Are We the Welfare Office? Managing Administrative Burden in a Guaranteed-Income Pilot

Despite increased attention to the phenomenon of administrative burdens, we know less about efforts to minimize these burdens, particularly how those efforts affect frontline staff. This article addresses the gap by analyzing documents gathered and generated by the authors as they implemented a guaranteed-income pilot in Ann Arbor, Michigan, intentionally designed to lessen administrative burdens on applicants. The findings highlight the challenges of putting burden-reducing practices into place and the tensions that emerge, including those between reducing administrative burdens and being accountable for the spending of public dollars. Moreover, we contribute to the literature on administrative burden by uncovering an additional role that administrative burdens can serve—namely, as a device to protect an organization’s professional reputation.