(Originally published by The Washington Post on August 19, 2026.)

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.

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