The Trump administration recently launched a new online portal to solicit deregulation recommendations. For members of Congress, identifying and recommending rules for elimination is a good opportunity for the legislative branch to renew its role in overseeing federal regulations. To that end, lawmakers should look to a new tool: artificial intelligence.
Recent Supreme Court decisions, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, have limited federal agencies' power to issue regulations not explicitly authorized in federal statute by Congress. The court's ruling to end the doctrine known as Chevron deference poses both an opportunity and challenge for Congress. Lawmakers can reassert their power to pass the nation's laws and not broadly defer to the executive branch to implement them. However, this will require additional congressional expertise and work, including passing detailed laws, to fill the void of curbed executive authority.
It's not clear that Congress is ready for the task. At a House Committee on Administration hearing last summer, Chairman Bryan Steil asked a panel of nonpartisan experts if Congress, as currently structured, "was set up to review the rules coming out of the administrative state?" Each witness answered no.
Restoring appropriate congressional authority over the federal regulatory state will require many changes. However, none is more critical than lawmakers' direct engagement in the regulatory process as a way to begin restoring congressional muscle memory to oversee regulations
In 2025, the Trump administration's initiative to solicit deregulation recommendations from the public is a historic opportunity for Congress to engage in regulatory oversight and encourage a governmentwide streamlining of outdated rules.
To do this work, Congress should follow the lead of states like Ohio and South Carolian, which have used AI to conduct retrospective regulatory reviews. Over the past three years, the Ohio state government has trimmed five million words from the state's code with the help of AI and human oversight, nearly one-third of the state's regulations. Senator Jon Husted, who led Ohio's effort when he served as Lieutenant Governor, recently introduced legislation to require a similar, AI-enhanced regulatory streamlining at the federal level.
But Congress need not wait for this smart bill to pass to begin the overdue work of regulatory streamlining. Members of Congress who favor deregulation should use AI tools to provide recommendations to the Trump administration's regulatory streamlining project.
For example, congressional committees and offices should use funding from the Modernization Initiatives Fund, which received $10 million from the House to fund technological innovations such as software to support congressional oversight and manage constituent data. In 2025, that Fund should make AI regulatory review tools broadly available to all House Committees and members to enable efficient oversight and retrospective regulatory reviews. Armed with this technology, members could proactively identify questionable or unnecessary regulatory language and provide recommendations to the White House for streamlining.
Congress could also enlist the Government Accountability Office to conduct retrospective regulatory reviews using artificial intelligence tools. GAO already has statutory authority to review specific federal regulations under the Congressional Review Act. In 2024, Congress added to GAO's regulatory oversight responsibilities by enacting the GAO Database Modernization Act, which requires agencies to issue reports to GAO when the agency “revokes, suspends, replaces, amends, or otherwise makes the rule ineffective, or the rule is made ineffective for any other reason,” to bring transparency to regulatory streamlining. In 2025, Congress could direct GAO to identify agencies' regulations that have outdated language or are inconsistent with the laws passed by Congress.
Lawmakers are right to consider legislative reforms to press federal agencies to employ technology to clean up the federal code. However, they should also use their other constitutional powers and enlist the entire legislative branch to conduct long-overdue oversight of federal regulations.
