New Research: Balancing the Practical Ethics of Sludge in Government Customer Experience

Earlier this month, standing under blue skies and the St. Louis Arch before presenting my government CX research at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Conference, I found myself thinking about the long arc of CX in government.

It’s been 14 years since I first stepped into the VP of CX role at EXIM Bank, back when few public sector CX leadership roles existed.

Since then, one truth has stayed consistent across my CX consulting and research:

We often underestimate the practical, ethical tradeoffs government administrative leaders navigate every day in developing and running agency programs. They’re constantly balancing what’s best for the people they serve with resource constraints and taxpayer interests.

Sludge often sits at the center of those decisions, shaping customer experience, even if no one ever sayas the words "sludge," or its related terms, "administrative burden," or "red tape."

The study I presented at the APPE conference grew out of that reality. I analyzed 37 federal agencies’ 2025 CX improvement plans to understand what kinds of sludge leaders were trying to reduce and how. The results concretized exactly what leaders planned to work on, and the techniques they planned to deploy: customer feedback, pilot projects, and cross‑agency collaborations.

Public sector customer experience professionals seem to have always known this, anecdotally, but now the evidence is crystallized, and we know more about the specialized skills neeeded to make change happen.

So often, pushback in CX practice comes from internal forces that believe CX is about regulatory simplification. But what I found was that none of the CX improvement plans entailed rewriting program rules, laws, or overhauling programs.

If there’s one idea I hope sticks from the research, it’s that sludge isn’t necessarily an immovable force. It’s a practical problem with practical solutions. Safeguards can be respected while improving customer experience. While tensions persist in government CX, so do the possibilities.

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