How many federal criminal laws and regulations are there? Nobody knows. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s because nobody in government has the time needed to go through more than three billion words in the federal register. And then there are the multitude of state and municipal laws and regulations, which are often far worse.
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.
Nobody in Congress sends out a flyer promoting their repeal of archaic, pointless and counterproductive laws as part of their re-election bid. Yes, it can be an achievement if you care about such matters, but most people want forward looking accomplishments to appeal to voters. Cleaning up what’s become known as “policy sludge” just isn’t very sexy, and is really hard work that mostly concerns nerds and policy wonks.
The Fed’s coin report should be easy to kill. But the law is still on the books 15 years since it became obsolete. What has made this problem intractable is the scale and complexity of the code. In the 1970s, then-law professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg hired a small army of students to search the code for sex bias. Under the Reagan Justice Department, one official led a failed two-year effort to count the number of federal crimes, noting you could have died and been “resurrected three times” and still not know the true number. Auditing the legal code by hand takes time no legislature can afford.
And it’s not just the feds.
Some of the laws still on America’s books are ugly remnants of the past. We found that dozens of municipalities still have provisions for segregated schools, poll taxes and male-only voter eligibility — practices that have long been unconstitutional. In San Francisco, the public health director has the power to “examine any person of either sex whom he has reasonable grounds to believe is afflicted with a venereal disease.” But outdated, unconstitutional laws are just one part of the story. Four findings from our scan of reporting requirements illustrate how policy sludge is handicapping government and undermining public trust.
While some zombie laws are offensive and unconstitutional, arcane reminders of our less than enlightened times, others are just expensive and pointless, regulations that may have made some sense in the moment but are now just a needless burden that nobody needs.
First, reporting requirements have ballooned. In California, they grew roughly 400 percent between 2000 and 2025. Staffing has not kept pace. In Maryland, we estimate that reading all reports the legislature ordered during fiscal year 2023 could take a single legislator up to 14 weeks. The session only runs 13.
Second, many reports are never even filed. In California, 30 percent of recurring reports appear to not have been fulfilled. A paper mandate that produces nothing satisfies no one. Reports should increase transparency, but the reality is that many of them may never be read. When San Francisco published a housing report and overstated evictions by 40 percent in July 2025, few noticed.
Third, costs and benefits vary enormously. At the high end, producing a single report in California consumed 3,500 hours of staff time and more than $870,000. Others take a few hours and are downloaded thousands of times.
There are reasons why such requirements are put in place, at least at the time. Often, those reasons turn out not to be nearly as good as initially believed. Other times, the reasons go away, even though the law remains. And often laws and regulations are performative, to appease a pressing public concern and create the appearance of doing something even if the something being done fails to fix the problem and creates other problems that are even worse.
For generations, we’ve been unable to address this “policy sludge” because of its sheer volume and the lack of motivation to get rid of zombie laws. Now, there may be a way to deal with it.
That constraint is now broken. My team developed an AI system capable of scanning municipal codes (3 billion words), state codes (500 million words) and the federal code (33 million words). This tech-based approach makes it much less costly to identify outdated fees, commissions, reports and discriminatory provisions.
AI has the capability of doing what mere mortals cannot, and will not: read and synthesize all this slop.
Governments are beginning to act, using our results to guide their code cleanup. San Francisco embarked on an extensive consultative process and passed legislation streamlining over a third of its reporting requirements. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-New York) issued an executive order for a “Regulatory Reset,” kicking off agency processes to identify and cut obsolete requirements. Though AI enables such reform, lasting change requires consultation, input and human judgment.
And there’s the rub. While AI can read it, can AI figure out what is obsolete and what still matters? Would, or should, anybody trust AI to identify what laws and regulations are slop and what still serves a purpose? Can the algos be adequately written to serve a salutary purpose without overkill or bias, or just being dead wrong about things that algo doesn’t understand?
The more durable fix is structural. In a forthcoming paper, we offer a model statute with three key elements: sunsetting reporting obligations, keeping a public digital repository and tracking the costs and uses of each obligation. Codifying law should make it legible.
The idea of using AI to achieve what we’ve been unable to do for years is certainly interesting, and likely the best opportunity we have to get rid of policy sludge and zombie laws. Passing a law that empowers AI to make the decision, however, pushes the experiment too far.