Bureaucracy moves slowly, and decades of outdated provisions only make it worse. Sometimes dubbed “policy sludge,” such obsolete processes and stale reporting requirements can trap civil servants in red tape and cause program dysfunction.

Scholars at Stanford Law School’s Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab) and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) are working with cities and states across the country to find and cut out this sludge. They developed an AI tool to examine 500 million words of state statutes across all 50 U.S. states to reveal common patterns in the sludge, which they detail in a new paper, “The Abundance of Reports and Incapacity of States,” forthcoming in the Yale Journal on Regulation. RegLab also partnered with the states of New York, California, and Maryland to help these governments start paring these provisions from their books to speed the pace of government.

“This is a direct example of how AI can benefit millions of people,” says Daniel E. Ho, William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law, faculty director of the RegLab, and associate director at HAI. “These tools can clean up outdated requirements, reduce burdens on civil servants, and enable government to serve regular people who don’t want to face delays in filing for a new business, building a house, or securing a license. We hope that more states and cities will adopt this approach to clear clutter.”

Based on this work, New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order in July, directing state agencies to carry out a “regulatory reset” to remove outdated requirements, burdensome fees, and obsolete and unnecessary reports and commissions. “People have lost confidence in their state to be able to deliver the way they want it to,” Hochul said in a New York Times story about the order. “We have to shake it all up—be creative, and rethink government on a daily basis.”

Mapping the Clutter

In the new paper, co-authored by Ho and RegLab researchers Emily Robitschek, Ananya Karthik, JD ’29 (BA/BS ’23), Gabe Malek, JD ’27, and Derek Ouyang (BS/MS ’13), the team compiled a corpus of half a billion words of state statutes. They developed an AI system to methodically scan through all provisions of the code to identify reporting requirements, commissions, and fees.

The team tested and validated the tool in collaboration with the San Francisco City Attorney last year. The findings of that project led to legislation that streamlined over a third of San Francisco’s reporting requirements.

The scholars are working with other state partners to understand the prevalence, growth, costs, and benefits of such requirements. RegLab worked with Maryland to identify and analyze the estimated benefits and costs of reporting requirements across four state agencies. In California, the team collected information about how often reports are downloaded and then validated the findings against a tracker of reports by the California Legislature. The cross-state analysis also allowed the team to understand how such requirements vary by institutional factors, such as government size and political representation.

“The AI tool built by the RegLab team was instrumental in New York’s regulatory reset, enabling us to convert unwieldy legalese into digestible datasets that will empower agency staff to systematically review mandated reports and identify opportunities for reform,” says Zoe Jacobs, director of regulatory reform and delivery in the office of Governor Hochul.

Key Findings: More Bloat, Less Value

The cross-state analysis and government collaborations have revealed several striking findings.

First, reporting requirements have ballooned over time. In California, reporting requirements grew by 400 percent from 2000 to 2025. In Maryland, it could take up to 14 weeks to read reports, when the legislative session lasts just 13 weeks.

Second, the explosion of reporting requirements means many reports are never filed. In California, 30 percent of ongoing reports may never have been completed. Even civil servants question the utility of these reports: Maryland agencies identified 20 percent as candidates for elimination or consolidation.

Third, the impact and costs of reporting requirements can vary dramatically. A single report was calculated to consume 3,500 staff hours and more than $870,000 to produce. Other reports cost a few hours of staff time and are viewed thousands of times. “States need a rational process to clean up clutter while identifying and preserving reports that add value,” says Malek, who worked on the project as a law student fellow in the Maryland governor’s office. “That process begins with better cost and impact data.”

Fourth, the team was able to test common conjectures about government bloat. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, for instance, claims that blue states are more bureaucratic. Ho and his co-authors found that reporting requirements are indeed more prevalent in Democratic states, but this partisan difference is small relative to the scale of reporting requirements. In other words, the problem exists across party lines.

The project also surfaced a myriad of obsolete provisions, underscoring the need for code cleanup. New York still has a provision on the books that requires the Board of Regents to report on actions taken against “subversive” teachers, a Red Scare measure found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967.

“The original idea of codification—the process of compiling statutory law—was to make law legible and accessible,” Ho says. “What this work shows is that if left unaddressed, policy sludge can have the exact opposite consequence: making the law illegible and programs inoperable.”

Giving Tools to Governments

Based on extensive engagement with jurisdictions around policy sludge, the RegLab team is also providing a model state statute to enable jurisdictions to get a handle on reporting requirements going forward. The model statute, for instance, provides for automatic sunsetting, a digital repository, and lightweight tracking of costs and benefits of reporting obligations.

The team also released results of the full scan across the 50 states and a website to enable anyone to explore reporting requirements. In addition to New York’s recent executive order, state action is underway closer to home: California is using this data to convert paper reports into digital dashboards where possible.

“We hope this public resource triggers thoughtful, human-centered analysis to determine what processes serve people,” says Ho, “and which ones trap civil servants and citizens in red tape.” SL

Shana Lynch is head of content and associate directorof communications at Stanford HAI, which first posted this article.