Administrative overload and policy triage: causal evidence from the introduction of the Acid Rain Program in the United States

Abstract Recent research suggests that additional public policies can sometimes decrease overall policy effectiveness rather than improve the problem-solving capacity of the state. This occurs when new policies are not supported by additional administrative capacities, leading to an overburdened administration. Public authorities handle the increased workload by employing “policy triage,” which involves reallocating resources among different policies. Despite this straightforward argument, a systematic understanding of these dynamics is lacking in the existing literature. This paper addresses this by examining the US Environmental Protection Agency’s introduction of the Acid Rain Program. Utilizing a difference-in-differences analysis, it reveals a significant reduction in inspections for industrial sites not covered by the Acid Rain Program as administrators redirected enforcement efforts. These findings, robust against various alternative explanations, highlight the inherent trade-offs in the public sector when policy and administrative expansions are not considered together. To assess broader relevance, we complement our analysis with twenty-eight interviews in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, showing that policy triage is a common response to administrative overload across diverse institutional contexts.