Daniel E. Ho is a professor at Stanford University, where he directs the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab.
Every year, the Federal Reserve’s board of governors sends Congress a report on the Presidential $1 Coin Program. Federal law demands it, even though the coins stopped being minted for circulation in 2011. Since then, the Fed has asked — without success — each year to be relieved of the exercise.
Such “policy sludge” — obsolete requirements that accumulate over time — riddles the United States’ more than 3 billion words of legal code. The sheer volume of rules, regulations and laws has frustrated researchers and lawmakers trying to clean house for decades. But no longer. Thanks to artificial intelligence, our team at Stanford University’s Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab, or RegLab, is able to examine every word of federal, state and municipal code in an effort to hunt down antiquated requirements.
Policy sludge can have pernicious effects. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch noted in his 2024 book, “Over Ruled,” that a single report on the printing operations of the Social Security Administration took 95 employees more than four months to complete. In “Recoding America,” Jennifer Pahlka argued that procedural accumulation prevents progressive government from delivering. These requirements stay wedged in the U.S. Code, quietly consuming civil servant time that could have been spent processing a Social Security check, a building permit or a nursing license. It also fuels mistrust of government.
The Fed’s coin report should be easy to kill. But the law is still on the books 15 years since it became obsolete. What has made this problem intractable is the scale and complexity of the code. In the 1970s, then-law professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg hired a small army of students to search the code for sex bias. Under the Reagan Justice Department, one official led a failed two-year effort to count the number of federal crimes, noting you could have died and been “resurrected three times,” and still not know the true number. Auditing the legal code by hand takes time no legislature can afford.
That constraint is now broken. My team developed an AI system capable of scanning municipal codes (3 billion words), state codes (500 million words) and the federal code (33 million words). This tech-based approach makes it much less costly to identify outdated fees, commissions, reports and discriminatory provisions.
Some of the laws still on America’s books are ugly remnants of the past. We found that dozens of municipalities still have provisions for segregated schools, poll taxes and male-only voter eligibility — practices that have long been unconstitutional. In San Francisco, the public health director has the power to “examine any person of either sex whom he has reasonable grounds to believe is afflicted with a venereal disease.” But outdated, unconstitutional laws are just one part of the story. Four findings from our scan of reporting requirements illustrate how policy sludge is handicapping government and undermining public trust.
First, reporting requirements have ballooned. In California, they grew roughly 400 percent between 2000 and 2025. Staffing has not kept pace. In Maryland, we estimate that reading all reports the legislature ordered during fiscal year 2023 could take a single legislator up to 14 weeks. The session only runs 13.
Second, many reports are never even filed. In California, 30 percent of recurring reports appear to not have been fulfilled. A paper mandate that produces nothing satisfies no one. Reports should increase transparency, but the reality is that many of them may never be read. When San Francisco published a housing report and overstated evictions by 40 percent in July 2025, few noticed.
Third, costs and benefits vary enormously. At the high end, producing a single report in California consumed 3,500 hours of staff time and more than $870,000. Others take a few hours and are downloaded thousands of times.
Reporting requirements can represent real oversight victories, but more reports do not always mean better governance. That’s why it matters that when agencies reviewed their obligations, as in Maryland, they identified about 20 percent as candidates for elimination or consolidation. Civil servants are not defending this system; they are trapped inside it.
Fourth, procedural sclerosis is not a partisan story. Proponents of “abundance” point their fingers at Democratic states. Our data confirm that reporting requirements are indeed more prevalent in blue states, even controlling for size of government. But the difference is small. Sludge is bipartisan. It is the result of legislative processes with every incentive to claim credit for new legislation and little motivation to revisit the old. Reporting in The Post has described burdensome congressional reports as a “parable about why some big government systems break down.”
Governments are beginning to act, using our results to guide their code cleanup. San Francisco embarked on an extensive consultative process and passed legislation streamlining over a third of its reporting requirements. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-New York) issued an executive order for a “Regulatory Reset,” kicking off agency processes to identify and cut obsolete requirements. Though AI enables such reform, lasting change requires consultation, input and human judgment.
The more durable fix is structural. In a forthcoming paper, we offer a model statute with three key elements: sunsetting reporting obligations, keeping a public digital repository and tracking the costs and uses of each obligation. Codifying law should make it legible. But without maintenance, it achieves the opposite — the law as written stops being the law as it is. New York law, for instance, still requires the state’s board of regents to report on disciplinary actions taken against “subversive” teachers, a Red Scare measure found unconstitutional in 1967. A one-time cleanup resets the clock. Maintenance keeps it wound.
Clearing out remnants of outdated law is not deregulation for deregulation’s sake. It ensures public servants can spend time on what matters. Maintaining good government hygiene can help restore trust in government when Americans are rightly worried about its capacity to deliver.
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