Chain reaction: tackling redundancies in government rules and regulations

Government agencies play a pivotal role in crafting the rules and regulations that bring primary law – emanating from legislatures and parliaments – to life.The volume of rules and regulations has grown exponentially in many jurisdictions over the last few decades, with the total number of pages published in, for example, the US Code of Federal Regulations ballooning from 50,000 to more than 180,000 pages. This expansion translates to increased regulatory burdens for businesses and heavier administrative burdens for agencies.Any content library of that size is going to contain redundancies and overlaps. A natural question to ask is: “How much of any library of regulations contains overlapping material?” A natural follow-on question is: “What factors contribute to the creation of the overlap?” Getting to the root causes of regulatory overlaps The rapid increase in regulatory footprint since the 1970s has likely been exacerbated by the use of computers in the drafting process.