If youve ever tried to get one of the many benefits offered by the federal government to help people out in need, youve probably run into a thorny problem: time-consuming and often confusing paperwork.

The federal government offers a plethora of benefits designed to help alleviate poverty and help those in dire straits, whether its Medicaid, disability, food assistance, unemployment insurance or any of the thousands of other programs offered from farm loans to disaster relief. But too often, the discovery and application processes are designed not to facilitate enrollment, but rather to hinder those trying to sign up.

Fewer than 50% of those eligible for Medicaid are signed up for it. More than half of those potentially eligible for unemployment insurance in 2022 did not apply because they werent aware they were eligible. And 28% of those eligible for supplemental food assistance colloquially known as food stamps do not receive it. Recent scholarship from academics and government agencies shows that paperwork burdens and informational hurdles impose a real cost on people seeking to access benefits, reducing enrollment, kicking people off of programs theyre eligible for, and making it hard to learn about them in the first place. And these costs perpetuate inequality and poverty.

The Biden administration is finally trying to do something about this .

In an executive order issued in 2021, President Joe Biden directed agencies to reduce burdens and improve customer experience for government benefit programs with the aim of helping everyone who is eligible to be able to access and receive benefits.

Biden is really the first to try to tackle this as a whole in the agencies across the executive branch, said Pamela Herd, an expert on administrative burdens at Georgetown University.

This is part of Bidens hope to restore faith in government by showing that it can work for Americans. Making government work requires doing the big things, like the new industrial policy vision embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, and also the small things, like eliminating barriers people face to get health care or housing or unemployment insurance.

While agencies have been taking on this work for some time, this is the first presidential directive running through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that seeks to make burden reduction a permanent part of the culture of the federal bureaucracy.