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 people held CX roles in the public sector.

Even after leaving EXIM a decade ago, one truth has stayed consistent across my CX consulting and research: It’s easy to underestimate the practical, ethical tradeoffs government agency leadership teams 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 what’s responsible for taxpayers.

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

The independent study I presented at the APPE conference grew out of that reality. I qualitatively deconstructed 146 action items across 37 federal agencies’ 2025 CX improvement plans to understand what kinds of sludge leaders were trying to reduce. That’s all I expected to find, initially.

But what came through just as strongly was how they planned to approach it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. “How do we fix this?” is a question I’ve been asked more times than any other since practicing, consulting, and researching government CX.

Oftentimes, pushback in CX practice comes from internal forces that say, “No! We can’t change the rules!” None of the CX improvement plans in my study entailed overhauling programs or removing program participation rules.

Across agencies, leaders planned to focus on communication barriers with customers, followed by process issues, then inclusivity challenges. Customer feedback, pilot projects, and cross‑agency collaborations topped the “how” list.

For anyone looking for "magic bullet," on the "how" list, sorry, but nope, didn't find that anywhere! Executing the how is extremely hard work.

So often, pushback in CX practice comes from internal forces that say, “No! No CX! We can’t change the rules!” But what I found was that none of the CX improvements agencies had planned entailed rewriting program rules, laws, or overhauling programs.

For me, that’s where the practical ethics became most visible. Addressing sludge requires navigating competing responsibilities with care.

If there’s one idea I hope sticks from the research I presented at the APPE conference, it’s that sludge isn’t necessarily an immovable force. It’s a practical problem with practical solutions. The conversations in St. Louis were a reminder that while tensions persist in government CX, so do the possibilities, far beyond federal silos.

Follow me on LinkedIn here, and see my study's extended abstract and portions of the study here: Link