“Every interaction that a person has with their government, whether that’s a traffic stop or going to the D.M.V. or getting access to SNAP — that’s where democracy is happening,” Elizabeth Linos, a behavioral economist at Berkeley, told me. “If we get all of those small interactions right, then we have created a society where the government is responsive to its citizens, and citizens trust that it will deliver when it says it’ll deliver.”Mr. Biden’s executive order notes that it is about both getting people what they need and proving that “democracy still works.” And yet it’s clear his administration has only partly learned its own lessons. Just look at its two approaches to free at-home Covid tests. All Americans can go to a Postal Service website, enter their addresses, and sign up in minutes to receive four free tests per household.But when a household runs out of its four free tests, its members have to wrangle with the other option the administration has set up. Insurers have been ordered to cover eight tests per month for free. That of course leaves out the 27.4 million people without insurance. Even if you have it, if you don’t buy the tests at your insurer’s preferred pharmacy you have to pay up front, hold on to your receipt and maybe even the test box, and submit a claim for reimbursement, then fight to get it processed.There are trade-offs, given which goals are prioritized. Is it most important to reduce the use of government resources? Is it most important to keep the supposedly undeserving from sneaking in? Or is the goal to ensure that as many people who are eligible get the benefits they deserve as soon as possible?It used to be that experts believed those who needed help the most would work the hardest to get it, overcoming any barriers thrown in their way. But that isn’t true. Work requirements, for example, have mostly kept people off welfare and further impoverished them, and when briefly instituted in Arkansas’s Medicaid program, a work requirement kicked people off — many of whom actually qualified — without increasing how many worked.“The pandemic gave us an opportunity to rethink whether or not all of those hurdles were necessary,” Dr. Linos said. More people were made eligible for unemployment insurance. Stimulus checks were sent to most Americans with no strings attached. Rental assistance rules were loosened to get the money flowing faster.The organization Code for America has long been focused on how to make it easier for people to get the benefits they’re eligible for. So when Democrats expanded Child Tax Credit payments, it built a simple site for nonfilers to claim them. The site only sought information the I.R.S. wasn’t able to get itself, like bank account details, and didn’t require people to track down a bunch of documents. The questions were simplified. It was available in Spanish as well as English. Families were able to fill out the form in 10 to 15 minutes and virtually all of them didn’t need help. More than 115,000 households used the website to claim $438 million in less than three months, about a quarter of whom had never filed taxes before.