The Office Is the Policy: Why Regulatory Reform Fails Without Ownership

Nearly every state has passed regulatory reform at some level: sunset provisions, enforceable cost-benefit requirements, small business impact statements, periodic review mandates. Yet regulatory requirements keep accumulating, and the reforms already on the books rarely slow them down.

The reason is not that these policies are wrong. It's a problem of transparent ownership. A sunset clause with no one enforcing it becomes a rubber stamp: the agency certifies "continued need" every four years and moves on. A cost-benefit analysis requirement with no reviewer becomes a compliance exercise the agency grades itself on. A transparency mandate with no maintainer becomes a static PDF. The pattern repeats across states because the failure is structural: no review body is positioned to evaluate cumulative burdens across the whole executive branch, enforce consistent analytical standards, or ensure a governor's regulatory policy or the legislature’s statutory mandates are actually implemented. Each agency sees its own mission, but nobody sees the system.

This gap is what an Office of Regulatory Management is designed to close.

What an ORM actually is

An ORM is a small, dedicated office with supervisory authority over the regulatory work of executive branch agencies. It is the state-level analog of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Its core functions:

An ORM maintains a baseline catalog of every regulatory requirement in effect, so the state knows what it is actually enforcing. It reviews proposed and final rules and the cost-benefit analyses behind them, with authority to return rules that don't meet legal or analytical standards. It compels an annual Unified Regulatory Plan listing every anticipated regulatory and guidance action, so nothing moves in the dark. It supervises reduction targets and retrospective review of the existing stock, increasingly with AI-assisted analysis. It also reviews guidance documents, FAQs, and manuals to ensure agencies are not imposing binding requirements without going through rulemaking.

None of this requires a large bureaucracy. Virginia ran the model with a staff of four.

The proof of concept

Virginia created its ORM in 2022 and paired it with a directive that agencies cut at least 25% of the requirements in their regulations. Over four years, agencies streamlined 35.70% of regulatory requirements, exceeding the target, while every executive branch regulatory action, including previously exempt actions, moved onto a single searchable public platform. Separately, the state's economic analysis estimates annual savings to Virginians of roughly $1.4 billion. Several states, including Texas, Indiana, Alaska, and South Carolina, have since implemented versions of the model, and ALEC has adopted model legislation for states that want a statutory path.

The lesson from Virginia is not just that the numbers are large. It's that the numbers came from ordinary agencies doing ordinary work under an office that tracked progress, set standards, and pushed back. The office was the difference.

How the ORM makes other reforms work

Regulatory reform is best understood as four mutually reinforcing categories: transparency, discipline on new rules, review of existing rules, and permitting reform. An ORM is not a substitute for any of them. It is the institution that keeps each from decaying into paper.

Transparency reforms: a complete, searchable, machine-readable public record of regulations, guidance, dockets, and analyses is the data foundation for everything else. But a portal is only useful if it’s up to date. An ORM has both the mandate and the internal incentives to keep the record complete, because its own review work depends on it. Clean citations and a full guidance compendium are also what make AI-assisted retrospective review effective rather than noisy.

Discipline on new rules: cost-benefit analysis, strict notice-and-comment, and unified planning require a reviewer with the authority to request additional information and, if necessary, say no. Accepting whatever an agency submits is rubber-stamping; pushing back is what creates the filter. A CBA requirement without an ORM is a form. With an ORM, it is a standard.

Reforms to the existing stock: sunset provisions, reduction targets, regulatory budgets, and retrospective review triggers all depend on someone converting agency obligations into tracked, enforced commitments. Virginia's experience before its reforms is instructive: agencies routinely ignored periodic review or summarily certified continued need without analysis. The ORM turned that same statutory obligation into a working discipline.

Legislative-branch reforms: REINS-style approval requirements, standing committee review, and sunset-via-approval operate on a parallel track with an ORM. These policies complement rather than compete. Executive-side review improves the quality of what reaches legislators; legislative review adds a democratic check the executive cannot supply itself. In states with partial legislative review infrastructure already in place, a new ORM coordinates with it, rather than duplicating it.

Permitting reform: inventories, public dashboards, and firm timeline commitments are where regulatory modernization becomes concrete for citizens. Homes are built, businesses open, and projects move forward. It also depends on exactly the capabilities an ORM provides: analytical capacity to map processes and economic stakes, plus standing authority to hold agencies to their reported timelines.

The takeaway

States considering regulatory reform tend to ask which policy to pass. The better question is who will own the system after the bill signing. Sunset clauses, CBA mandates, transparency requirements, and permitting deadlines have all existed for decades. Virginia added an institution accountable for making them real, and the results followed. The model legislation exists. The proof of concept exists. What each state needs next is the office.