States are turning to artificial intelligence to help reduce red tape and cull through redundant or outdated regulations.
South Carolina Rep. Jeff Bradley (R), who chairs an AI committee, recently partnered with Google to use AI to review his state’s Code of Regulations. Ohio, an early AI adopter, started teaming with consulting firm Deloitte in 2020 to deploy an AI tool to comb through the state’s administrative and revised codes looking for overlap.
As governments have increasingly sought to streamline rules and regulations, Republican-led states in particular are starting to view AI as a tool that can assist with that administrative decluttering.
“We’re looking to use this to identify obsolete, duplicative, confusing regulations,” Bradley said in an interview. “We would then look at trying to get rid of them or change them.”
Before AI, British Columbia in the early 2000s thinned its regulations by a third through a program called the Red Tape Reduction Action Program. In 2016, Rhode Island created an Office of Regulatory Reform and subsequently reduced by one-third 25,842 pages of executive agency regulations.
There have been similar efforts in recent years in states including Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Virginia, and now President-elect Trump’s new push for government efficiency.
As momentum builds for regulatory reform, there is an effort to harness AI’s capabilities to help tackle the problem.
“Because the volume of regulations is so big, the ability of a human to look across them all and see duplication is limited. AI doesn’t have that limitation,” said Patrick McLaughlin, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who publishes an annual ranking of the most regulated states in the U.S.
Bradley said he was inspired to see if Google could help South Carolina reduce regulatory redundancy after meeting Chris Hein, Google’s head of engineering for the public sector, at a company-hosted event for lawmakers in Chicago in September. Bradley called Hein after the conference to see if Google could help with the effort. The answer back was “yes.”
“They’re taking our Code of Regulations and they’re using that as a large language model,” Bradley said. “They’re using their Gemini product as the algorithm that they’re putting on top of this language model and then what they’ve done is they’ve built in some predetermined parses.”
Bradley said that at a recent demo the Google team was able to produce a spreadsheet showing the myriad regulations in South Carolina dealing with school absences. His hope is that eventually the AI will be able to produce one-page reports that he can share with his legislative colleagues highlighting specific opportunities to simplify state regulations.
“We are hopeful that maybe we can create a model that other states can use as well,” Bradley said.
In an interview, Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted (R) said Deloitte’s AI tool RegExplorer enabled the state to remove 2.2 million words and rescind nearly 900 rules from administrative code. AI was also used to identify more than 400 instances when the public was required to do state business in-person or through outdated modes, such as using certified mail. Changes were made so that those interactions could happen online or remotely.
“AI is a tool that can really be helpful,” Husted said of the effort to analyze the state’s 16.6-million-word administrative code. “It can do in seconds what it would take human beings days or hours or months to do depending on the task.”
Next, Husted said, will be an effort to harmonize state fire and building codes, then higher education regulations. Husted predicts that Ohio will eventually remove 5 million words, about one-third of the state’s regulatory code.
“We’re not removing safeguards, we’re eliminating the unnecessary,” Husted said, likening the regulatory cleanup to decluttering a 200-year-old house.
Deloitte has touted the project as a model that could be replicated elsewhere.
Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center who wrote the book “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better,” underscored AI’s potential to remove layers of outdated regulations during an event at the National Conference of State Legislatures’s summit this summer in Louisville, Ky.
“That policy cruft has been accumulating for a very, very long time and … it is no longer serving the people in your state. We need to carry that away,” Pahlka told an audience.
“AI is going to help us make sense of all of that complexity,” Pahlka said.