Cass Sunstein’s Sludge: What Stops Us From Getting Things Done and What to Do About It identifies the bureaucratic friction, endless paperwork, and grueling wait times that prevent us from accessing what we need. Sunstein argues that this “sludge” is a pervasive tax on our time and dignity that undermines what he deems to be fundamental rights and disproportionately impacts those already stretched thin.
Continue reading to understand the psychological and economic toll of administrative burdens and to learn Sunstein’s roadmap for streamlining systems to improve lives without sacrificing essential protections.
Table of Contents
Overview of Sludge by Cass Sunstein
Cass Sunstein’s Sludge: What Stops Us From Getting Things Done and What to Do About It, argues that excessive administrative friction—the paperwork, waiting times, processes, and bureaucratic obstacles he calls “sludge”—separates people from what they need. While some friction serves legitimate purposes, Sunstein contends that the vast majority of sludge causes far more harm than good. It wastes billions of hours annually, costs hundreds of billions of dollars, depletes people’s mental capacity, and disproportionately harms the most vulnerable. It also undermines human dignity by making people feel their time and lives don’t matter, and it undermines what Sunstein considers to be fundamental rights such as voting and accessing essential services.
A Harvard Law professor, Sunstein contends that reducing sludge should be a priority for governments, businesses, and institutions because it improves lives without the tradeoffs typical of most debates on regulation: You can reduce administrative burdens without sacrificing protections or benefits. Sunstein confronted the paperwork burdens imposed on Americans in his role as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Barack Obama. He’s best known for coauthoring Nudge with economist Richard Thaler on the subject of choice architecture: the idea that the way options are presented shapes decisions. “Sludge” is the dark side of choice architecture: friction that blocks beneficial actions rather than encouraging them.
While Sunstein draws primarily on US examples, he argues that sludge is a universal challenge. In this overview, we explore Sunstein’s ideas in three sections. We begin by establishing what sludge is and where it comes from. Next, we examine Sunstein’s argument for why sludge is problematic, exploring its economic damage, psychological and cognitive costs, and violations of human dignity and rights. Finally, we discuss his recommendations for reducing sludge and the impact it would have on society.
What Is Sludge, and Where Does It Come From?
Sunstein defines sludge as the friction that separates people from what they want or need: excessive paperwork, long wait times, confusing applications, mandatory in-person appointments, complicated procedures, and frequent renewals. If you’ve ever abandoned an application for financial aid or health insurance because it was too complex, you’ve encountered sludge. If you’ve waited four hours in line to vote, you’ve experienced sludge. The obstacle is friction that makes completing a task so difficult that you give up. Sunstein’s key insight is that sludge isn’t inevitable—it’s a design choice about how much friction to embed in processes.
We’ll discuss how sludge works through choice architecture, and then we’ll cover who creates sludge and why, drawing primarily on examples from US government programs and businesses.
How Sludge Works Through Choice Architecture
Sunstein explains that choice architecture encompasses all the background elements that influence your decision-making: how items are arranged in a store, how forms are structured, and what the default option is. Sludge is the friction embedded within this architecture, and even small amounts of sludge can dramatically shape outcomes. Consider the difference between opt-in and opt-out systems: Sunstein reports that when parents have to opt in to receive text messages about their children’s academic progress, only 1% participate. But when parents are automatically enrolled, participation reaches 96%. The shift results from removing the need to take action—the friction of actively enrolling proves insurmountable for many.
Organizations understand that friction influences decision-making, so they use friction strategically. When companies want you to select a particular option, they make the choice effortless. Conversely, when they want to discourage certain selections, they add friction. They use both sludge and “nudges” (a concept Sunstein and Thaler popularized in their 2008 book Nudge) to influence choices. Nudges steer your decisions without forbidding options or imposing added costs. Many work by reducing friction, such as making healthy foods more visible in cafeterias. But not all helpful interventions reduce friction. Some nudges increase friction to promote careful deliberation, such as the “Are you sure?” prompt when you’re about to permanently delete a file.
We can categorize interventions in choice architecture along two dimensions: whether they reduce or increase friction, and whether they help or harm you. Sunstein explains that the most beneficial interventions are low-friction and helpful—they make good choices easy. Deliberation-promoting nudges are high-friction but helpful—they slow you down at crucial moments. The most problematic interventions are those that are high-friction and harmful: pure sludge that blocks you from things you need without serving any useful purpose.
Even if you think that you typically make rational choices, behavioral science reveals that human psychology amplifies sludge’s effects. Sunstein explains that we all suffer from powerful inertia—we tend to continue our current behavior even when change would benefit us. Procrastination compounds this problem. In our tendency to defer tasks, we treat the future like a distant, foreign place: The burden of filling out forms exists in the present, while the benefits exist in the future. This mismatch means we consistently undervalue future gains relative to present costs. Sunstein emphasizes that even perfectly rational people would struggle with sludge: Sometimes the rational response to sludge is simply to give up.
Who Creates Sludge—and Why?
Sunstein contends that sludge isn’t an inevitable feature of complex systems or large organizations. It results from choices—whether made thoughtfully or carelessly, with good intentions or malicious ones, consciously or unconsciously—about how much friction to embed in a system’s processes. Let’s explore the three major sources of sludge.
Some Sludge Is Created Unintentionally
First, Sunstein explains that many systems’ architects don’t anticipate the burdens their designs impose. Completing paperwork or meeting requirements may be far more difficult than designers imagine, especially for people who are already stretched thin, have limited education, or are going through life circumstances that make documentation hard to obtain. Government officials may create sludge for programs explicitly designed to help vulnerable populations, never recognizing that the administrative requirements undermine the program’s mission.
Medicare Part D illustrates this problem: The US government program aims to help older adults access prescription drug coverage, but picking an insurance plan involves navigating options for deductibles, coverage gaps, and premiums. This complexity proves particularly challenging for older adults experiencing cognitive decline—exactly the people the program serves.
Some Sludge Is Well-Intentioned but Harmful in Practice
A second category of sludge originates from efforts that address legitimate concerns but create disproportionate harm. Sunstein explains that to ensure only qualified recipients receive benefits, officials may impose barriers that exclude eligible people. For example, while the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has an 85% participation rate, 15% of eligible people don’t receive support due to administrative obstacles. The application process takes over five hours, including two trips to local offices and out-of-pocket costs averaging more than $10. After enrolling, recipients must repeatedly prove their eligibility, and they frequently lose benefits during these recertification processes.
Sunstein points out that US states face conflicting incentives that lead them to create such sludge. They can be penalized by the federal government for issuing benefits to ineligible people, which pushes them toward stricter verification standards, but they face no penalty for failing to serve those who qualify. The friction persists because concerns about program integrity override concerns about access.
Some Sludge Is Deliberate and Strategic
The third category of sludge is created with full awareness of its effects, either to advance organizational interests or to use as a political weapon. Sunstein points out that, in the private sector, companies make subscriptions easy to start but difficult to cancel, deliberately deploying friction. Online dark patterns—user interface choices that manipulate you into decisions you didn’t intend to make—rely heavily on strategic friction. They exploit how people naturally interact with user interfaces: For example, large, brightly colored buttons draw attention while tiny, low-contrast text gets ignored. Common examples include hiding the “unsubscribe” option, using guilt-inducing language (such as, “No, I don’t want to save money”), creating fake urgency with countdown timers, or requiring a phone call to cancel a service.
In the public sector, officials use friction to limit program reach. Sunstein argues that voting provides a clear example: Administrative burdens are intentionally imposed to prevent specific populations from voting, and they’ve historically disenfranchised Black Americans. These barriers have included literacy tests (eventually forbidden by the 1965 Voting Rights Act), voter roll purges, photo identification requirements, and reduced numbers of polling places that create long wait times. These burdens transform sludge from a bureaucratic nuisance into a threat to democracy.
Why Is Sludge a Problem?
Sunstein builds his case against sludge by examining three types of harm it routinely causes. First, sludge wastes enormous amounts of your time and money. Second, it depletes your mental capacity, especially if you’re already struggling with scarcity, and this psychological toll is particularly severe if you’re poor, elderly, sick, or disabled. Third, sludge violates your dignity by making you feel your time doesn’t matter, and it undermines your constitutional rights. Let’s examine each of these types of harm.
Sludge Wastes Your Time and Money
Sunstein argues that the most visible cost of sludge is wasted time, which has real economic value. Americans spend 11.4 billion hours annually on federal paperwork alone. At the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average hourly wage of $27, this represents over $300 billion in annual costs—figures that capture only federal paperwork and the time spent on it, not the psychological costs or opportunities lost because of effort spent dealing with sludge. This means that reducing sludge can generate substantial economic benefits. The TSA PreCheck program illustrates this potential: If five million travelers use the program four times yearly and save 20 minutes per trip, that equals 400 million hours saved annually—over $1 billion in value.
Sunstein reports that the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated how sludge can be reduced when the stakes become clear. US federal agencies eliminated administrative barriers practically overnight. The Department of Agriculture waived in-person interview requirements for food assistance. The Treasury Department reversed a decision that would have required Social Security recipients to file tax returns to receive emergency payments. The Department of Health and Human Services eliminated many paperwork requirements and authorized telehealth services to replace face-to-face visits. These changes helped millions of people access services during an economic crisis, expanding access to critical programs when speed mattered most.
Sludge Depletes Your Mental Capacity
Aside from wasting your time and money, sludge also depletes your cognitive resources. Sunstein emphasizes that you don’t experience these psychological burdens the same way when you’re financially secure as when you’re stressed about losing housing. Research by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir shows that financial scarcity limits your perception, depletes your self-control, and temporarily reduces your intelligence. In experiments, poor people performed as well as wealthy people on intelligence tests when considering a $300 car repair. But, if the same repair cost $3,000, poor people performed worse because figuring out how to find the money was so mentally taxing.
Sunstein explains that traits often attributed to personality—lack of motivation, inability to focus, poor planning—may really reflect bandwidth limitations caused by scarcity. If you’re poor, elderly, busy, sick, or overwhelmed, administrative burdens don’t just waste your time: They deplete the cognitive resources you need to navigate your challenges.
Sludge Violates Your Dignity and Rights
Beyond practical and psychological costs, Sunstein argues that sludge represents an assault on your human dignity. It feels humiliating, not just frustrating, to have to navigate seemingly arbitrary obstacles to exercise your basic rights or access essential services. When you’re applying for food assistance, forms that include warnings about fines and jail time for errors send a message about how the system views you. When you’re struggling with poverty and must provide extensive documentation, travel to multiple offices, and repeatedly prove you deserve help, the process communicates that your need is suspect and your time is worthless.
Sunstein also argues that sludge is a threat to your constitutional rights. He cites the example of abortion access: Requirements include mandatory counseling about fetal pain, mandatory ultrasounds, waiting periods of up to 72 hours, and scripted information designed to discourage the decision to have an abortion. Sunstein acknowledges that whether this sludge constitutes a reasonable intervention or an excessive burden depends on your moral beliefs on this issue, but he emphasizes that when sludge prevents you from exercising constitutional rights, it becomes more than an inconvenience—it’s a crisis of justice.
What Should We Do About Sludge?
Sunstein argues that to reduce the impact sludge has on society, we should shift from making people overcome friction to making systems work automatically. He explains that the first step in reducing sludge is to measure it. Organizations and governments should conduct “sludge audits” to quantify the administrative burdens they impose and confront the reality of what they’re demanding from people.
A sludge audit involves several components: Quantify current burdens by measuring time required, money spent, and steps involved in a process; identify which requirements are unnecessary or excessive; assess whether the benefits of each requirement justify its costs; examine who bears the burden most heavily; and, when possible, make the findings public to create accountability. For example, states could audit the requirements for accessing SNAP benefits, calculate how many hours applicants spend gathering documents and traveling to offices, identify which requirements exclude eligible families, and publish these findings.
After conducting audits to measure existing sludge, Sunstein recommends applying several key principles to reduce it:
1. Use Automatic Enrollment
Sunstein argues that when organizations already have the information needed to determine whether you’re eligible for a benefit or service, they should automatically enroll you rather than requiring you to apply. Switching from opt-in to opt-out helps programs reach the people who need help most because inertia and limited bandwidth mean even small obstacles become insurmountable. For example, automatic enrollment in health insurance can dramatically increase participation: Research on Medicaid shows that when children eligible for benefits through other programs are automatically enrolled rather than requiring separate applications, enrollment increases substantially, and gaps in coverage are reduced.
2. Reuse Information That’s Already Available
Sunstein also argues that organizations should pre-populate forms with data they already have rather than asking you to provide the same information repeatedly. Asking you twice for what they already know wastes your time and creates unnecessary barriers. When government agencies use data they’ve already collected through tax systems, social services, or other programs to automatically fill in application information, they eliminate paperwork while improving accuracy. This approach has been implemented in various contexts, from streamlining benefit renewals to simplifying tax filing processes.
3. Simplify Forms and Reduce Reporting
Organizations should choose the least burdensome method that achieves their goal. For benefit programs, Sunstein recommends requiring annual rather than quarterly reporting to prove continued eligibility. For licenses and certifications, he recommends longer renewal periods. Forms should include only essential questions and use plain language rather than legal jargon. Each additional question and each shorter renewal period creates another barrier to your access. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) achieves 80% participation partly because it requires only a standard tax return, while programs requiring quarterly check-ins or extensive documentation see their participation rates drop.
4. Make Sludge Creators Justify the Burden
Sunstein argues that the default position should be against creating friction—those who add requirements should have to prove the benefits outweigh the costs. When agencies propose new paperwork, they should explain why the information is necessary and why simpler alternatives won’t work, and people should have the legal right to challenge unjustified obstacles. According to Sunstein, the burden of justification should belong with sludge creators, not with people trying to access services, and every administrative requirement should be judged by its impact on those least able to bear it—the poor, elderly, sick, disabled, and busy caregivers who have the least bandwidth to overcome obstacles.
Sunstein also recommends establishing mechanisms that require ongoing assessment of burdens and provide consequences for excessive friction. These mechanisms would include government agency reviews that presume against new burdens, periodic reviews of existing requirements to determine if they’re still necessary, public reporting of how much burden institutions impose, and legal rights allowing people to challenge arbitrary obstacles. Without oversight, institutions face no consequences for imposing excessive burdens on you. Courts should invalidate requirements that cannot be justified by legitimate reasons.
5. Require Leadership Commitment
Bureaucracies won’t reduce sludge without clear direction from the top, yet Sunstein reports that no US president has ever made paperwork reduction a sustained priority. He contends that we can only drive lasting change in the amount of sludge that Americans encounter if our leaders make it a genuine priority. In 2012, when Sunstein led the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, high-burden federal agencies were directed to eliminate at least two million annual burden hours. But the absence of ongoing presidential commitment meant these reductions weren’t sustained or expanded.
