Podcast: Regulating social media

Ninety years ago this month, the Federal Register Act was signed into law in a bid to shine a light on the rules driving President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—using the best tools of the time to make government more transparent and accountable. But what began as a bold step toward clarity has since collapsed under its own weight: over 100,000 pages, a million rules, and a public lost in a regulatory haystack. Today, the Trump administration’s sweeping push to cut red tape—including using AI to hunt obsolete rules—raises a deeper challenge: how do we prevent bureaucracy from rebuilding itself?

What’s needed is a new approach: rewriting the rule book itself as machine-executable code that can be analyzed, implemented, or streamlined at scale. Businesses could simply download and execute the latest regulations on their systems, with no need for costly legal analysis and compliance work. Individuals could use apps or online tools to quickly figure out how rules affect them.