PDF Summary:Sludge, by Cass Sunstein

Have you ever abandoned filling out a complicated application, given up on an important call after spending hours on hold, or skipped voting because the line was too long? That’s sludge—the administrative friction that separates you from what you need. In Sludge, Cass Sunstein reveals how bureaucratic obstacles waste billions of hours, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and harm the most vulnerable people. He argues that most sludge isn’t inevitable—it’s a design choice.

Our guide helps you recognize sludge, understand why people struggle to overcome it, and learn what we can do to reduce how much sludge people slog through to get what they need. We’ll also examine the questions Sunstein leaves open: Can his recommendations work when those creating sludge benefit from it? Does making government assistance easier to access sidestep harder questions about why so many people need it? And when political leaders can’t agree on basic governing, can they sustain the commitment such reforms would require?

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(Shortform note: A regulatory movement has emerged to combat dark patterns. California banned dark patterns related to data privacy in 2021, and in 2022 the Federal Trade Commission fined phone service provider Vonage $100 million for using dark patterns in its cancellation processes. Research shows dark patterns are a growing consumer protection issue: A European Union report found 97% of popular websites and apps used at least one dark pattern, and these manipulative designs don’t affect everyone equally. People new to technology or using software in a secondary language are disproportionately vulnerable and more likely to make choices inconsistent with their preferences when exposed to dark patterns.)

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 Administrative Barriers Work to Change Election Outcomes

When politicians weaponize sludge to undermine voting rights, they restrict who can vote—but in ways that courts and the public may tolerate. Unlike overt disenfranchisement, modern voter suppression operates through bureaucratic complexity that makes it harder for some people to vote. This proves effective at reducing turnout: When Texas rejected thousands of mail ballot requests in 2022 under a law that added identification requirements, voters whose ballots were rejected were 16% less likely to vote in the next election. They remained less likely to participate two years later, showing a compounding effect where voter suppression in one election reduces turnout in subsequent elections.

The electoral math shows why politicians invest in these tactics. Small amounts of voter suppression may have minimal impact when districts aren’t competitive: It has to affect enough voters to overcome the margin of victory, but as suppression increases in scope or becomes concentrated in specific geographic areas, its effects accelerate. Research on US House elections showed that blocking a small percentage of one party’s voters produces little change. But once the percentage of affected voters crosses certain thresholds, it triggers cascading losses as multiple close districts flip. This means voter suppression can prove decisive in close statewide contests and help predetermine election outcomes.

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. In this section, we’ll 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.

(Shortform note: The time saved with TSA PreCheck varies by airport, terminal, and time of day, and several factors complicate the program’s value for travelers. PreCheck costs $85 for five years of membership, making airport security a two-tiered economic system. It also requires travelers to submit fingerprints and biographical data to be shared with the FBI and stored indefinitely, a significant privacy tradeoff. Meanwhile, experts argue the entire airport security apparatus fails to meaningfully reduce the risk of terrorism while wasting billions of dollars and millions of hours. This raises the question of whether we should reduce friction within this system—or reconsider whether the system justifies its costs in the first place.)

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.

Why the Political Will for Sludge Reduction Is Selective

The selective political will to reduce sludge reflects deeper psychological patterns in how we make sense of our economic system. According to system justification theory, we’re motivated to defend existing economic and political arrangements to reduce anxiety about the status quo. In the American economy, this manifests as beliefs that economic outcomes reflect individual merit and effort—that those who succeed deserve their success, and those who struggle bear responsibility for their circumstances. This means that many Americans view cash assistance programs as providing “a substitute for work.” Middle-class Americans express particular resentment toward people who receive this assistance.

The Covid-19 pandemic temporarily disrupted this pattern: When the normal economic system was suspended and many people couldn’t work, the motivation to justify the status quo weakened. As Sunstein notes, stimulus checks went out, unemployment benefits were expanded, and Medicaid coverage became easier to access. Because of these changes, child poverty fell to historic lows, health insurance coverage reached record levels, and employment recovered faster than after previous recessions. People could accept that assistance was needed without it challenging their beliefs about deservingness because the crisis made clear that individual effort couldn’t overcome structural barriers.

Yet once the crisis passed, legislators reduced spending from $3.5 trillion to $500 billion and stripped most safety net expansions despite polls showing that a majority of Americans favored increased government spending on education (65%), health care (63%), Social Security (62%), and assistance to the poor (59%). System justification theory helps explain this disconnect: To make pandemic-era funding increases permanent, the voting public would have to confront their uncertainty about change and take on the effort of political mobilization. As the economy stabilized, it became easier to accept the restoration of the status quo than to fight for a different system, even one people had seemed to prefer.

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.

The Bandwidth Problem and the Case for Universal Basic Income

Mullainathan and Shafir’s research, documented in Scarcity, reveals what happens when financial stress depletes your mental resources. They found that when you’re managing any form of scarcity, your brain focuses on immediate crises at the expense of long-term planning. People on restrictive diets become hyperaware of food, but worse at other tasks. The poor become adept at stretching dollars but lose capacity for everything else. This tunneling effect explains decisions that often get blamed on flaws in someone’s values, personality, or intelligence: Scarcity consumes the mental bandwidth needed for good decision-making.

This insight has led some observers to argue that universal basic income is a pragmatic solution to helping people get out of poverty. If scarcity depletes cognitive capacity, then providing everyone with enough money to meet their basic needs would restore the mental bandwidth currently consumed by financial stress. For example, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes argues that removing this cognitive drain would enable people to make better decisions for themselves and society as a whole. But critics note we don’t yet know how universal basic income could affect incentives, labor markets, and companies’ behavior—and finding out would require running an experiment at the scale of an entire economy.

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.

When Accessing Health Care Requires Proving You’re Worthy

When Sunstein discusses abortion restrictions, he’s describing the legal landscape under Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which allowed states to try to persuade people to choose childbirth as long as they didn’t create “substantial obstacles” to abortion. Legal scholars argue that requirements like mandatory counseling and waiting periods were meant to make people “earn” their abortions by proving their reasons were good enough, and that this violates their dignity by treating a person’s decision as suspect: requiring them to justify their choice to the state and forcing them to navigate obstacles designed to discourage them. But since Sunstein’s book was published, the constitutional landscape has shifted.

The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision eliminated constitutional protection for abortion, and as of 2025, 12 states ban abortion in almost all circumstances. These bans theoretically include exceptions—for the life of the pregnant person, rape, or fatal fetal anomalies—but doctors say the exceptions are so vague that they must watch patients’ health deteriorate until they’re clearly sick enough to qualify. Rape exceptions require police reports, barring many survivors from care. This intensifies both harms Sunstein identified: The dignity violation deepens (now you must prove you’ll die if you can’t access an abortion), and what was once a constitutional right has become unavailable for those who lack the resources to navigate barriers or travel for care.

Sunstein’s abortion example also reveals something broader about American health care: To gain access, you must justify your worthiness—having the right job to get insurance, or proving you really need a treatment—which sorts people into those “deserving” and “undeserving” of care. Some doctors see health care as a basic right, but the US has never decided whether health care is something owed to citizens. Research shows what Americans do agree on: They want the rules to apply to everyone. When health care access varies based on job, state, and income, it may create skepticism that the government can fairly administer universal programs, making the reforms that would eliminate sludge difficult to establish.

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.

(Shortform note: Critics argue Sunstein’s approach—measure sludge, then optimize it—might make unjust systems more politically sustainable rather than prompting us to question them. For example, even if such an audit were to help the government streamline SNAP paperwork, it would reinforce the implicit assumption that such paperwork is necessary at all—that people must prove they deserve food assistance rather than addressing the issue of why full-time workers can’t afford groceries.)

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.

The Privacy Tradeoff in Automatic Systems

Both automatic enrollment and pre-populated forms create a privacy tradeoff: They require organizations to collect comprehensive data about you to eliminate friction. A cognitive bias helps explain why people trade privacy for small conveniences even when they genuinely care about how their information is used: Researchers have found that we accept this exchange (and undervalue privacy protection) due to hyperbolic discounting—our tendency to overweight immediate benefits and underweight future costs. The time savings of automatic enrollment or pre-populated forms feel more immediate and concrete than the abstract risks you might experience later if your data is misused.

The data systems that enable automatic enrollment and pre-populated forms also create infrastructure that agencies can use for other purposes, including identity verification, that worry scholars. Research from Georgetown University’s Digital Benefits Network found that 22 state unemployment agencies now require facial recognition technology for identity verification, a recent development that creates biometric records, raises privacy concerns, and can create new barriers to access. This illustrates a tension: The data infrastructure required for systems to reduce friction can generate new burdens that offset those gains.

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.

Is Simplicity Enough If Eligibility Is Narrow?

Sunstein uses EITC’s 80% participation rate as evidence that simple forms expand access. But this raises the question: 80% of whom? The EITC achieves high participation among those eligible, but eligibility is restricted. Workers under 25 and over 64 without children are excluded, and the credit for childless workers aged 25-64 is so small (just $632 in 2024) that it doesn’t offset the payroll and income taxes they owe, meaning their after-tax income falls below the poverty line even though their pre-tax income was above it. More than 7 million childless adults end up poorer after taxes because the EITC provides them almost no relief.

When Congress temporarily expanded eligibility in 2021—tripling the credit and including younger workers—it reduced housing hardship by 28% among young adults who became newly eligible. However, like many other benefits that were enacted because of Covid-19, this expansion soon expired. Meanwhile, the “success” of the EITC illustrates how high participation among an intentionally narrow population may look like a win for sludge reduction, but obscures that the program’s design limits its reach.

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.

What If Proving Eligibility Is the Problem?

Sunstein contends that those who create administrative burdens in benefits programs should have to justify them, but some experts argue that the real problem is the structure of the programs themselves. Many government benefits use means-testing: the practice of determining who qualifies for help based on income, assets, or other measures of financial need. Some political economists argue that means-testing is just taxation applied at the point of benefit distribution rather than income collection, making it administratively wasteful while excluding many eligible recipients.

The alternative would be universal programs that provide benefits to everyone regardless of income. Research suggests it’s cheaper to offer universal benefits than means-tested ones because you eliminate the need for the verification processes, oversight mechanisms, and legal challenges Sunstein recommends. If there’s no eligibility threshold to meet, there’s no application sludge.

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.

Leadership Commitment Requires Political Consensus

Sunstein’s assertion that no US president has made sludge reduction a sustained priority reflects deep challenges in modern American governance. Political scientists point to a basic tension: Democracy requires both conflict and consensus to function effectively, yet the US political system has become increasingly polarized, with Democrats and Republicans farther apart ideologically than at any point in the last 50 years.

The consequences extend beyond legislative gridlock: Legislative paralysis creates a particular problem for sludge reduction. Congress has historically avoided making difficult decisions by passing legislation with broad goals, then delegating the hard tradeoffs to regulatory agencies—the very institutions where most sludge originates.

When the Supreme Court struck down the policy of letting regulatory agencies make these decisions and passed the buck back to Congress, legislators showed little interest in reclaiming this responsibility.