Lower-income New Yorkers are all too familiar with the burden of filling out endless reams of paperwork. Worried you won’t be able to feed your family? There’s a lengthy application for that. Need emergency cash or a housing voucher? There’s a stack of paperwork for that.
These processes take hours of precious time, continuous follow-up with agencies, and can take weeks or months before benefits are secured. But there’s an easy way to alleviate part of this burden — the government must automatically enroll eligible individuals in public benefit programs.
In her new book “The Time Tax,” The Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey explores this exact phenomenon — the vast bureaucracy established to access benefits or government services, from filing tax refunds to applying for food stamps. She calls the mental, emotional, and administrative burden tied to these onerous processes the “time tax,” something overwhelmingly levied on low-income Black and Brown Americans.
Much of this burden is justified as fraud prevention. But the math doesn’t support that: insurance companies and large-scale business fraud account for the greatest losses to public systems, not individual applicants, Lowrey notes. The notion of adding restrictions in our modern administrative state is a concept rooted in anti-Black racism as Congress added carveouts for government programs like Social Security to ensure Black Americans did not receive benefits.
Since entering office, I’ve advocated for policies that make it easier for New Yorkers to access the benefits and services they deserve. If we create a brand new program that folks are told will benefit them but they can’t access it, our constituents have no reason to trust their government.
We can implement a solution that will cut down on the time tax and bolster access: automatic enrollment.
Under automatic enrollment, the government would use the data it has to fill out any relevant paperwork for you and simply require your signature before enrolling you in a program.
The City Council just passed my bill to do this for one city-established benefit program, Fair Fares, which provides half-priced transit for eligible low-income New Yorkers. This bill will ensure anyone who applies for benefits like food stamps or cash assistance have a streamlined application and do not have to submit a brand new application or duplicate information. Any information the city doesn’t have, like your tax filings, it can request from the relevant state agency.
Reducing bureaucracy will require the city to create a new process that completes forms on behalf of New Yorkers and secures their consent prior to enrolling them. Fully implementing automatic enrollment will also require the city to work with relevant state agencies to agree on terms to share personal data and abide by strong privacy protections. These are meaningful challenges, but they are workable ones. With continued leadership from the mayor, governor, and their respective agencies, we can make automatic enrollment a reality.
Less paperwork means New Yorkers have more time to dedicate to their families, jobs, passions, and personal lives. It means the people who are meant to receive benefits but may be unaware of them or unable to find the time to fill out paperwork can receive them. And it means greater trust in our government.
Let’s cut down on the paperwork and begin a new client-centered era of benefit administration, one marked by automatic enrollment.
Hudson represents Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, and Crown Heights in the City Council.