DONALD TRUMP HAS BEEN TRYING for months now to shrink the number of Americans who can vote. So far his efforts have been in vain, but this might be the week he succeeds.

The SAVE Act that Trump is pushing is not simply a voter ID bill. It’s part of his administration’s larger drive to make government interactions as frustrating, time-consuming, and clunky as possible—with the end goal of netting financial or political gain for Trump, his family, his friends, and his enablers.

For instance, the SAVE Act would require would-be voters to present a birth certificate or passport to prove their citizenship. People who don’t have such documents would have to figure out how to get and pay for them. That could include, among others, those born at home or in other countries, and anyone who has changed their name—such as the vast majority of married women.

As someone who recently spent weeks trying to locate birth certificates and other documents for parents born nearly a century ago, I can relate. Notably, every step of every process has been easier because I didn’t change my name when I got married.

Still, I needed two birth certificates and so did my brothers and father. That’s because he changed our family name when we were kids. My mother would have needed three, for her birth name, her married name, and her new married name. If the SAVE Act had been in place, those documents would have been required to prove her citizenship and re-register to vote each time she changed her name or the five times she moved.

And trust me, she would have wanted to make sure she could vote. You might call voting my family’s religion. My mother voted in 2024 and listened to political news until just a few weeks before she died this month at nearly 97.

All of which is to say, the SAVE Act is deceptively complicated and would guarantee fewer voters if it passed. The only questions are how many voters and which party would be hurt more. Trump & co. seem certain it would help Republicans, and that’s completely possible.

On the other hand, are lower-income, less-educated voters less likely to have passports? Which party’s women are more likely to change their names when they marry? Will rural voters be close enough to the right offices to get the right documents? Which age group will be more motivated?

Nobody knows for sure, but it seems at least possible that the SAVE Act—which has passed the House and could come up for a Senate vote soon—would keep some prospective Republican voters at home. What’s certain is that the broader project—of continually adding weight to the administrative burden in ways that penalize people who struggle with it and give up—has a bright future in this administration.

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‘Savings’ that cut off food and care

The latest headline to set me off was this one from Nathan Tankus’s “Notes on the Crises” newsletter: “BREAKING: HUD is Planning on Hobbling Federal Financial Assistance for Housing by Burying it in Paperwork.” The idea is to “create enormous and duplicative reporting requirement burdens and subject HUD grants to unprecedented centralized control by the federal government.” The collateral damage, beyond high costs and potentially erroneous AI fraud findings, could include exposure of sensitive personal information.

There are plenty more examples of this sort of thing. Last year’s big tax-and-spending law (the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”) added work as a condition of Medicaid and nutrition aid, with onerous reporting requirements that guaranteed many actual workers would quit trying and lose benefits. The GOP goal was to save hundreds of billions of dollars.

And it’s working, in a way. The New York Times recently wrote up Arizona as a cautionary preview of the law’s crackdown on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The state feared that errors could trigger new financial penalties stiff enough to shut down its whole program. So it cut staff to save money and increased paperwork for applicants to try to minimize errors.

The upshot is that some 440,000 people—half the state’s caseload—lost their food aid, though many were still eligible for it, and services collapsed. The opening horror story alone, about a grandmother raising three teenagers, recounts several months waiting for a renewal, a hundred phone calls no one answered, the case closed over a mistaken document, no time to fix it because of the state’s delay, and, now, four months into an appeal.

The Medicaid requirements don’t kick in until 2027, after the midterm elections. It’s a strategic choice that’s hopefully fooling few people. Most people on Medicaid already work and we know from research and real life that work requirements push people off coverage in droves. That puts their health, productivity, and the hospitals they use at risk. Most administrations would think that’s a bad thing. But not this one. Its view of paperwork and conditions is the more, the better, and real-life consequences be damned.

Trump is taking us backward

The former Soviet republic of Estonia jumped into my brain when I saw that housing headline. I blame a book I helped edit eleven years ago about digital government.

Estonia was the first European country to adopt online voting, William D. Eggers wrote in that 2016 book, Delivering on Digital. Estonian citizens “can register a new company online and, in less time than it takes to finish a cup of coffee, start conducting business.” Every citizen has “a unique online identity” for interacting with their government. They never have to fill out the same information twice, they control who can view their data, and public officials can go to jail if they view it without permission. Oh, and “it takes only five minutes to file Estonian taxes online.”

That’s now down to three minutes, according to the Estonian agency that promotes innovation in government. The agency’s website also boasts that all public services in the country are available online 24/7, providing “a hassle-free environment for businesses and residents alike.”¹

It is true that Estonia is small, with a population of just 1.3 million, which makes it somewhat easier to roll out certain high-tech government services. In addition, Estonia had the advantage of standing up a newly independent government in the 1990s as the internet and personal computers took off.

The size and scale of the United States make everything more complicated and expensive, especially replacing cumbersome legacy systems with more efficient and secure technology. But that doesn’t account for Trump and his teams reversing gains that have been made in some areas, while adding paperwork and regulations openly intended to reduce access to government programs. The goal isn’t programs that work well, it’s to save money for their priorities—military interventions, tax breaks for rich people and corporations, and immigration dragnets, deportations, and detentions.

Our self-owns are real and beyond depressing. Estonians have been able to pay taxes online since 2000. The United States was just getting there last year with IRS Direct File, a Biden-era pilot program that consumers adored. The free program saved users substantial time and money, but Trump killed it after lobbying by tax-prep and software companies.

On top of that, by mid-2025, Elon Musk’s disastrous, Trump-approved DOGE crew had forced out 31 percent of the auditors needed to ensure the richest people and corporations in America, with the most sophisticated ways to evade taxes, weren’t nudged or hounded to pay up. A year later, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire—and the IRS, unable to cope with its workload after getting rid of 28,000 employees last year, received accelerated hiring authority to quickly bring on 8,000 people.

But the cutbacks had already helped protect tax evaders and tax preparers. To Trump and his tech and MAGA cronies, “reinventing government” means maximizing profit for themselves and people like them, while making it maximally punitive and exhausting for everyone else.

Don Moynihan and Pamela Herd, writing in the “Can We Still Govern?” newsletter, had a darkly funny take last fall on administrative burdens in the private and public sectors. They boosted the idea of “Admin Night” parties for people to gather and do their paperwork, floated the problem as ripe for collective action—a “politics of burden reduction”—and suggested giving credit “to politicians who commit to making things work better.”

Trump and his allies are not those people, and this won’t take off while he’s president. But close your eyes and think of Estonia. If they can do it, surely we can, too.