Alex J. Adams is the assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
What do women’s kickboxing uniforms, a dress code for deputy state veterinarians and an unaired lottery game show have in common?
Until a few years ago, all of them were still regulated by legally binding requirements in Idaho’s state administrative code. These rules were not on the books because they were essential. They were there because no one had gotten around to removing them.
Absurd and antiquated rules such as Idaho’s might be funny if they did not have real consequences.
At one of the first meetings I attended for the Idaho Board of Pharmacy, I heard the story of a business owner who bought an old bank and converted it into a pharmacy. But an inspector blocked it from opening because an exterior door did not comply with a state rule requiring a “solid core” door. Why the new occupant required more security than a bank went unaddressed.
The owner had installed security film on the property’s glass door, providing protection comparable to bulletproof glass. He argued, reasonably, that the rule’s purpose was security and that his solution achieved it. No one on the board could explain why a solid core door had become the required standard in the first place.
This dynamic illustrates how red tape accumulates and persists. Governments have elaborate procedures for creating regulations, guidance and administrative requirements. They have much weaker systems for asking whether those requirements still make sense years later, after technology has changed, programs have disappeared, or circumstances have evolved.
The result is a one-way ratchet: New requirements are added while old ones linger.
But Idaho’s experience shows that the ratchet can be reversed. In 2019, the state changed the presumption governing its administrative code. Instead of assuming every existing rule should remain in force unless proved unnecessary, agencies had to justify rules were still worth keeping.
That initial reset swept away obsolete provisions, stale cross-references, duplicative requirements and other administrative debris. But the more important reform came afterward.
Idaho put the surviving rules on a staggered five-year review schedule. When a rule came up for review, agencies had to ask if it remained legally authorized and necessary, whether evidence supported its efficacy and whether a less burdensome alternative could accomplish the same purpose.
By July 2026, Idaho’s regulatory code was 4,201 pages shorter than its 2018 baseline — a 49 percent reduction.
Nearly half of those cuts were part of the slower process that followed the dramatic initial cleanup. Deliberative review helped clear away requirements that were meaningfully frustrating businesses and suffocating economic growth.
The regulatory state did not grow overnight, and durable reform cannot be achieved through a short-term purge. It requires a management system. The lesson applies in Washington, too.
At the federal Administration for Children and Families, where I now serve, we inherited regulations covering grant programs that had not been funded in decades, references to health systems that no longer existed and other provisions whose usefulness had expired. We have been applying the same zero-based mindset: justify what should remain.
But the federal government presents another challenge. Much of its administrative burden does not stem from formal regulations. Instead, it is found in decades of sub-regulatory guidance: program instructions, technical bulletins, “Dear Colleague” letters and other documents that states and nonprofits are expected to navigate.
When the ACF conducted a comprehensive inventory, we found 4,118 guidance documents totaling 55,776 pages. The earliest active document dated back half a century. For every page of formal ACF regulation, there were more than 61 pages of informal guidance.
Many of those documents had once served legitimate purposes. But many remained part of the administrative landscape for a simple reason: No one was required to decide whether they should remain.
So the ACF applied the same discipline Idaho had used: First, make the inherited body of requirements visible. Then, require a reason for keeping each one.
Program offices reviewed their guidance and identified what remained necessary. The result was the rescission of 74 percent of the agency’s sub-regulatory guidance — 35,781 pages.
Governments everywhere would do well to adopt that strategy: inventory what exists, periodically require justification for keeping it, give agencies enough time to conduct serious reviews and build safeguards against reaccumulation.
The most important reform is a change in the status quo. A regulation, guidance document or administrative requirement should not survive today merely because it survived yesterday. Every so often, policymakers should have to show that it still belongs there. A strict sartorial mandate for deputy state veterinarians might be less important than they thought.
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