Key Takeaways

• Regulatory reform has evolved through three waves: the first focused on cutting red tape, the second introduced review cycles, and the third prioritized transparency and public accessibility.
• Without the right systems, regulatory reform becomes less “action word” and more “empty campaign promise.”
• Agencies determine reform outcomes regardless of central mandates; data quality, timeliness, clarity, and consistency depend on how agencies operationalize reform, not just on executive orders or legislation.
• Public confusion creates measurable agency workload through calls, emails, and complaints; improving transparency often reduces internal friction by enabling citizens to self-serve accurate information.
• States like Tennessee and Montana have invested in systems that make good regulatory management easier than poor regulatory management.

Why Regulatory Reform is Entering a New Phase

For about 80 years, the US government has made attempts at improving the way regulations are managed at the federal and state level. 

These attempts are defined by three notable waves. The first, beginning in 1946 with the passage of the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA), focused on cutting red tape. 

The second wave introduced regular review cycles and sunset provisions. Both improved how agencies managed rules internally, but neither changed how citizens experienced regulation.

The third wave is different. It’s driven by public trust, accessibility, and visibility, not just efficiency. 

Now,

• Citizens expect to understand what regulations apply to them without hiring a lawyer. 
• Legislators want real-time accountability. 
• Governors are setting expectations that agencies can’t meet with spreadsheets and institutional memory.

The third wave of regulatory reform requires agencies to rethink how people experience regulation from the outside. You must explain regulations clearly, make them easy to find, and keep them accurate and up to date.

This version of regulatory reform requires more than policy change to work. 

What is Regulatory Reform?

Regulatory reform refers to any effort to improve how government rules function: by changing what they say, how they’re created, or how the public experiences them.

The term covers two distinct types of work:

• Substantive reform: Changing what regulations actually require (reducing licensing requirements, updating environmental standards, consolidating overlapping mandates)
• Procedural reform: Changing how regulations are drafted, approved, tracked, reviewed, and published (improving workflows, maintaining accurate records, ensuring citizens can find current rules)

But, changing what a rule says is pretty straightforward. 

Changing how your agency tracks versions, maintains institutional knowledge, or ensures published regulations match approved text? 

That’s the hard part.

When reform focuses only on policy outcomes, agencies absorb the operational cost. You’re left managing new requirements with old systems, creating friction that outlasts the reform effort itself.

The First Two Waves of Regulatory Reform (And Their Limits)

First Wave: Reducing Red Tape (Often Through Executive Orders)

The first wave focused on cutting or simplifying rules. 

Governors would announce targets: 

• Eliminate 10 percent of regulations
• Reduce processing times by 30 days
• Streamline permit applications. 

Agencies would identify outdated rules, consolidate redundant requirements, and report progress. 

These efforts produced short-term wins. Rules were removed. Reports were filed. Press releases went out.

But the wins rarely lasted. 

Executive orders expired. Administrations changed. The rules that got cut were often the easiest ones to remove, not necessarily the most burdensome. And because the underlying systems for creating and managing regulations didn’t change, complexity crept back in. 

Agencies returned to the same workflows, the same approval bottlenecks, the same publishing challenges that made regulations hard to track in the first place.

Second Wave: Regular Review Cycles (Often Through Legislation)

The second wave, largely spearheaded by the 104th congress, introduced sunset reviews, cost-benefit analyses, and periodic reporting on regulatory impact. 

These measures improved oversight and created accountability mechanisms that executive orders couldn’t. Agencies had to justify keeping rules on the books, not just adding new ones.

But the administrative burden was high. Reviewing regulations took time away from creating new ones or responding to emerging issues. Reporting requirements piled up. And the core limitations remained:

• No clear ownership of reform across agencies
• No shared system for tracking progress
• No continuity when leadership changed

Reform became a compliance exercise rather than a durable improvement.

The pattern repeated itself across states. Reform initiatives would gain momentum, produce initial results, and then stall. They became slogans instead of systems. Earlier waves changed expectations without changing how agencies worked day to day. You were told to do more with regulation, but not given better tools to do it.

The Third Wave of Regulatory Reform: Transparency and Visibility

The third (and current) wave of regulatory reform prioritizes public understanding of regulations, not just rule existence. 

Citizens expect clear visibility into what applies and why, ongoing access rather than one-time comment windows, and the ability to navigate simple requirements without hiring a lawyer. 

Transparency is now measurable. 

You can track how often citizens access regulations, which rules generate the most confusion, and where your public-facing information conflicts with internal records.

• Legislators get dashboards. 
• Auditors get version histories. 
• Citizens now have access to search that actually works.
• Transparency-focused reform exposes gaps between internal processes and public-facing reality. 

This wave doesn’t ask you to write fewer rules. It asks you to make rules findable, understandable, and trustworthy.

Why Regulatory Reform so Often Stalls at the Agency Level

Regulatory reform stalls because agencies lack shared infrastructure to carry it forward. The problems are structural, not motivational.

No clear ownership exists across agencies. One department maintains regulations in Word documents, another in a content management system, a third in PDFs on a legacy website. When a governor or legislature calls for reform, there’s no single person or office coordinating how it happens.

No consistent tracking follows reform initiatives once they’re announced. Agencies submit reports showing which rules were reviewed or eliminated, but there’s rarely a system tracking whether those changes made it into published regulations or whether the public can now find clearer information. Progress gets measured in activities completed, not outcomes achieved.

No continuity exists across administrations. A new agency director arrives with different priorities. The staff member who understood the rulemaking workflow retires. The legislative mandate expires. Reform initiatives outlive their champions and fade.

This plays out predictably:

• Rules live in multiple locations: the official version with the Secretary of State, the working draft in an agency folder, the version cited in enforcement guidance, the summary on the public website
• Review workflows rely on institutional memory
• Publishing is disconnected from drafting and approval, creating version control problems no one notices until an audit exposes the gap

You can’t quickly answer basic questions: How many active regulations do we oversee? Which ones haven’t been reviewed in five years? What happens when the staffer managing our rulemaking database leaves?

Reform stalls when agencies lack shared infrastructure to carry it forward.

The Role State Agencies Play in Making Reform Real

Regulations ultimately converge at the Secretary of State. That’s where they’re published and made available to the public. When someone needs to know what rules apply, they go to the central repository where regulations are supposed to live in their final, authoritative form.

Image Source: Tennessee Secretary of State

Agencies look to these central offices for standards and structure. 

Secretaries of State set formatting requirements, manage publication schedules, and maintain the official record. But this convergence point doesn’t eliminate agency responsibility. 

Even when reform is led centrally, agencies determine the outcomes. Data quality depends on what the agency submits. If the text has errors or outdated references, those problems carry through to publication. Timeliness depends on meeting deadlines. Delays at agency level become delays in public access. Clarity depends on how you write and organize regulations before they’re ever sent for publication.

Consistency depends on maintaining alignment between what you enforce, what you publish internally, and what appears in the official code. When these versions diverge, the Secretary of State’s office can’t fix it. Only you can.

What Leading States are Doing Differently

Tennessee has pursued sustained, statewide regulatory reform with centralized accountability. Rather than launching a single initiative tied to one administration, the state built infrastructure that makes reform continuous. 

Agencies work within a shared framework for tracking regulations, conducting reviews, and publishing updates. Reform isn’t a project with a completion date. It’s how the state manages regulation as an ongoing responsibility.

Montana took a different approach. The Secretary of State’s office led a modernization of the state’s Administrative Rules to improve public access. Under Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen’s leadership, the state rebuilt how citizens interact with regulations online, making rules easier to search, understand, and reference. 

The effort focused on the public experience first, which created pressure and opportunity for agencies to improve internal processes. When citizens can see what’s published, you have a stronger incentive to ensure it’s accurate and current.

Both approaches emphasize durability over one-off projects. 

• Tennessee invested in systems that connect agency workflows to accountability measures. 
• Montana invested in systems that connect internal record-keeping to public transparency. In both cases, public access and internal accountability are linked.

Successful reform efforts invest in systems that survive leadership changes. They create infrastructure that makes good regulatory management easier than poor regulatory management. 

What Regulatory Reform Looks Like for the Public 

Citizens want:

• Clear answers without legal training

• The ability to type a question into a search box and reach the specific rule that applies, written in language they understand

• Direct links to authoritative rules, not summaries that drift out of date or interpretations that conflict with enforcement

• Accessible, trustworthy information they can verify on their own, without calling your agency

When states deliver this experience, you feel the difference. There would be fewer calls and emails asking for clarification on rules that should be self-explanatory. 

Less interpretive back-and-forth between citizens and enforcement officers trying to explain requirements that aren’t clearly published. 

More confidence in published guidance because it’s connected to the actual regulatory text rather than operating as a separate document that might drift out of sync.

This connection runs both ways. Public confusion creates agency workload. A regulation that’s hard to find generates phone calls. A rule written in dense legal language generates emails asking for plain-language explanation. A website that hasn’t been updated in three years generates complaints and distrust that staff must manage.

Better public access reduces work for government staff. When people can find accurate information themselves, agencies field fewer basic questions and can focus on more complex work. When public-facing rules match internal records, staff avoid wasting time reconciling different versions. Transparency isn’t just good for the public, it saves agencies from the hidden costs of keeping information locked away

Regulatory Reform as an Operating Model, not a Mandate

Reform works best when agencies have a single system of record for regulations, documented workflows that don’t rely on institutional memory, clear version history showing how rules evolved, and built-in audit trails that answer accountability questions without manual research. These aren’t aspirational features. They’re operational necessities for agencies expected to deliver transparency while managing increasing regulatory complexity.

The goal is integration. Publishing, policy management, and rulemaking should reinforce each other rather than operating as disconnected activities. When you draft a new rule, that draft should feed directly into the approval workflow, which should feed directly into the publication process, which should feed directly into the public-facing website. Version control should be automatic. Compliance documentation should be generated as a byproduct of normal work, not assembled after the fact for audits.

Some states are adopting purpose-built platforms to support this model. These systems treat regulatory management as infrastructure, not as a series of one-off projects. The approach is gaining traction as an emerging best practice, particularly among states facing increased pressure for transparency without corresponding increases in staff capacity.

The shift is from mandate to operating model. Mandates tell you what to achieve. Operating models give you the infrastructure to achieve it consistently. Reform becomes durable when it’s embedded in how work gets done:

• Maintaining accurate regulations is easier than maintaining inaccurate ones
• Publishing updates takes less effort than tracking down the current version manually
• Accountability is built into the workflow rather than added as a reporting requirement afterward

What State Agency Leaders Should Focus On Next

State agency leaders should start by asking direct questions about their current capacity:

• Do we know where every active regulation lives?
• Can we explain our rulemaking process consistently to new staff, auditors, or legislators?
• How quickly could we respond to an audit or legislative request for a complete regulatory inventory?
• What happens when key staff leave?
• Is our public-facing information aligned with internal records?

If you can’t answer these questions confidently, you’re in the majority. Most agencies struggle to do so. These questions reveal whether you’re prepared for transparency-focused reform or simply carrying out mandates without the infrastructure to support them.

You don’t need to fix everything at once. Start by identifying where gaps exist and deciding which ones create the most risk. Look to peer states for practical examples. Tennessee built centralized accountability. Montana redesigned public access to its Administrative Rules. Use these models as reference points and adapt them to your structure and constraints.

The path forward starts with acknowledging that regulatory reform requires infrastructure, not just intention.