Stop Printing Government Forms — $3,543,085,000 a Year

Putting every government form online would save an estimated $3,543,085,000 a year. That count covers only 3 agencies: the IRS, immigration (USCIS), and Social Security. The rest of the federal government is not counted. So the real total is higher.

The government should stop printing forms. Every form a person has to fill out or sign should be online — fillable and signable from home, in 1 sitting, through DocuSign or the government's own system like it. No printer. No envelope. No mail.

Here is where the money goes. The Treasury Department counted 201,000,000 paper documents a year at the IRS alone: 76,000,000 paper returns and forms, plus 125,000,000 letters, responses, and non-tax forms. The government's own watchdog priced paper handling at up to $14.85 extra per document. USCIS spent $396,000,000 in 2025 running paper lockboxes — facilities that open envelopes and scan paper — plus $10,860,000 on postage. Its own department says going online can erase nearly all of that. The IRS pays $40,000,000 a year just to store paper: more than 1,000,000,000 old documents sitting in warehouses. Social Security's top 10 signed paper forms alone take in 7,500,000 submissions a year. Add it up, and 3 agencies burn $3,543,085,000 a year on paper. That is the floor, not the ceiling.

It is slower, and it makes more mistakes. A stamp costs $0.82 in 2026, and a signed form rides the mail 2 times — out and back. That is days each way before anyone reads it. Then a mailroom. Then a worker typing it in by hand. Typing by hand makes about 10 times as many errors as electronic filing, by the IRS watchdog's count. USCIS rejected more than 1,000,000 paper requests in 2025, and 25% of those rejections were fee mistakes that an online form catches before the form is ever sent. An online form is done in minutes, and the agency has it the moment it is sent. It checks itself as you go: a blank box is flagged, a number that does not add up is flagged, and it cannot go in unsigned.

This should have been done before COVID. A 2018 law — the 21st Century IDEA Act — gave federal agencies 2 years to put every public paper form online. Then offices closed, and paper stopped cold. Passport applications are paper forms, mailed in. By June 2020, 1,800,000 of them sat piled up, unprocessed. In 2021, passport service by mail took up to 18 weeks, against 6 to 8 weeks before COVID. Online systems never closed. Paper did.

Paper also costs the environment, counted by weight. The 3 counted agencies take in 1,287,000,000 sheets of paper a year. USCIS lockboxes alone handled 453,000,000 pages in 2025. By weight, that is 6,435 tons of paper — 154,440 trees a year. Making that paper puts out 51,158 tons of carbon dioxide a year, by the EPA's own model. Then trucks haul the forms out and haul them back: 1,351 more tons of carbon dioxide a year, just moving paper through the mail. Total: 52,509 tons a year, to move paper that a link could replace.

The people paper shuts out are the people who can least afford it. A person with no printer cannot print the form. A person with a disability may not reach an office or a mailbox easily. A person far from the capital cannot just stop by.

South Carolina shows the fix is already paid for at the state level. The state holds a statewide DocuSign contract — contract 4400038445, worth $2,000,000, running 2026 to 2031 — and the state's own price list puts a signed form at $2 to $4. Yet this month, 2 South Carolina agencies are mailing paper forms, with return envelopes, to a resident who has no way to fill out and sign their forms online. His cases wait on the mail, in both directions, for want of a link. The tool is bought. The forms just are not on it.

So here is the ask, at every level of government: put every form people must fill out or sign online, and make it signable on the spot. Start with the highest-volume forms. Count the savings agency by agency — processing, postage, storage, staff hours, days cut off each case — and publish the numbers. The count already says $3,543,085,000 a year is on the table, before anyone counts the other agencies, the states, the paper, or the trees.

Thank you