Columbus, OH – On Wednesday, The Buckeye Institute released a new policy brief, Making the Grade: Ohio’s Success Cutting Regulations, which reviews and grades how Ohio’s state agencies fared in cutting regulations. The Buckeye Institute analysis gives state agencies a B in complying with the Ohio Senate Bill 9, which requires every state agency to cut regulations by 10 percent by June 30, 2023, with the ultimate goal of cutting regulations by 30 percent by June 30, 2025.

“Ohio’s state agencies earned a solid B grade in cutting regulations due to legislative oversight and vigilance,” said Greg R. Lawson, a research fellow at The Buckeye Institute and the author of Making the Grade. “To improve Ohio’s grade and solidify the state as the nation’s leader in reg reform, lawmakers should look to artificial intelligence to find and eliminate regulatory redundancies.”

In the paper, Lawson urged lawmakers to:

• Hold state agencies accountable for “incorporating by reference” to maintain regulatory burdens and thereby violate the spirit of Senate Bill 9; and 
• Expand computer and AI assistance to find and eliminate regulatory redundancies and to determine whether Ohio’s regulations are outliers compared to regulations in other states.

The Buckeye Institute gave Ohio an A for the Cut Red Tape Ohio website, which Senate Bill 9 required, and has already successfully helped eliminate duplicative regulatory oversight. For state agency cooperation in meeting statutory deadlines to cut regulations, Ohio received a disappointing C- due to the fact that “some agencies seem inclined to satisfy the letter of the law without embracing the spirit of the law” by “striking some Administration Code restrictions” but not meaningfully reducing the regulatory burden on Ohioans.

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