Streamlining Government
Literally for decades, I have advocated that the Iowa legislature should engage in a multi-year project to purge bad, outdated, or overly complicated laws. And it’s pretty simple…the Code of Iowa is the set of laws, passed by a legislature and signed by a governor. The number of volumes has exploded over time, now standing at eight volumes including tables and index. When I was a young lawyer, it was half that many. You can buy the new set for $125 from the state.
My idea was to take a single volume a year, and the first job of a legislature was to go page by page and eliminate or simplify whatever laws were in there, with an idea toward keeping what’s needed and getting rid of what is not. A single volume a year doesn’t sound like too much to ask. And of course, laws in volume 1 are connected to certain provisions in volume 5, so it’s not as pure as I make it seem…but it doesn’t matter, no one has listened to that suggestion anyway.
But some hope for something similar came from the desk of Iowa’s governor this week. Gov. Reynolds signed an executive order putting a moratorium on administrative rulemaking and instituting a comprehensive review of all existing administrative rules. It’s no doubt part of the plan she announced to streamline and reduce the number of state executive departments.
The governor’s statement read, “Iowa’s Administrative Code contains over 20,000 pages and 190,000 restrictive terms, putting undue burden on Iowans and the state’s economy, increasing costs for employers, slowing job growth, and impacting private sector investments…We’re taking a commonsense approach that gets government out of the way and leads to a more robust economy in every community.”
The announcement said the Executive Order also directs a “comprehensive evaluation and rigorous cost benefit analysis” of existing rules to evaluate their public benefits, whether the benefits justify the cost, and whether there are less restrictive alternatives to achieve their intended goal.
That Iowa Administrative Code was so cumbersome and had so many changes that it was in loose leaf format, with updates sent to subscribers twice a month…you’d have to go through each of the dozens of binders and replace pages regularly just to stay current.
Partisans may quibble about motives, but who can honestly say our bureaucracy could not benefti from a top to bottom review?
Sort of like “spring cleaning” for government. Don’t tell me you don’t have extra stuff you don’t need. Them, too.
