March 24, 2025
“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.”
WASHINGTON – Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) just penned this op-ed in The Wall Street Journal announcing his plan to introduce a bill to complement ongoing executive branch efforts to serve taxpayers better and at a lower cost by streamlining the mammoth Code of Federal Regulations. The bill would empower the federal government with an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to identify redundant and outdated rules.
Key excerpts include:
“To serve taxpayers better—and at a lower cost for the long haul—Congress should clean up the Washington bureaucracy itself.”
. . .
“We can begin by looking at Ohio’s success leveraging artificial intelligence to cleanse its regulations of outdated, conflicting, or redundant content.”
. . .
“The reform allowed state agencies to use the AI tool RegExplorer to flag pieces of the code that were duplicative, outdated or so silly that only government would have preserved them.”
. . .
“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.”
. . .
“This week, I am introducing the Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Streamline the Code of Federal Regulations Act of 2025 to give the legislative branch a smart, careful way to legally reduce bureaucratic bloat. 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.”
. . .
“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.”
The full op-ed is available here.