public participation in government processes (with the Trump-Vance administration actively making such participation harder or impossible; see Hiller and Jarcho Reference Hiller and Jarcho2025), and making government benefits and services easier to use (with the Trump-Vance administration increasing the hurdles to accessing benefits and services; see Hacker and Sullivan Reference Hacker and Sullivan2025; Hussein Reference Hussein2025). Any subsequent administration thus must grapple with how to rebuild such a devastated federal administrative state. As part of that rebuilding process, researchers and policy makers should consider how to not simply replicate the pre-Trump-Vance administrative state, but also how to affirmatively advance a more democratic and equitable vision of the federal government. That might include the creation of new agencies and programs with the dedicated function of attempting to expand participation in government processes and building public capacities to do so. For example, one important lesson from the case studies I have discussed is that agencies often lack the capacity for sustained public engagement. Might a future administration propose legislation creating robust public engagement offices across agencies, with dedicated field staff who can proactively engage in outreach for a broad set of constituencies? Another lesson is that upstream engagement is often more valuable than downstream engagement, especially for individual members of the public when interacting with regulatory development. Might a future administration support legislative and operational changes to the rule-making process to incentivize deep agency engagement pre-rule drafting, and in exchange expedite the review of regulatory proposals? A related but distinct question is how the judicial efforts to dismantle or disempower parts of the administrative state, especially the ability to enforce and regulate the private sector or advance equity, will affect these efforts, since these rulings will presumably affect future presidential administrations as well (e.g., Metzger Reference Metzger2017; Rahman and Thelen Reference Rahman and Thelen2019). Future research is needed to understand how the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in this vein might affect these initiatives by diminishing the scope of potential regulation, diverting agency resources and attention to court challenges, and creating a fear of potential litigation (Savage Reference Savage2024). Here, too, more fundamental changes to government structure may be necessary.
Making Lived Experience More Legible and Usable to Federal Agency Staff
One challenge to fostering greater participation across federal agencies was helping agency staff—especially in program or regulatory offices—to understand how to use direct feedback from the public. Agency staff from program and regulatory offices are often more accustomed to interpreting and using comments and feedback from legal, scientific, or technical commenters, rather than individual members of the public, since public participation in the regulatory process is so limited and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 has historically favored legal and technical feedback. Just as these initiatives seek to build the external muscle wielded by members of the public when they contact federal agencies, so too do these initiatives need to help career programmatic staff better use public feedback. One promising strategy from the initiatives thus far includes encouraging greater collaboration between programmatic offices and agency offices of public affairs or public engagement, which more regularly engage individual members of the public. Another helpful strategy may be to provide agency staff with examples of how agencies have previously incorporated public feedback—for instance, making clear how individual experiences can better help to contextualize the hard-to-quantify benefits of a proposed regulation, such as those related to dignity and fairness (Bayefsky Reference Bayefsky2014). But more research would be helpful to understand how to take public feedback—often focused on the issues or problems that an individual may encounter in their life—and help to sort it into the kind of input that program staff are more accustomed to receiving, as well as how to encourage agency staff to use these new inputs. A final related consideration is how agencies can best solicit and use lived experience from the public in ways that provide useful information to guide agency decisions but do not unduly stymie government processes. The contribution of some participatory processes to the slowdown of government action—for instance, infrastructure construction—has received considerable attention from scholars, elected officials, and advocates in recent years (e.g., Bagley Reference Bagley2019; Pahlka Reference Pahlka2023). An open question is how to structure avenues for participation in government processes that balance the need for deeper participation from affected communities with the need for efficient government responses to social and economic needs. Of the three research questions I pose, this line of work has the least existing research, though two starting points may be the rich existing research on street-level bureaucracy and bottom-up perspectives on social program administration (e.g., Lipsky Reference Lipsky1980; Michener, SoRelle, and Thurston Reference Michener, SoRelle and Thurston2020; Zacka Reference Zacka2017).
Understanding and Addressing the Specific Barriers that Individual Communities Face
OIRA guidance focused on the broad set of barriers that members of the public, especially those from underserved communities, might face to participating in the administrative state. But we lack more detailed and actionable evidence on the specific barriers that individual communities—for example, applicants to unemployment insurance—might face to sharing their perspectives with government. For federal agencies to tackle those specific barriers, we need more evidence on a program-by-program basis about the obstacles that specific populations confront, and the strategies for overcoming those barriers, building on existing work on administrative burdens and public participation among underserved communities (Herd et al. Reference Herd, Hoynes, Michener and Moynihan2023; Michener, SoRelle, and Thurston Reference Michener, SoRelle and Thurston2020). As an example of this kind of research, in the remainder of the paper, I use as a case study an effort to solicit lived experiences from applicants to food assistance to inform burden reduction efforts for SNAP applications.
A SNAP Case Study: Answering Agency Questions about Barriers to Engagement Faced by Program Applicants and Beneficiaries
The USDA was one of the leading agencies implementing both the public participation and burden reduction initiatives (OIRA 2023; 2024a; 2024b). Yet the USDA, like other federal agencies we worked with, wanted more actionable evidence on the obstacles faced by its constituents to greater participation. At a practical level, while it was helpful to remind agencies such as the USDA that they should be mindful of engaging with communities with low trust in government, existing research in political science has not said how much low trust was an obstacle for the specific constituencies—such as SNAP applicants or beneficiaries—that the USDA or other agencies worked with. Nor did such research necessarily test specific interventions for the USDA or other agencies to implement in light of those obstacles. Federal agencies, we found, were looking for more granular evidence applicable to their individual programs and constituencies to push implementation forward.
As an example of what such research could look like tailored to a specific agency, I report on a case study of research on SNAP applicants’ barriers to greater participation in the regulatory process and what could overcome such barriers, building from the specific research questions that the USDA and other agencies had posed to the OMB. SNAP makes for a useful case study given its centrality to the US welfare state—reaching some 40 million people each year, including one in four children—as well as the fact that it was the site of significant rule-making and burden reduction work during the Biden-Harris administration (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2022).
To conduct the analysis, in January 2024, I fielded an online survey using Meta advertisements to target English-speaking individuals on Meta’s platforms (including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Reels, and partner websites; see Zhang et al. Reference Zhang, Mildenberger, Howe, Marlon, Rosenthal and Leiserowitz2020) with experience applying for SNAP benefits. While Facebook ad-driven recruitment does not yield probability samples, other researchers have documented how Facebook samples can recover similar estimates to government surveys, especially for smaller populations that might be otherwise difficult to recruit (e.g., Schneider and Harknett Reference Schneider and Harknett2022; Storer, Schneider, and Harknett Reference Storer, Schneider and Harknett2020). For my purposes, using Meta to target participants permits me to reach a relatively large sample of individuals with firsthand experience interacting with SNAP, and do so much more cost-effectively than with traditional survey methods.
I designed an ad campaign to target US adults with SNAP experience, which directed individuals to an online Qualtrics survey link. Online appendix 1 details the campaign. I implemented quotas to ensure that the final sample would resemble the overall population of individuals with SNAP experience. I used the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate the demographics of SNAP recipients from 2010 to 2023, and created quota targets for race and ethnicity, age, education, and employment status (see online appendix 2). The sample compares favorably to other CPS estimates. In addition, I developed raked survey weights to match CPS targets on age, education, race and ethnicity, employment status, and region (though weighting does not appreciably change my results). Excluding nonconsenting respondents, respondents who failed a CAPTCHA to screen out bots (automated responses), duplicate responses, and respondents deemed to be low quality using Google reCAPTCHA, 1,492 respondents successfully completed the survey (see online appendix 3 for the complete instrument; see Hertel-Fernandez [Reference Hertel-Fernandez2025] for replication data).
Barriers to SNAP Applicant Participation in the Administrative Process
In light of the USDA’s (and other federal agencies’) interests in exploring the barriers specific to their own programs, I focus first on the self-reported barriers that SNAP applicants might face to better understand where the USDA and similar agencies should prioritize their engagement.
In conceptualizing potential barriers to participation in SNAP administrative policy making, I draw from the long-standing literature on civic participation (e.g., Rosenstone and Hansen Reference Rosenstone and Hansen1993; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady Reference Schlozman, Verba and Brady2012; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995). I test four barriers, summarized with the survey measures I used to test each one in table 1. These barriers also reflect hypotheses that federal agencies themselves shared with the OMB about what might make engagement with the public challenging.
Table 1 Hypothesized Barriers to Administrative Policy-Making Participation and Corresponding Survey Measures
Assessing each of these barriers in turn, I find minimal support for a lack of relevant opinions as a barrier to participation—which comes as no surprise to anyone who has talked with SNAP applicants, but offers important documentation to those who might argue that these communities do not have informed opinions to offer to federal agencies, an argument the OMB sometimes heard from some agency staff. As I detail in online appendix 4, across survey items respondents voiced relevant views about their experiences with the SNAP application process, including noting specific barriers they faced and how the process made them feel. For example, 78% of respondents voiced specific challenges they faced in the application process. Fewer than 1% said they did not have an opinion on the stress they experienced when applying. Additionally, about half (47%) of respondents said they had talked about their SNAP application experience with family, friends, or other SNAP recipients.
I also find mixed support for time as a barrier to greater participation, which is relevant given that the OIRA guidance explicitly mentioned time as a potential obstacle for federal agencies to consider. When given the option to indicate whether a lack of time was a barrier to sharing their opinion about SNAP, only 10% of respondents indicated that it would be—though this may reflect a lack of experience. Respondents who had previously tried to contact a government agency about their SNAP experience were twice as likely to say time was a barrier to engagement, though it still did not reach a majority of respondents.
I find more support for a lack of organizational connections serving as a barrier. Only about 36% of respondents indicated that they had ever been asked by a community, faith, or other nongovernmental organization about their SNAP experience, indicating that most individuals did not have connections to such organizations that could facilitate their engagement in policy making. As we will see, confirming past research connections to such organizations is one of the strongest predictors of participation in administrative policy making.
Turning to awareness of federal administrative policy making, I find much stronger support for evidence of barriers. When given the option to indicate who was most responsible for their application experience from a list of different government actors, only 40% responded with the USDA and only 17% reported the White House was responsible. Fewer still indicated that both the USDA and the White House were responsible—just 8%. In short, the role played by the federal administrative state through the White House and the USDA was not visible to most respondents. In addition, I find that 21% of respondents cited not knowing whom to contact served as a barrier. Twenty percent of respondents cited as barriers not knowing what information to share or how to share it. In all, about 47% of respondents cited as an obstacle either a lack of knowledge about whom to contact with their opinion or not knowing how or what to share. Table 2 summarizes these perceptions held by survey respondents.
Table 2 Lack of Awareness of the Administrative Policy-Making Process as a Barrier to SNAP Participation
Note: The survey included individuals who reported applying for or receiving SNAP benefits (n = 1,492).
Last, I find strong support for perceptions of the effectiveness of participation and trust in the administrative process as a barrier. When queried about the barriers they might face to participation, the most common response given by respondents was that their opinion would not make a difference (25%). Another 24% said that they might not participate because they did not know how their opinion would be used. A final 16% said that they might not participate because of a lack of trust in government staff. About half of all respondents provided one of these three responses as a barrier (recall that respondents could select more than one option). Table 3 summarizes these perceptions held by survey respondents.
Table 3 Lack of Trust in the Administrative Policy-Making Process as a Barrier to SNAP Participation
Note: The survey included individuals who reported applying for or receiving SNAP benefits (n = 1,492).
As a final analysis, I consider the potential importance of community-based organizations as conduits that can help to bridge the experiences of individual SNAP applicants and beneficiaries with government agencies. As I indicated above, we at the OMB drew the lesson from the political science research on participation that such organizations could play a critical role in lowering the costs to participation for social program applicants and beneficiaries. The 2024 SNAP survey permits a preliminary test of this hypothesis. The survey asked respondents if they had previously shared feedback on their SNAP experience with the federal government, as well as if they had previously been engaged by a nongovernmental organization in their community before.Footnote 5 Thirty percent of respondents who had been engaged by a community-based organization reported having contacted the federal government to share their experiences, compared to just 10% of respondents without such engagement by a community-based organization. That difference held up even adjusting for a range of other demographic and political characteristics (see online appendix 5), providing suggestive evidence that the OMB and federal agencies were right to focus on supporting community-based organizations as crucial intermediaries for supporting more program applicants and for helping beneficiaries to share their experiences with the federal government (see also Michener Reference Michener2022; Reference Michener2024). It also invites further research on how agencies can best engage with underserved communities through such community-based organizations.
Bridging Political Science and Federal Policy Making: Lessons for Our Discipline and Democratizing the Administrative State
Past research has documented stark inequalities in engagement of the administrative state, and how in practice the federal government, despite its ostensibly democratic nature, hears disproportionately from more advantaged interests, skewing policy outputs (e.g., Carpenter et al. Reference Carpenter, Dagonel, Judge-Lord, Kenny, Libgober, Rashin, Waggoner and Yackee2023; Haeder and Yackee Reference Haeder and Yackee2015; Yackee and Yackee Reference Yackee and Yackee2006). Motivated in part by this research, the Biden-Harris administration launched new initiatives intended to democratize the administrative state, encouraging greater public engagement to inform regulatory development and efforts to reduce the burdens involved in accessing federal social benefits. Though limited—and ultimately rolled back by the Trump-Vance administration—this work represented important advances for the democratization of the federal government, including the welfare state and regulatory processes. This piece demonstrated how different pieces of social science, including political science research, informed those efforts to help political scientists better understand how their work can be relevant to federal policy makers.
How Did Political Science Matter for Federal Policy—and How Could Political Science Matter More?
The social science research most likely to be applicable and useful for policy makers in the examples I provided in this piece tended to cluster in three different areas. One cluster of work helped to provide new descriptive facts about how government agencies and policies were working. Another cluster of work was more theoretical, offering new categories, concepts, or frameworks to help policy makers think about policy problems or approach the development of policy proposals and solutions. A final cluster of work assessed the impacts of changes in individual government policies and programs, providing lessons for designing future solutions.
In my experience working in the federal government, all three types of work were equally helpful for policy makers—affirming that rich descriptive work or theoretical development can be just as useful as causal impact studies for policy development. Closely related, in my experience reported here, both quantitative and qualitative work alike was helpful for our work; indeed, some of the most helpful work on administrative burden came from qualitative research documenting the firsthand experiences of individual applicants interacting with social programs as a way of socializing agency staff with the concept of psychological burdens.
The work described above spanned multiple disciplines, including economics, but also disciplines that have historically received less attention in the federal policy-making process, including sociology and political science. A through line, however, for all of the research that we drew from was that it was policy focused: quantitative or qualitative, descriptive, theoretical, or analytical, the most helpful research focused on the substance of government agencies and public policies either as outcomes or explanatory factors. Accordingly, to the extent that there are movements within political science to encourage more work that is closely attuned to the substance of public policy—such as the new subfield of American political economy—it will help our work to be more visible and useful to policy makers (see, e.g., Hacker et al. Reference Hacker, Hertel-Fernandez, Pierson and Thelen2022; Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2014). The same is likely true of other allied disciplines, such as sociology.
The case studies also revealed the limits of social science research, including political science, in informing policy decisions. The implications of research were less likely to be followed when they came into conflict with concerns about feasibility, where they conflicted with other political priorities, and where they introduced legal or political risk for government officials.
An underlying conclusion from the case studies is that government officials, including both career and political staff, with particular social science training were themselves the conduits for research to influence policy discussions and decisions. These officials were familiar with relevant political science research and could translate the implications of both broad debates as well as individual studies into conclusions relevant for policy making. These officials were also able to identify relevant scholars to contact for additional follow-up and advice. It is no coincidence that OIRA launched the participation and burden reduction initiatives with two academic political scientists in its front office, supported by political science PhDs who were serving on the career staff as well. If accurate, this conclusion adds to the growing literature on the ways that government officials’ backgrounds, including their educational training, can shape policy decisions (Krcmaric, Nelson, and Roberts Reference Krcmaric, Nelson and Roberts2020). This conclusion also suggests that for political science research—and other social science disciplines beyond economics—to have more influence in government, we will need more officials with training in relevant social sciences.
Encouraging more government service among academic social scientists could help to foster a virtuous cycle, whereby our colleagues who have served in government can draw on that experience for research that is more relevant to policy makers and teaching that can better prepare students for work in government. This will require a change in norms: compared to other academic disciplines, and especially legal academia and economics, political scientists in particular are less likely to serve in federal government (Fourcade Reference Fourcade2009). It was my experience working in the federal government that the vast majority of my political-appointee colleagues from academia came from either law or economics. Yet as this piece has indicated, many of the topics that policy-focused social scientists, including political scientists, tackle in their work are deeply relevant to the work of the federal government, and they have just as much to offer as social scientists from other disciplines.
As a first step, political scientists and other social scientists should consider more avenues for government service, including spending time as fellows with government agencies (building on the successful model of social science fellows in the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the US General Services Administration), building careers in the career civil service, and pursuing political appointments. Disciplinary organizations, as well as allied civic organizations like the Scholars Strategy Network or the Social Science Research Council, could also do more to help match interested social scientists with more of these opportunities and provide support for them in gaining the skills necessary to serve in government (e.g., Skocpol Reference Skocpol2014). And, over the longer run, social scientists might consider proposals to institutionalize the presence of more types of social science research in government, as economists have done historically through policy and planning offices, offices of chief economists, and the Council of Economic Advisers (Berman Reference Berman2022). In my experience, these governmental institutions helped to build pipelines of economics research and economists into government. For example, agency chief economists tend to be academic economists who could bring relevant economic studies, concepts, and arguments into policy discussions. Additionally, agency chief economists often hired staff or fellows with academic economics training, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Those students or fellows then gained experience working in government that could inform their future research and teaching, as well as subsequent government service.
Further Research to Democratize the Administrative State
This piece has also spelled out areas of future research where political science could be helpful for advancing the public participation and burden reduction initiatives in future administrations. In particular, research on institutionalizing these efforts across agencies, making lived experience more legible for federal agency staff, and identifying program-specific barriers and interventions could all help federal agencies to better implement democratization efforts in the years to come.
As an example of such research, I have reported on the specific barriers faced by SNAP applicants to sharing their experiences with government, and potential interventions to overcome those barriers. Echoing past work on lived experience as political knowledge, my analysis suggests that the primary barriers to greater participation do not involve a lack of relevant opinions, attitudes, and preferences (see, e.g., Cramer and Toff Reference Cramer and Toff2017; Weaver, Prowse, and Piston Reference Weaver, Prowse and Piston2019). Instead, the main barriers individuals faced were a lack of relevant organizational connections that could help them to mobilize their experiences into action, a lack of knowledge of the processes around administrative policy making, and a lack of trust in government institutions, especially how their input would be used.
In particular, results from the survey underscore the importance of community organizations (see also Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa Reference Han, McKenna and Oyakawa2021; Skocpol Reference Skocpol2003), echoing the OIRA guidance’s emphasis on such intermediaries. This finding suggests the need for further research and experimentation on how community organizations can help to mobilize social program beneficiaries into participation in administrative processes (e.g., Judge-Lord Reference Judge-Lord2021).
Taken together, these findings help us to understand why the administrative policy-making process is so tilted toward economically advantaged interests, as well as interventions that could help to broaden public participation. In so doing, they offer practical contributions as well for those in the federal government and civil society who seek to answer the federal government’s recent call to democratize the administrative process, bringing in the perspectives of those who are typically excluded from political decision making into the federal government. These resources and lessons can be useful as policy makers, researchers, and policy analysts consider how to rebuild the federal government in the wake of the Trump-Vance administration.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592725101928.
Data replication
Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MAI7J4.
Acknowledgments
For their leadership in supporting these initiatives, I thank Ricky Revesz, Sabeel Rahman, and Sam Berger. This paper benefited from helpful presentations and discussions at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Russell Sage Foundation, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois-Chicago’s American Politics workshop, and Yale University’s American Political Economy Exchange. For feedback on earlier drafts, I thank Carolyn Barnes, Sophie Jacobson, Jen Nou, Sabeel Rahman, and Elizabeth Wilkins. This study received human subjects research approval from the author’s institutional review board.
Open access
