In 2024, the Federal Register eclipsed 96,000 pages—the highest count in history. This record may prove short-lived, as the incoming Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency are poised to slash red tape. For inspiration, the president-elect and his new commission should look to the Buckeye State’s innovative rule-cutting program.
The Ohio legislature passed a law in 2022 requiring government agencies to reduce regulations by 30 percent within three years. As a result, the state is now on track to eliminate 5 million words from its government code—nearly one-third—by mid-2025. To achieve these cuts, officials have adopted a regulatory clean-up program that leverages artificial intelligence.
The Ohio Common Sense Initiative, a project led by Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, has used an AI tool called Reg Explorer to review hundreds of years of rules and regulations issued by Ohio state government. “Regulations, while well intended, have consumed our time and our resources as they pile up on one another over time,” Husted told me. “Over the course of 200 years, we passed laws, and you have agencies write rules, and they add up. And it becomes overwhelming.”
“It’s never been anybody’s job to clean it up,” Husted added. “We have made it our job to clean it up.”
A small team of staffers within the lieutenant governor’s office is tasked with manually reviewing rules and regulations identified by AI as exhibiting outdated, redundant, or anachronistic characteristics; the team then shares its recommendations with experts at state agencies for input. Executive action can cut much of that red tape, but some changes require the state legislature’s consent.
So far, the Common Sense Initiative has identified 2 million words and 900 rules from the administrative code as unnecessary. The program has eliminated 600,000 words of text from the state’s building code alone and has slashed several outdated paper-filing and in-person-appearance requirements. The state projects that the initiative will save $44 million in tax dollars and 58,000 hours of labor by 2033.
“Ohio’s regulatory burden has been a long-term hindrance” to the state’s economic prosperity, explained Rea Hederman Jr. of the Buckeye Institute, noting that state agencies are on track to meet the law’s 30 percent reduction target. “In recent years, Ohio policymakers, including incoming senate president Rob McColley and the DeWine-Husted Administration, have enacted many regulatory reforms that have reduced restrictions on workers and businesses.”
Artificial intelligence has been central to the initiative’s success. Husted sees “an unprecedented opportunity to use AI tools to eliminate regulations, to make them more easily understandable, and thus make them easier to comply with.” He believes that the state is “creating a culture of reform that no one human being or human beings can do on their own. An AI tool can do what it would take human beings years to do.”
The incoming Trump administration should similarly use AI to review and streamline rules and regulations. Indeed, near the end of Trump’s first term, his Department of Health and Human Services inaugurated a Regulatory Clean Up Initiative, which deployed AI to identify outdated regulatory language. The project, intended to make “miscellaneous corrections, including correcting references to other regulations, misspellings and other typographical errors,” resulted in more than 70 changes to the code.
The second Trump administration may go even further, judging by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans for the DOGE. Among other reforms, Musk and Ramaswamy have detailed a plan to identify regulations potentially subject to legal challenge following recent Supreme Court decisions narrowing the executive branch’s authority to issue rules without direct statutory authority. Trump could issue an executive order requiring federal departments and agencies to initiate AI-enabled regulatory clean-up initiatives, building on HHS’s successful pilot project. The order could also require agencies to use AI to search for regulations that exceed statutory authority and may now be in legal jeopardy.
It might be hard to imagine a federal regulatory clean-up initiative that matches the scope of Ohio’s, but the arrival of AI will enable large-scale regulatory review. Those tools make it possible to slash previously unthinkable amounts of red tape—if the White House has the political will.
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