Welcome back to Gray Matters, the podcast of the Seaboarding Grace Center for the study of the administrative state.

I'm J. Slington, the Gray Center's Policy and Strategy Director. I'm joined today by Reeve Bull.

Reeve used to be the research director for the administrative conference of the United States,

but most recently, he led Virginia's new Office of Regulatory Management under former

Governor Glenn Youngkin. We had Reeve and Andrew Wheeler on the show back in 2023 as they were

getting started, and Wheeler was the first director of ORM. Reeve took Andrew Wheeler on the show back in 2023 as they were getting started,

and Wheeler was the first director of ORM. Reeve took the reins in 2024, and now we're grateful to have him with us to talk about Virginia's recent experiment with regulatory reform.

Reeve, welcome back to Gray Matters. Thanks, Chase. I'm delighted to be on again.

Well, I'm really appreciative for you doing this so soon after getting through all the success in Virginia.

And I was hoping, for people who might not have heard that first episode, can you start back at the beginning?

Maybe even with the early push for regulatory reform back with that 2018 pilot program.

Can you tell us about that and then how the Yonkin administration built on that from there?

Sure. Yeah. You know, so, yeah, you're exactly right. In 2018, there was a bill passed,

very bipartisan, Alad, by the way. I think there may have been one or two dissenting

votes, but it passed overwhelmingly. And essentially what this bill did is, one, create an inventory

of all regulatory requirements in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And then two, it tasked two agencies,

Department of Criminal Justice Services, and the Department of Professional and Occupational

regulation with reducing those requirements by 25%. And those two pieces are both important. And I'll sort of take a second to explain why. So with respect to requirements, seems obvious, but if you look at, you know, prior to that point, what was happening in a lot of states or in federal agencies is the focus was less on requirements

and regulations and more total numbers of regulations or total pages of regulations. And I think

what was really innovative or a really good idea in this pilot program is to put the focus

on how many requirements, how many must,

shells, how many things are you required to do? Because I think that's a more tailored way to look

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