the.com/red tape
the bureaucratic dragon slain only by filling out form 27-B in triplicate
means Excessive bureaucracy and rigid official procedures that delay or obstruct getting anything done.
from Refreshingly literal: from the actual reddish-pink tape once used to bind and tie up official documents and legal bundles in England. Civil servants and lawyers wrapped their dossiers in this ribbon for centuries, so by the early 1700s 'red tape' had come to stand for the whole tedious apparatus of officialdom — and the figurative sense was fully tied up by the 19th century, when writers like Dickens and Carlyle made it a byword for bureaucratic obstruction.
- literal origin
- Spanish kings bound urgent files with red ribbon
- royal habit
- Henry VIII petitioned the Pope on red-taped scrolls
- american adopter
- Civil War veterans' files were tied with red tape
- real cost
- compliance burdens cost trillions globally each year
- color logic
- red made important documents instantly findable in piles
irs tax code — 75,000+ pages of federal regulations requiring accountants to interpret for compliance
fda drug approval process — 10-15 years and $2.6 billion average cost to bring one drug to market in the us
european union gdpr compliance — 888-page regulation requiring businesses to overhaul data practices or face 20 million euro fines