Description:

Please join the American Politics Workshop as they host Jae Yeon Kim, assistant research scientist at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and incoming assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Federal policymakers have urged the use of human-centered design to reduce administrative burdens in policy implementation. In this study, we describe the potential of human-centered design principles to identify burdens, reducing the effects of what we label as administrative checkpoints. Administrative checkpoints - mandatory requirements that must be satisfied in order to progress in an administrative process - have disproportionate negative effects in excluding the public from receiving public services. Mandatory interviews are one such checkpoint. Based on consultation with safety net clients and caseworkers, we designed a field experiment (N=1,554) to minimize the exclusionary effects of mandatory interviews for SNAP applicants. Compared to a control group that received a traditional mailer reminder, SNAP applicants who also received texts reminding them of the interview and communicating flexible “interview anytime” scheduling options had a higher interview completion rate by 10 percentage points, a higher benefit-approval rate by 6 to 7 percentage points, and also completed interviews 3-4 days sooner. Follow-up surveys show that the text reminders reduced learning costs about the interview requirement and processes.

Jae Yeon Kim is an assistant research scientist at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Kim is also a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a fellow at the Better Government Lab at Georgetown’s McCourt School and Michigan’s Ford School. Starting January 2026, Jae Yeon Kim will join The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill as an assistant professor of public policy. Kim is a computational political scientist focusing on urban, social, and tech policy in the United States. Specifically, Jae Yeon uses computational approaches to study (1) state capacity in policy implementation and (2) civic capacity in offline and online spaces. His recent projects seek to identify and reduce administrative burdens in U.S. safety net programs. To achieve this goal, Kim utilizes human-centered design, field experimentation, and surveys, collaborating with state and local governments and nonprofits.