Reform is already underway across government

Right now, traditional oversight holds agencies accountable to an outdated model of working by focusing on process compliance rather than outcomes. We’re arguing for and helping to build a different model of oversight—one that asks better questions, focuses on how programs actually operate for the public, and gives both Congress and agencies the tools and political cover they need to behave differently.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which exists within the legislative branch, is one of the most influential federal oversight bodies. The Comptroller General position, which heads GAO and serves 15-year terms, is currently vacant, making GAO reform a central focus and near-term opportunity. We are convening partners across the ecosystem (Foundation for American Innovation, Federation of American Scientists, Bipartisan Policy Center, Niskanen Center, Partnership for Public Service, and POPVOX Foundation for now, with others possible in the future) to define what a reformed GAO should look like and to shape the upcoming Comptroller General transition, which only happens about once a decade. That includes: (1) a management-reform agenda that a new Comptroller General could implement internally; (2) potential statutory reforms to adjust GAO’s authorities and provide political cover for doing things differently; and (3) practical collaborations with GAO teams, such as training and workshops on how they can shift how they frame questions and write recommendations now, even before deep structural change. 

Before you can fix something, you need to understand how it works, and how it varies. State civil service systems are among the most consequential and least understood pieces of America's government infrastructure. They determine who gets hired into government, how they're paid, whether poor performers can be removed, and how disputes are resolved. Yet until recently, there was no comprehensive, publicly available resource describing how all 50 states approach these questions. State HR directors say they have long wanted this kind of comparative data but had never had access to it.

We funded the National Academy of Public Administration and the Niskanen Center to conduct the first study of its kind: a benchmarking analysis of personnel management practices across all 50 states, covering hiring and recruitment, compensation and classification, performance evaluation, at-will employment, and grievance procedures. They reviewed publicly available laws, regulations, and HR documents for every state, and 44 states directly participated through interviews or written responses. The resulting report and data, including detailed state-by-state spreadsheets, are freely available to the public.

The findings reinforce something we see across our work: there is no single model, but there are clear patterns. State classification systems range from roughly 100 to 4,000 job classes. Over half of states have adopted skills-based hiring policies, but most can’t yet say whether they're working. Performance evaluation remains the most underleveraged tool in state government, with pay-for-performance programs widespread but thin evidence of effectiveness. This baseline analysis is infrastructure for the entire workforce modernization ecosystem, giving reformers, researchers, and state leaders a shared factual foundation from which to design and advocate for ambitious change. It is even a resource for those working on federal civil service reform, given the role that states play as laboratories of democracy that can inspire and inform reforms at the federal level. 

Durable state capacity reform requires cross-ideological support. We are funding the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) to launch a Network for Conservative Public Management, a community of practice for conservative public servants, reformers, and policy leaders who believe that a limited government must also be a capable one. This network is designed to ensure an intellectual home on the right for this work that reflects conservative priorities and builds a constituency for reform that spans election cycles. It will convene practitioners across state and federal government, publish essays and case studies through FAI documenting what effective conservative governance looks like in practice, and cultivate a cadre of reform-minded managers who see competence and stewardship as conservative virtues. 

The way in which the federal government classifies and describes its jobs is totally out of sync with the rest of 21st-century American work life. The General Schedule (GS) classification system, which defines job titles, position descriptions, and compensation structures across the federal government, hasn’t been meaningfully updated since 1949, and is predicated upon industrial-age assumptions about worker mobility, the labor market, and the composition of the workforce. When Congress crafted it, it made good sense for the midcentury labor market, but that economy has long-since moved on. 

The result is a government trapped in a system of opaque job titles, unintelligible position descriptions, and rigid internal equivalency that treats software engineer positions and HR specialist positions as equally complex jobs to be compensated at the same rate. This is a major barrier to the federal government’s efforts to compete for and retain top talent and upstream of all other parts of the civil service system. 

We’re funding Niskanen’s efforts to bring the federal personnel system into alignment with current labor market and workforce conditions. Their work has already resulted in a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind historical analysis of the federal jobs classification system and set of recommendations for reform that will form the basis for draft legislation and engagement with policymakers on the Hill. 

We are funding the Institute for Progress (IFP) to produce Factory Settings, a Substack series featuring the inaugural CHIPS Program Office leadership team: former CHIPS Director Mike Schmidt, former Chief Investment Officer Todd Fisher, and former Chief of Staff and COO Sara Meyers, with guest posts from others involved in the program's execution.

Factory Settings is premised on a simple insight: as the federal government attempts to increase its ability to deliver on large policy goals, future programs will face the same procedural and operational challenges CHIPS did, and the lessons from how this team navigated them are directly transferable. With over 2,700 subscribers and more than 25 published posts, the series has covered topics central to our reform agenda, including why they took deliberate process risks to avoid the greater risk of failing to deliver, how the Paperwork Reduction Act created friction that didn't reduce paperwork, how they navigated NEPA and the Davis-Bacon Act, how they ran into many of the same roadblocks to fast, high-quality hiring that teams across the federal government face, how they navigated legal challenges, and how they designed milestone-based accountability that went well beyond standard grant oversight.

This kind of ground-floor implementation knowledge, practitioners documenting what they built, what worked, what didn't, and why, is extraordinarily rare in government. It creates a durable resource for future program leaders and the broader state capacity field, and it directly informs our advocacy by demonstrating, with specificity, where structural change is needed.

Federal employee performance management systems are outdated, under-resourced, and widely regarded as ineffective. The current system is often treated as a “check-the-box” exercise. Instead of enabling workforce planning and strong management, it impedes rewarding high performers and dealing with poor performers. Effective performance management promotes accountability and growth, but today’s system undermines morale and limits organizational effectiveness.

We're funding the Partnership for Public Service (the Partnership) to propose reforms to the federal employee performance management system to strengthen accountability and reward high performers. As part of this effort, the Partnership is using journey mapping and engagement with practitioners to identify leverage points for reform across the performance management lifecycle. The Partnership will then develop reforms to create a performance management system that has a clear purpose and enables employees to effectively implement agency missions. This includes considering mechanisms to better deal with poor performance and misconduct and how to ensure managers are well-equipped.

Congressional modernization efforts have produced a growing set of recommendations for upgrading Congress's operations and technology. But there is no shared reference point for what a Congress that’s better equipped to legislate and conduct oversight in an era of rapid AI advancement and accelerating technological change would look like. Without that shared vision, individual reform proposals risk being disconnected from one another, and funders and organizations working in this space lack a common framework for prioritizing investments.

We are funding the POPVOX Foundation to  develop, in tandem with partner organizations, an ambitious, coherent, forward-looking vision for what it would look like for Congress to function as a modern institution.  The project will analyze and synthesize existing proposals for improving Congress’s institutional capacity, staffing, information infrastructure, technology systems, and oversight, and will present them through an open-source, interactive microsite  designed for Hill staff, funders, and reform organizations. The goal is to create the shared intellectual infrastructure needed to build a technically capable legislature. 

Durable state capacity reform requires cross-ideological support. We are funding the Roosevelt Institute – a progressive think tank historically focused on economic policy – to launch a state capacity team alongside center and right-of-center organizations doing complementary work. Roosevelt brings something unique to the ecosystem: deep relationships with progressive policymakers and progressive communities whose buy-in matters across each of our competencies.  

The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), despite its name and stated intent, has dramatically increased paperwork burden on Americans and has become one of the greatest barriers to modern government service delivery. Under the PRA, anytime an agency wants to collect information from 10 or more people, it is required to post the proposed collection in the Federal Register twice and secure approval from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the White House, even for minor updates. As a result of these requirements, paperwork burden hours have risen from 6.97 billion in 1997 to over 10.5 billion today, during an era when digital technology should have reduced paperwork significantly. 

The information collection process required under the PRA (section 3507 of title 44, United States Code) should be modernized to reduce unnecessary burden on agencies, create opportunities for more meaningful public input, and remove barriers to timely government service delivery while maintaining OIRA's ability to identify duplication and process concerns. 

Together with a broad set of ecosystem partners, we’re pursuing reforms to the PRA that include improving the process for public input on information collections; streamlining approval timelines; and supporting modern service delivery. 

We’re convening partners to raise the political salience of state capacity issues in Congress and advocate for reforms. Together with government affairs teams and staff from Partnership for Public Service, Niskanen Center, Federation of American Scientists, and Foundation for American Innovation, we are coordinating to build relationships across Congressional committees, parties and caucuses, with the goal of educating members and staff on the urgent need for a new government operating system. We want to ensure good ideas do not sit on shelves, and this is critical to creating the conditions for enacting and implementing reform. 

Statutory authority for skills-based hiring at the federal level already exists. The Chance to Compete Act, signed into law in 2025, requires federal agencies to assess candidates on demonstrated job skills rather than the self-rated questionnaires and keyword-matched resumes that 90 percent of federal jobs currently rely on. But statutory authority doesn’t always translate into practice. Hiring managers default to old habits, HR specialists lack training in skills-based assessment methods, and risk-averse organizational cultures push everyone back toward what's familiar. Without sustained, agency-level implementation support, even well-designed reforms stall at the point where hiring decisions get made.

We are funding the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to accelerate skills-based hiring adoption inside federal agencies. This work, led by Peter Bonner, centers on collaboration with agencies including  technical assistance, leveraging a suite of tools including a Chance to Compete Act playbook, pilots and simulations with target agencies, using this work to surface likely blockers and enabling tools to support the whole human capital community, and after-action reviews to identify the operational, cultural, and governance gaps that block adoption. 

We are testing a specific hypothesis: that hands-on implementation support inside agencies, paired with a documented playbook a broader set of actors can use, is the missing piece between statutory or regulatory reform and actual change in federal hiring outcomes, and a smart way to surface where real versus perceived barriers lie. 

Of the 4,000 legislative staff in Congress, less than 4% have any technology background. The institutional knowledge on issues like civil service systems, federal procurement, and digital service delivery is even thinner. This matters because congressional staff are the people who draft legislation, conduct oversight, and decide which reform proposals get a hearing. Without staff who understand how the government actually operates, even well-designed reform proposals stall.

TechCongress places technologists into the U.S. Congress through the Congressional Innovation Fellowship. Their fellows serve as technology advisors to Members of Congress and Committees, helping the legislative branch build a critical mass of technology expertise. We are  funding TechCongress to pilot a state capacity vertical within its fellowship program, which has placed over 140 technologists in offices across both chambers and both parties since 2015.  The pilot recruits and places fellows who are focused on improving the government operating model, targeting placements on committees with jurisdiction over civil service, oversight and accountability, procedural reform, and digital services. TechCongress has already demonstrated that its model builds lasting capacity: roughly 30 fellows have converted to permanent congressional staff, and 66% of alumni serve across the public sector. 

Policy reforms create permission for change, but they do not produce it. The gap between what new laws allow and what agencies actually do is where most reforms fall short. Closing this gap in civil service implementation requires capabilities that state human resources (HR) offices typically don't have: service design, user research, plain language policy translation, and product management for the tech platforms HR runs on.

We are funding U.S. Digital Response (USDR) to embed those capabilities inside North Carolina's Office of State Human Resources (OSHR) to effectively implement a new performance management policy taking effect on July 1, 2026. USDR will recommend design improvements to the performance management platform around manager needs, apply plain language methods to the policy companion guide and pending Chapter 126A implementation guidance, and build service design capabilities in OSHR staff so they can lead this work independently in the future. This adds to USDR’s growing body of work applying its delivery capabilities on the margins of major HR policy reforms, and we expect to learn as much about how that model adapts to a new domain as about the specific reforms it supports. This will build the field’s capacity, so that other states attempting similar reforms in the years ahead have somewhere to turn. We anticipate funding additional ecosystem partners to provide targeted support for other aspects of implementation and building new capabilities, as the work progresses.

Almost 80 percent of the $100 billion the federal government spends annually on information technology (IT) goes to maintaining existing systems, some running on decades-old software. The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), created in 2017, was built to address this problem by providing multi-year funds for modernization projects that annual appropriations—constrained to twelve-month cycles and predicated on predictable spending patterns— couldn’t fund. TMF was recently reauthorized through the end of fiscal year 2026, but needs long-term reauthorization in order to award new funds and support broader modernization efforts. 

We’re working with a set of ecosystem partners, including the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI), and the Partnership for Public Service to advocate for reauthorizing and fortifying TMF. We’re supporting bipartisan legislation introduced in the House and Senate that would strengthen repayment integrity to ensure fiscal discipline, revise selection criteria for TMF funding to mitigate agency mission creep, add project integrity protections to prevent fraud, and establish a federal legacy IT inventory to create a baseline for measuring TMF’s impact. 

Essential to our congressional modernization goals is the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) position in the U.S. House of Representatives, which is currently vacant. The CAO owns the House’s administrative and operational infrastructure, including procurement, human resources, the House Digital Service, and every tool Members and staff use to do their work. Thus, building congressional technical capacity requires a CAO appointed with a modernization mandate who is excited about treating administrative and operational functions as strategic levers for legislative efficiency. 

We are funding the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF), a bipartisan organization that has served Capitol Hill for nearly 50 years, to prepare the groundwork for a transformative CAO appointment. CMF will work with congressional leadership to draft a CAO job description that emphasizes strategic technology leadership; develop a weighted candidate scoring matrix that prioritizes future competencies like AI integration, change management, and systems thinking; and produce a behavioral interview guide designed to surface strategic depth. CMF will also conduct a 30-day "State of the CAO" departmental assessment, identifying immediate gaps in AI readiness and organizational efficiency, and produce a 100-day roadmap for the incoming CAO. 

Annual performance ratings often devolve into a check-the-box exercise of completing required paperwork. For example, the recent State Human Resources and Benchmarking Study by the Niskanen Center and National Academy of Public Administration found that 31 states have pay-for-performance programs, but managers tend to cluster ratings at the top, and evidence on whether these programs actually influence behavior is thin. The result – common across both federal and state governments – is a system that doesn't differentiate performance, develop high performers, or effectively improve or manage out poor performers.

With the expertise of our ecosystem partners, we are working with the State of North Carolina to redesign its performance management system and policies. The redesign centers on building a feedback culture that makes it easier for managers and employees to more meaningfully engage with the work and focus on outcomes. The state will also lead a series of test-and-learn pilots to measure policy impacts such as mandating calibration in performance ratings to identify meaningful numbers of both high and low performers. We are supporting work to measure whether these policies translate into improved employee engagement and agency performance, as well as to contribute learning to the work of the broader state capacity ecosystem.

Federal information technology (IT) oversight and management is focused on metrics and processes that are not tied to outcomes. Effective IT modernization can produce better and more reliable services for citizens and enable agencies to gain tools that boost productivity. In practice, IT projects are frequently launched with unclear goals, handed over to contractors, and allowed to proceed for years with minimal visibility into progress. Better Congressional and agency oversight is needed to ensure IT projects succeed and generate high return on investment for American taxpayers. We are funding the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) to evaluate reforms to IT oversight and propose recommendations for agencies and Congress. 

For over a decade, the model for improving government technology has been to send centralized digital service teams in to rescue troubled projects. While that model built a strong foundation, it was never meant to be a permanent solution to government's technology problem. Ten years in, there’s an opportunity to consider what is needed now to build durable in-house digital capacity, and recent examples to learn from of digital service teams embedding government-wide.

To begin to answer this question, we funded the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to carry out the first phase of its Digital Service Retros project. The team convened practitioners and published findings in June 2026, including "What Did We Stop Questioning?" and a practitioner guide.

We see this as the start of a broader effort to build durable digital capacity inside agencies: rethinking how digital delivery teams are designed, shifting toward a product operating model, and tackling the upstream barriers that make it impossible for teams to deliver without central government support or high-level political buy-in.

A state government’s agenda depends first and foremost on its workforce. In too many states, outdated Human Resources rules are driving vacancy rates in the double digits and hiring times over 180 days. In July 2025, Governor Josh Stein signed Session Law 2025-34, a bipartisan bill directing a full rewrite of the state's civil service rules, creating the opening for something more ambitious that could potentially serve as a model for other states pursuing workforce reforms. 

Working with North Carolina's Office of State Human Resources and drawing ideas from a deliberately cross-ideological coalition of civil service experts, we helped develop the policy framework for SB 1041, the Public Workforce Modernization Act, signed into law by Governor Stein on July 6, 2026. We learned there is significant cross-ideological support on the specifics of meaningful state civil service reform, which can give state leaders the confidence to pursue more ambitious changes. We also learned that states often have underutilized workforce flexibilities in hiring, classification, and compensation, reinforcing our belief that robust policy is a necessary but insufficient condition that must be paired with strong policy implementation and leaders and staff with the willingness to appropriately utilize existing flexibilities. With a new law in place, the state has the opportunity to challenge the “cascade of rigidity” with a state capacity ecosystem to help track, measure, and implement feedback loops that enable the state to adapt its guidance to fully focus on delivering on the promise of the law. 

Civil service reform that charts a path between rigid, outdated hiring and classification systems on the one hand and pure at-will employment on the other is extraordinarily difficult for elected leaders to pursue. The nuances of what "good" reform looks like are hard to communicate in a sound bite. Without sustained public argument for why these reforms matter and public recognition of leaders willing to take them on, the political incentives will continue to favor inaction.

We are actively working to shape that narrative. Our colleague, Robert Gordon, has published a chapter on government hiring reform through The States Forum documenting how states like New York, Tennessee, and North Carolina are beginning to modernize workforce systems, a detailed analysis in Vital City of the barriers New York City's civil service system poses for the Mamdani administration, and a companion piece on how the city can build internal capacity to reduce dependence on vendors. Our Co-founder, Board Chair, and Senior Advisor, Jennifer Pahlka, has written about why civil service reform should be Mayor Mamdani's top priority. This public writing is part of our theory of change. Reform requires a constituency, and a constituency requires a clear, compelling public case.

Public servants labor daily under a complex morass of procedures, processes, misinterpretations of rules, and inherited habits, manifest in task-oriented job descriptions, onerous reporting requirements, and myriad other burdensome demands that sap time and energy. Under these conditions, experimentation feels dangerous, compliance takes precedence over mission delivery, and workarounds become the only way to get anything done at all. 

We are funding the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to develop a new “Red Tape Lab” which aims to relieve the administrative burdens incumbent on career civil servants by equipping them with the diagnostic tools, shared language, and peer community they need to distinguish productive process and real requirements from “imagined policy,” and to act on that distinction within their existing authority. This work supplements top-down regulatory and statutory reform by providing direct support to current civil servants attempting to navigate existing processes. The Red Tape Lab’s approach is informed by human-centered design methods, deep policy and regulatory literacy, and a practitioner-first orientation that treats civil servants as capable change agents rather than problems to be solved. Through a collection of both team-based and self-starter resources, as well as storytelling and case documentation structures, the Red Tape Lab endeavors to build lasting internal mission delivery capacity in agencies by empowering individual public servants. 

Operational architecture and strong talent to fill it can make or break an administration. Organizational design and staffing determine if and how agencies work together to drive towards outcomes that matter. Without an empowered management function and strong leaders that can translate priorities into operational reality, drive change across agencies, and address barriers to effective back-office functions, even the best policy ideas stall. Leaders who want to make this change often do not know where to start.

We are co-developing operational teams with two new administrations in New Jersey and Virginia. In New Jersey, with the state and its partner organizations, we helped design New Jersey’s first-ever Office of the Chief Operating Officer, established through Executive Order 4 and Executive Order 5, with a mandate to implement strategic priorities and transform back-office functions: procurement, workforce, budgeting, customer experience, and regulatory simplification. This organizational structure combines back-office modernization authority (Office of Operational Performance) with cross-agency delivery (Office of Strategic Initiatives & Economic Opportunity). In Virginia, we funded the Federation of American Scientists to provide staffing support to fill the Chief Transformation Officer role with David Wilkinson, a leader in innovation and performance management at both the federal and state level. He is now working on modernizing Virginia’s approach to technology, talent, and reducing procedural burdens.

We also embedded a fellow throughout the first 100 days of Governor Sherrill’s administration, to support staffing of the office, define early priorities for back-office transformation, and generate operational momentum with delivery on early priorities, including a permitting dashboard pilot that allows applicants to track the progress and drives accountability to break down delays. Governor Sherrill is now hiring an individual with input from Recoding America to lead the regulatory simplification team that she established on day one. We are testing a specific hypothesis that getting a small number of the right people into well-designed operational roles, with a mandate to improve how the government works, can produce durable improvements in what the government can deliver. We are still working to build a starting model, based on what we learn directly and what other states have independently tried. 

AI and emerging technology can help put governments in the driver's seat of their technology. But not if we just layer new tools on top of the same operating model. The barriers to using these tools for impact and strengthening government technology often lie upstream — for example, in legislative funding models and agency budgeting models that incentivize large modernization projects versus ongoing development, procurement rules incompatible with how modern software gets built, workforce gaps that leave agencies unable to build in-house or manage the systems they buy, and internal review processes not designed for iterative improvement. 

We are co-funding a $10 million open call with Center for Civic Futures through its Public Benefit Innovation Fund. We are supporting proposals that tackle the upstream barriers to modernizing technology infrastructure and enabling the systems of the future. Through this open call, we are interested in funding proposals for early concepts and pilots of innovative frameworks, methodologies, and service models, not just products. This is a deliberate choice — investment is often concentrated in building the tools themselves, without addressing the institutional conditions that determine whether those tools ever get adopted for impact or sustained.

When states buy major technology systems, they often run a single procurement for a monolith contract that only a handful of large vendors can credibly bid on. The winner then builds, operates, and maintains the system for years. States often end up with little leverage on cost or quality, limited ability to course-correct mid-stream, and no recourse or alternatives when a vendor underperforms. 

One approach to disrupting this dynamic is breaking a system into discrete components that can be bought, built, replaced, and competed independently. This modular approach to procurement lets states make smaller bets and adjust as they discover what works; opens the market to providers who can win on a single module rather than only the few firms able to “meet” all requirements; and preserves the option to swap out an underperforming component without rebuilding the whole system. This involves not only new models for procurement, but also new models of governance of modular systems and of vendor engagement to surface non-incumbent providers.

Colorado is modernizing its Benefits Management System to put government in the driver’s seat for technology that millions of Coloradans rely on for Medicaid, SNAP, and other services. We are providing support connected with one part of Colorado’s work: co-funding the Open Contracting Partnership’s technical assistance to help the state execute a modular procurement approach. OCP brings deep experience with public sector procurement reform and is positioned to translate what Colorado learns into a methodology other states can adopt, along with usable supports such as a multi-award contracting vehicle solicitation that other states can use as a template, and peer learning guidance.

The default mode of funding for government technology projects (such as IT modernization efforts, healthcare enrollment platforms, and file digitization) is to divide the money among the individual systems and offices responsible for building the product. The problem is that this kind of budgeting doesn’t respect the nature of technological systems as complex products consisting of many interdependent elements. Splitting funding across offices and categories without a shared, holistic vision for the end product produces siloed and out-of-sync teams, leading to interminable delays, serious gaps in functionality, massive costs, and ultimately, Franken-systems that don’t do anything well. 

Capability-based budgeting, pioneered by Solitaire Carroll and the Niskanen Center, enables a different way of operating. Rather than tying dollars to the org chart or individual system upgrades, capabilities-based budgeting dedicates funding in blocks to complete capabilities, like successful enrollment or benefits delivery, and empowers an integrated team to address dependencies together, reallocate resources as priorities shift, and plan holistically around the full user experience. The model has already shown promise at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where realigning IT investments around capabilities enabled teams to see previously hidden costs, clearly identify the results of their work, and understand trade-offs. We are funding Niskanen’s continued work to expand the use of capabilities-based budgeting, and are advocating for its use with policymakers on the Hill and in federal leaders.

States across the political spectrum are confronting the same problem: decades of accumulated rules, from licensing requirements to compliance mandates, have grown too dense for the government to understand–never mind the public. AI tools can accelerate the identification of red tape, scanning thousands of pages of administrative code to surface outdated requirements, inconsistencies, and unnecessary burdens on individuals and businesses.

In partnership with U.S. Digital Response (USDR), we have run AI sprints for two states. In New York, we supported Governor Hochul's EXPRESS NY program, using AI to identify thousands of fees, fines, and penalties and archaic requirements like wet-signature mandates across the state code. Our pipelines uncovered burdens such as mandatory mail-in accident reports, high licensing fees, and mandatory consultants for childcare providers. In Utah, we are supporting the state's ongoing occupational licensure reviews for every regulated profession in the state, a process launched by Governor Cox's 2021 executive order and now run by the Office of Professional Licensure Review. These reviews include comparing Utah's statutes and rules against those in every other state, work that is slow to do by hand. We're using AI to accelerate the process — running 50-state scans of licensing statutes for jobs spanning healthcare and building trades, flagging outliers and novel policies, building policy maps, and assembling a research base for the state's reviewers. We are using what we learn to help several other states launch their own regulatory simplification initiatives. 

What we are finding is that AI tools can identify not only low-hanging fruit but also complex sources of red tape, particularly when directed in a domain. While AI can also accelerate the process to cut that red tape, success also requires empowered leaders, the right statutory conditions (such as within the state’s Administrative Procedure Acts) to make revisions based on AI-powered findings, and a relentless focus on outcomes. We are also finding that states have a lot to learn from one another. With the support of USDR’s technical partnership and regulatory reform leaders from Virginia and Rhode Island, we are starting to facilitate cross-state exchange, to move regulatory simplification from a one-off cleanup to a sustained function of state government.