Federal rules entitle the most desperate households to food assistance within seven days of applying. Here is how the government says it: “You may be eligible to receive SNAP benefits within 7 days of your application date if you meet additional requirements. For example, if your household has less than $100 in liquid resources and $150 in monthly gross income, or if your household’s combined monthly gross income and liquid resources are less than what you pay each month for rent or mortgage and utilities expenses.” What a person in crisis needs to know: If you have almost nothing and cannot cover your rent, you can get food help this week. The information was there, but language made it inaccessible.
At a moment when public trust in federal institutions has reached historic lows, state and local governments hold something genuinely valuable: proximity. People can walk into their city hall. They know which building to go to, which number to call, which official made the promise. But most governments squander that proximity by communicating the same way Washington does.
Federal grants account for roughly a third of total state funding and more than half of state health-care spending. As that money moves, the work of explaining what changes, what disappears and what comes next falls to governors, mayors, county executives and program administrators at precisely the moment residents most need someone to speak to them plainly.
This is not a new problem. The federal government has tried to fix it for half a century. President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order in 1978 requiring regulations to be written in plain English. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, revoked it within 30 days of taking office. Bill Clinton issued a presidential language memo in 1998 with hard compliance deadlines. George W. Bush let it expire. Congress passed the Plain Writing Act in 2010, but wrote in an explicit bar on judicial review and excluded formal regulations entirely, rendering it essentially meaningless.
The Center for Plain Language has graded federal agency writing annually since 2012, evaluating compliance with the Plain Language Act; the average has never exceeded B-. A 2024 MIT study analyzing 225 million words of federal legislation found that legal complexity has not meaningfully declined since reform efforts began.
The reason is not ignorance of the solution. Bureaucratic language was never accidental. For decades, federal funding has demanded outcome frameworks, evidence hierarchies and cross-sector coordination language. Agencies became fluent in that register not because it served the public but because it satisfied grant reviewers. That vocabulary migrated from program officers to press releases, budget announcements and public notices. No agency decided this was a good idea. It accumulated, one passive construction at a time, until the language of public obligation became indistinguishable from the language of institutional management.
The pattern holds across programs and levels of government. State ballot measures between 2017 and 2023 averaged a readability level requiring roughly 18 years of education. Medicaid enrollment forms have consistently tested between the 11th- and 18th-grade reading levels, in a program whose enrollees read at a fifth-grade level on average. Public health guidance during COVID-19 averaged an 11th-grade reading level across 137 federal and state sources, well above the eighth-grade standard the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends. During the post-pandemic Medicaid unwinding, roughly 72 percent of enrollees did not know that states were permitted to disenroll them. Millions lost coverage for procedural reasons rather than true ineligibility. At that point, it is no longer administrative inefficiency. It is a failure of democratic accountability.
The returns on doing this differently are documented. When Washington state rewrote a single tax letter in plain language in 2003, compliance tripled, netting $800,000 in new revenue, roughly a dollar for every penny spent. A randomized study of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) outreach in Pennsylvania between 2015 and 2019 found that simplified mailings nearly doubled enrollment; adding application assistance tripled it. Clarity is not a civic virtue disconnected from performance. It is among the highest-return, lowest-cost investments available to government.
What makes the current moment different from previous calls for plain-language reform is scale. The federal government has not simply communicated poorly; it has largely withdrawn from the work of explaining what its programs mean to the people who depend on them. That work has to go somewhere. More than ever, states, cities and counties are being asked to become the primary interpreters of what government means for ordinary people, to translate policy into language that tells residents what has changed, what is gone and what they should do next. A state agency that rewrites its benefit notices, a city that names who a budget cut affects and by when — these are proof points, at a scale where proof is still possible, that government can be trusted to say what it means.
The practical implication is a discipline, not a checklist. Somewhere in the drift toward institutional self-protection, government stopped saying what it would do and started announcing what was available. That shift transferred accountability from institutions to individuals. Reversing it is not merely a transparency exercise; it is the minimum a government owes the people whose lives its decisions touch.
State and local governments cannot reverse the federal pullback. But they can decide, in this moment, to be the level of government that tells people the truth in language they can use. The trust that creates is not built through policy. It is built sentence by sentence, notice by notice, in the accumulated experience residents have of whether their government speaks to them or past them.
Matt Watkins leads Watkins Public Affairs and is a Fellow with the Change Collective. He also writes the monthly “Watch Your Language” column for The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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