Something rather remarkable just happened in Idaho. The state legislature opted to—in essence—repeal the entire state regulatory code. The cause may have been dysfunction across legislative chambers, but the result is serendipitous. A new governor is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to repeal an outdated and burdensome regulatory code and replace it with a more streamlined and sensible set of rules. Other states should be paying close attention

2026-10-10: Sunsetting Rules Stick

Conventional regulatory reform fails because repealing rules requires overcoming concentrated bureaucratic inertia on an issue-by-issue basis. Idaho made its cuts permanent by institutionalizing an automatic sunsetting mechanism: every chapter of the state administrative code was assigned an expiration date, forcing agencies to affirmatively re-justify rules to prevent them from vanishing. By shifting the default from permanent regulatory accretion to mandatory re-authorization, the state eliminated 50% of its administrative code and cut total rule pages from 8,200 down to under 4,800. manhattan.institute