What bureaucratic rules and regulations would you be in favor of reducing, eliminating, or at least streamlining?

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It doesn’t have to be a particular regulation. It can be federal, state, or even local.

Examples could be permitting, licensing, environmental, food/drug, etc. There’s a whole world of rules out there and I know we have all experienced inefficiencies at some level, somewhere in our personal and professional lives that makes us ask “why do we do it this way?”

Comments

  1. AutoModerator Avatar

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    It doesn’t have to be a particular regulation. It can be federal, state, or even local.

    Examples could be permitting, licensing, environmental, food/drug, etc. There’s a whole world of rules out there and I know we have all experienced inefficiencies at some level, somewhere in our personal and professional lives that makes us ask “why do we do it this way?”

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  2. BoratWife Avatar

    I’m an extremist against nimbyism 

  3. Pizzasaurus-Rex Avatar

    When conservatives talk about the problems with regulations, they always talk about how unnecessarily difficult it is to be a licensed hairdresser, but they never seem to fix it. Well they convinced me on that one.

  4. unkorrupted Avatar

    Can you be specific about some federal regulation that you find excessive? 

    I’m not interested in conceding hypotheticals framed from a position that sounds like it’s based on right wing assumptions. 

    We’ve seen where right wing assumptions lead.

  5. Lamballama Avatar

    The number of stages of community review for any infrastructure project are honestly ridiculous – any one person has multiple ways to hold up necessary improvements for years, then someone else can come in and raise the exact same challenges and have to relitigate everything

    Also, with CAD being a thing, we can totally remove manual review for construction planning

    Realistically, human anything for most bureaucracy is unnecessary – I get the theory is that they can respond to new challenges and edge cases, but they either aren’t given or aren’t willing to use the leeway necessary to do so, so just replace them and call it a day. Why are we paying people actual money, in an actual building we pay money for, to type in answers on a form I filled out by hand, then hand me back a different form? Why are we sending out other forms by snail mail to have you collect your answers in another form which ultimately gets sent back by snail mail?

  6. snowbirdnerd Avatar

    I’m for ending government intervention into medical care. Federal and state governments should stay out of reproductive rights and trans procedures. 

  7. TakingLslikepills Avatar

    I think the government should enforce environmental regulation. I don’t think private individuals should suing on the behalf of the environment.

    I think eminent domain should be much more aggressively utilized for expanding public and non-car transit.

    Any rule put up to protect a monopoly or oligopoly for the benefit of a public corporation.

  8. Consistent_Case_5048 Avatar

    I work for state government. We could benefit from just some analysis of our procedures and come up with ways to make our work more streamlined. We could reevaluate our expectations and get some attitude adjustments, as well. I had someone four or five steps up the ladder say to me last year say, “three to four months is nothing in bureaucratic time.”

    I’d also get rid of the concept of “chain of command.” We’re not a paramilitary organization. No one’s life is on the line. The chain of command just becomes adults playing a game of telephone.

  9. hammertime84 Avatar

    I’m not sure what you mean by regulations exactly, but things I’d put in that category that I’ve found annoying, outright stupid, or wastes of money in recent years:

    Schools here (Texas) are required to have armed security

    Schools in Louisiana are required to display the 10 commandments and Texas is currently passing the same.

    Book bans in general.

    Cheap, pistol caliber rifles like hi point ones aren’t allowed in some states (e.g., Washington).

    Every other driver’s license renewal here has to be in-person instead of always online.

    State employees in many states are required to be in an office when there’s no reason for them to be.

    Tons of limits around drug purchases, even alcohol. Texas is even planning to ban thc soon.

  10. Subject_Stand_7901 Avatar

    Most of them. And not because I’m a fan of Dogeism, but because one way to rebuild trust in government is to make it faster and more efficient and not a complete PITA to deal with. With the rise of even marginally competent AI, you could streamline so many processes that you would only need humans around to monitor the systems and provide customer support. 

    Example: I’m building a house in Houston. It took 4 months to get the plans approved because the printer the city was using to print out our plans was so low on toner that it wasn’t fully printing our blueprints. What did the city do? Keep kicking our plans back to us for revisions with no guidance. Try to call? Have fun waiting for hours on hold. 

    A marginally competent AI system would be able to do this whole process 100% more efficiently than the system they have in place now and would have cut our development time by months.

  11. ampacket Avatar

    Most regulations exist for a reason. Usually in direct reaction to someone being harmed in some way. They don’t just exist in a vacuum, nor were they formed out of thin air.

    Like, the reason we have safe roadways and clean drinking water and houses that don’t collapse and safe restaurant food and banks that can’t steal from you and working conditions that won’t injure or kill you, is because of regulations put in place directly because of people dying or otherwise being hurt. They’re a response to prevent that bad thing from happening in the future.

    When left to their own devices, private companies will always, always, always prioritize profits over safety and well-being. ALWAYS. And the only way to stop that is through forceful regulatory legislation.

    I say this as a previous 8-year Starbucks manager and current middle school teacher, whose parents both worked 30+ years in banking/finance. Believe me, I know “regulations.”

  12. Idrinkbeereverywhere Avatar

    I think HOAs should be illegal

  13. fjvgamer Avatar

    A friend of mine had a water ice cart for awhile in Los Angeles. It became too expensive to run cause he had to keep it in a space that that special food prep areas for washing veggies and things. Reasonable for a restaurant but kind of crazy for opening packages of frozen flavored ice and scooping them into cups to sell.

  14. BettisBus Avatar

    We need major zoning reforms so builders can build tall, beautiful apartment buildings. Abolishing rent control would also incentivize building new housing.

  15. jquest303 Avatar

    Who cares? We have an idiot in control who thrives on chaos and fancies himself a king. It’s gonna be years before anyone’s opinion even matters.

  16. MidnyteTV Avatar

    Zoning, business permitting (things like alcohol, cannabis, tobacco), process for the sake of process.

  17. metapogger Avatar

    Local zoning laws limiting the type residential housing needs to be reduced/abolished. Probably the only way to do this is in a state or federal level. Zoning laws are a big part of why houses are so expensive: you are not aloud to build houses in the places people want to live.

  18. toastedclown Avatar

    In general I think that regulations exist for a purpose, and should be left in places unless someone makes the case that either there is a better way of acheiving that purpose or that the purpose is a bad one. But:

    I want to nuke 95% of zoning regulations from Federal orbit.

    I want to modernize building codes to eliminate requirements that have been statistically shown to be ineffective or dubious, like the requirements for double-loaded corridors in apartment buildings. However, I am not interested in removing regulations just because they annoy developers. They have to be ineffective and annoy developers.

    I think people should be able to grow or not grow whatever plants they want in their own yard unless they are creating a genuine environmental or health hazard.

    I want to get rid of the three-tier system and repeal the part of the 21st amendment that essentially makes alcohol an exception to the commerce clause.

  19. 7figureipo Avatar

    I think we need to separate initiatives aimed at correcting social injustices from projects on an individual level. For example, we shouldn’t have requirements to “work on hiring more of group X” in order to even bid for federal funding to build something, like rural broadband or a semiconductor factory. We should focus efforts on more general approaches that apply across industries as separate legislation/regulation.

    We also need to take a hard look at the emergency powers democratic governors have invoked to rebuild infrastructure after a disaster. Some of those can be applied to new projects, and therefore used to reduce/remove regulation, and still ensure that we meet goals for protecting the environment and doing other socially good things.

    We also need to stop having the government be just a source of money that companies use to do things, like build housing or the like. The government needs to become a more active participant in the market, and that means getting rid of legislation and regulations that restrict and prohibit it from doing so.

  20. ranmaredditfan32 Avatar

    Anything that would help push back against NIMBYism would be good start. Same with some of the licensing regulations. Though alternatively we also need more or at least smarter regulation in some areas. Some businesses just accept OSHA fines right now as the price of doing business, while the largest and least punished form of theft in the U.S. is wage theft. It ridiculous and counterproductive.

  21. GeeWilakers420 Avatar

    I think the way in which laws are proposed and enforced is ridiculous. Like, if tomorrow we figured out that somehow found out that a child in bumfu– Kansas had figured out how to make Herioen from pencil shavings, highlighter fluid, and scotch tape. Then by Thursday, these products should no longer be able to be legally brought to school. I’m not saying we should put Mrs. Parker in handcuffs because she failed to check her bags, but the fact that we are still finding things like asbestos in modern buildings is insane.