There’s no shortage of enthusiasm or angst over the executive branch’s push to purge the federal bureaucracy of waste, fraud and abuse. If November’s election was any indication, Ohioans fall largely in the enthusiasm column. But skeptics are asking fair questions about how to preserve the savings and efficiency of that work and what Congress’s role should be.
Presidents and governors have increasingly relied on executive orders to address policy problems. The inefficiency of our nation’s laws and regulatory codes are part of the reason why. To serve taxpayers better—and at a lower cost for the long haul—Congress should clean up the Washington bureaucracy itself.
Technology has brought productivity and efficiency to nearly every sector of the economy. It’s time for government to adopt these tools to serve the American people better. We can begin by looking at Ohio’s success using artificial intelligence to cleanse its regulations of outdated, conflicting, or redundant content. In 2020, before ChatGPT and the AI revolution began, I led Ohio’s effort, known as the Common Sense Initiative, to use AI to unlock substantive regulatory reform. As lieutenant governor, I saw the state’s regulatory code had ballooned to 17 million words and knew we had to reduce that burden. Merely reading those rules—never mind making sense of them—would shave 21 weeks off your life.
The reform allowed state agencies to use the AI tool RegExplorer to flag pieces of the code that were duplicative, outdated or so silly that only government would have preserved them. We found thousands of pages of rules governing lottery games that were no longer played. The regulatory wires had gotten crossed in ways that made Ohio building codes far more complicated than in other states. Duplicative language made it hard to discern differences between state building and fire codes and national standards.
We identified rules that needlessly forced people to conduct their government business in person or by mail. We estimated the upside of correcting the code’s outdated provisions would save 58,000 state-employee man-hours and $44 million over 10 years. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to spend all day waiting in line to untangle red tape.
After five years, Ohio is on track to reduce its regulatory code by about a third. That’s five million unnecessary words. Now it’s easier for people and businesses to comply with the law. The state even made it simpler, cheaper and more secure for people to communicate with the Department of Taxation without hiring new agents.
Congress can work with the Trump administration to cull inefficiencies and redundancies from the federal government. This week I will introduce the Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Streamline the Code of Federal Regulations Act of 2025 to give the legislative branch a smart, careful way to reduce bureaucratic bloat legally. AI tools don’t replace government workers but can empower them. When we spotted dead weight in state code, Ohio state employees addressed it. This bill would apply a similar approach federally—annually referring old, repetitive language to the agency that promulgated it so that people within the agency can decide what to cut and what to keep. This way, the federal code won’t shift with the political winds.
Ohio proved that AI is a powerful and efficient tool for addressing the problem of government waste. The Trump administration should be lauded for taking on this work, but the executive branch can’t do it alone. Congress has oversight responsibility of the federal government. Only Congress can authorize using AI to right-size the sprawling federal code, and we should.
Mr. Husted, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Ohio. He served as lieutenant governor, 2019-25.