Due to COVID-19, new rules forced public servants to work remotely, or under strict guidelines at the office. While these rules were necessary from a societal perspective, from a public servant’s perspective they also created a compliance burden and sense of limited flexibility to be able to do the work properly. New rules, for example, obliged public servants to develop impersonal remote citizens interactions, but also challenged task and goal clarity due to remote working. Rules that are perceived to entail a high compliance burden ánd lack of functionality are known as red tape. This is one of the most often studied phenomena in public administration (PA). Although red tape as a job demand is often related to lower public servants’ wellbeing and performance, the topic of COVID-19 related red tape and its consequences has not been studied yet. The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised many questions about the negative consequences of new job demands (such as COVID-19 related red tape) for wellbeing and performance and how these can be prevented. Scholars argue that supervisor support might be one of the most important resources for public servants to cope with these demands. Moreover, they also argue that public servants themselves need to find ways to deal with COVID-19 demands. Several scholar therefore call for research focused on how employees can overcome negative consequences of COVID-19 for wellbeing and performance. To answer the call, this study builds on the Job Demands-Resources model which is increasingly used in PA to study the health-impairment process of red tape, through wellbeing on performance. According to JD-R scholars there are two main strategies to overcome health-impairment: through coping by usage of job resources such as supervisor support, and/or through recovering strategies, including work detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control. However, the effects of these strategies to overcome COVID-19 related red tape is unknown. This article will therefore study the effects of these two strategies. Our study will answer the following questions: What is the relationship between public servants’ perceived COVID-19 related red tape through wellbeing on their perceived performance? And To what extent do coping strategies (through supervisor support) and recovering strategies (through work detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control) moderate this health-impairment process? Based on structural moderated mediation analyses of data collected from 3,332 Dutch public servants in December 2021 two conclusions can be drawn. First, COVID-19 red tape might be seen as a particular type of red tape that was created to deal with the quickly changing working conditions. Consequently the results show that this type of red tape might actually be fairly helpful in handling change and it might even stimulate public servants to go the extra mile in their work to make up for the inefficiencies of the red tape. Second, recovery strategies are more effective than coping strategies to deal with the negative consequence of perceived COVID-19 red tape.