Many quantum information protocols require the implementation of random unitaries. Because it takes exponential resources to produce Haar-random unitaries drawn from the full $n$-qubit group, one often resorts to $t$-designs. Unitary $t$-designs mimic the Haar-measure up to $t$-th moments. It is known that Clifford operations can implement at most $3$-designs. In this work, we quantify the non-Clifford resources required to break this barrier. We find that it suffices to inject $O(t^{4}log^{2}(t)log(1/varepsilon))$ many non-Clifford gates into a polynomial-depth random Clifford circuit to obtain an $varepsilon$-approximate $t$-design. Strikingly, the number of non-Clifford gates required is independent of the system size -- asymptotically, the density of non-Clifford gates is allowed to tend to zero. We also derive novel bounds on the convergence time of random Clifford circuits to the $t$-th moment of the uniform distribution on the Clifford group. Our proofs exploit a recently developed variant of Schur-Weyl duality for the Clifford group, as well as bounds on restricted spectral gaps of averaging operators.
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