That’s not an isolated incident. Justice Neil Gorsuch made a similar point in a 2024 Atlantic essay, drawn from his book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law: a Social Security Administration report on its own printing operations took 95 employees four months to complete.
Both are examples of what happens when legislatures create reporting mandates but don’t get around to killing them.
Daniel Ho and his coauthors at Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab set out to measure the scale of the problem in a new paper, “The Abundance of Reports and Incapacity of States.” They built an AI tool to search all 500 million words of legal code across all 50 states, then checked their findings against internal data from three state governments: California’s Government Operations Agency, Maryland’s Governor’s Office, and New York’s Governor’s Office.
The numbers are worse than the $1 Coin Program suggests. California’s reporting requirements grew from fewer than ten in 1940 to roughly 3,800 by November 2025 — more than 400% growth since 2000 alone, with no comparable growth in the civil service required to process it. Across all 50 states, the researchers identified 41,925 statutory provisions containing 47,305 distinct reporting requirements.
A comprehensive review of Maryland’s mandated reports found it would take state legislators 140 to 558 hours to read them all — 3.5 to 14 weeks of full-time reading, for a legislative session that lasts 13 weeks. When asked, Maryland staff suggested nearly 20% of the requirement could be eliminated or consolidated without losing anything. California’s own tracking database suggests roughly 30% of ongoing, recurring reports may simply never get filed at all. No one enforces it. No one, apparently, is checking.
That last point matters more than it sounds. In April 2023, San Francisco’s Planning Department overstated citywide evictions by about 1,600 — a 40% error — in its Housing Balance Report. Nobody caught it before publication, almost certainly because almost nobody was reading it. “If all reports are treated as high priority, none are,” the Stanford authors write. One Maryland agency official put it more bluntly: “We are not quite sure if anyone utilizes the report for policy purposes.”
Similarly, Kansas City’s 2021 audit of its Community Improvement Districts revealed that one-third had not published budgets and a quarter had not filed annual reports—both required by state law. The Council subsequently tightened reporting requirements and put the auditor’s recommendations into city code. This is the problem in miniature: the city increased its reporting requirements, but it did not wrestle with the bigger issue of whether more reporting equals more transparency or better policymaking.
Ho’s researchers found more colorful examples going back to the Red Scare — reporting requirements written for a threat that no longer exists, still technically in force. Congressional staffers, per the paper, have taken to using unread reports as doorstops.
Every reporting mandate was issued for a plausible reason: a scandal, a promise, a genuine desire for oversight. The problem is aggregation. A legislature that adds a reporting requirement every session and repeals almost none ends up, decades later, with a code nobody can fully read and a government that can’t tell which of its own rules are being followed.
The Stanford researchers offer model legislation — the “Streamlining Administrative Reporting Act” — built around a genuinely useful idea: stop assuming a report is permanent or worth the effort. Lawmakers should consider the time and resources such a report would require, default to a five-year sunset unless the legislature actively renews it, and an automatic ending when the program it’s reporting on ends. The report also recommends a public digital repository so it’s possible to tell which reports actually exist, and, perhaps most promising, the option to replace a static written report with a public dashboard when it performs the same job.
More reporting was supposed to mean more transparency. Instead, it’s produced a pile large enough that nobody — not legislators, not agencies, not the public — can see through it. The fix isn’t more oversight. It’s fewer things to oversee.
