It’s election season, and therefore time for certain candidates for state office to trot out the well-worn campaign promise to “cut regulations.” This sounds like a great idea — in general — but seldom if ever describes anything more specific.

It’s not much different than promises to “cut taxes,” or “cut spending.” A goal so ill-defined is not a serious political or governing principle. It’s an empty slogan.

When I was a lawyer at the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, I had a personal experience with this issue that is instructive. The Authority was a separate, quasi-public entity governed by a board of three members, with staggered terms, all appointed by the Governor. After I’d worked there for a short time, political control of the board turned over from Democrat to Republican – when one of the member’s terms expired and Gov. William Weld filled the vacancy with a Republican.

Soon thereafter, I was visited by a young staffer from the Governor’s office, who informed me that the Governor wanted the regulations that governed the use and policing of the Turnpike “reduced.” Now, the Turnpike was known for having more stringent requirements than applied to other roads state-wide. For instance, the transport of an over-sized load required a certain kind of state police escort, while these vehicles, as I recall, did not always require this extent of coverage on other interstate highways. There were other such regulations specific to the Turnpike that I don’t recall now, 30 years later.

Assuming the Turnpike Authority had good reason to adopt these regulations when they did, it would still have been a fine idea to compare the state DOT’s regulations with the Turnpike’s, and look for ways to reduce any regulatory burden imposed by the Turnpike Authority that could not be justified by, for instance, safety concerns.

However, that kind of review was not what they wanted. That would have required doing the hard, tedious, slow, work of government: reviewing and comparing the specific language and requirements of the regulations, gathering information from the state police, and the trucking industry and other stakeholders, to determine if the burden of the regulations outweighed the benefit of any safety benefits, for instance. Additionally, when public agencies propose revisions to their regulations, the law requires that the public be notified and provided an opportunity to comment, and that the agency respond to these comments on the record. 

Which is to say there’s a process, meant to ensure that government agencies do not act, in a term from Administrative Law, in ways that are “arbitrary and capricious.” To understand the gist of that legal standard, one need only observe what the Trump Administration does every day – that is what it means to govern in an arbitrary and capricious manner. The so-called DOGE effort is the most reckless example I have seen in my lifetime. (I am still waiting for my “DOGE check,” by the way.)

However, pressed into this task of “reducing regulations,” I questioned further how we were to measure this undefined “reduction” – by eliminating numbered provisions, number of pages, lines of text? Unsurprisingly, the staffer had no specific thoughts on this matter, other than to deliver the directive of “reducing” regulations. As I recall, I never heard another thing about it, and six months later I left the agency for a better opportunity. (Ironically, 20 years later I was a Deputy Secretary of Transportation in Massachusetts, when the state legislature and Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick implemented a transportation reform act. This comprehensive reorganization of the transportation agencies in Massachusetts eliminated the Turnpike as a separate entity entirely and absorbed it into the state DOT, ensuring that one set of state-wide regulations applied to all interstate highways in the state.)

So it’s all well and good to vow to cut regulations. And it certainly makes a great sound bite in a political ad. But it doesn’t really mean anything. Which regulations? And why?

Laws and regulations are adopted to insure our health, safety and welfare. Review of these regulations across all aspects of government should be a continuing effort, to identify ones that can be revised, simplified, or simply eliminated. And talking to the parties typically complaining of unnecessary burden, the businesses or individuals most affected, is the best place to start.

While candidates love to wield “cutting regulations” as a campaign slogan, the actual work of accomplishing this is more of an effort than they often seem willing to pursue once elected. All too often, it is simply an empty slogan, forgotten as soon as Election Day has passed.

Peter O’Connor, of Mystic, is a retired attorney and state and local government official.