Red tape Informal

Excessive, rigid bureaucratic procedure or regulation that slows down or obstructs a process without adding real value.

It’s almost always used critically, describing frustrating administrative delay rather than genuinely necessary rules.

The phrase comes from an actual physical practice: government and legal offices in England, and later elsewhere in Europe, bound official documents and legal bundles with a strip of red cloth tape from at least the seventeenth century onward, a custom still occasionally used for certain formal documents today. Untying and retying this literal red tape to access or refile a document became a small but real symbol of bureaucratic process, and the figurative sense of “red tape” for excessive procedure is documented in English by the early nineteenth century, closely associated at first with legal and governmental administration before broadening to any organization, public or private, seen as slowed down by unnecessary formal process.

It took months to get the permit because of all the red tape.

Cutting red tape is one of the main promises of the new administration.

The startup got tangled up in red tape trying to register in three countries.

A: Why is this taking so long? B: Just red tape, unfortunately.