An Insider's Guide to Regulatory Reform
Montana Lieutenant Governor Kristen Juras shares how she and Governor Greg Gianforte kick-started their state-wide Red Tape Relief initiative.
Regulatory reform has a long, complex history. Tension has always existed between the role of the legislature to establish policy through the adoption of legislation and the authority of federal and state agencies to implement this legislation. The adoption of the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in 1946 clarified that federal agencies may only issue regulations within the authority granted to them by the legislature and established a rulemaking process requiring public notice and comment. States followed with the passage of similar administrative procedure acts.Over the years state and federal agencies have increasingly created regulations, without implementing a systematic review of identifying and eliminating outdated, unnecessary, inefficient or burdensome rules. Many agencies have stretched or exceeded their rulemaking authority. Today, it is widely acknowledged that overregulation has negatively impacted economic development, innovation and business development. This has driven many state agencies to take a long, hard look at how they can ease some of the burden regulations have on the everyday person.For Montana Lieutenant Governor Kristen Juras, the path to regulatory reform began by identifying Montanans in need—and started well before she was elected into office in 2020.[esper_resource_quote layout="2" count="1"]
Frequently Asked Questions
Esper’s Regulation & Code Management module is a platform that moves rulemaking and regulatory drafting out of disconnected tools (spreadsheets, emails, shared drives) and into a unified, auditable workflow. It supports collaborative drafting, version control, automated publishing, compliance deadlines, and AI-powered search across your regulations. Esper
Esper is primarily targeted at government agencies (state, local, regulatory bodies) that must manage, publish, and enforce rules, codes, or regulations. It helps modernize the regulatory process in a transparent, auditable fashion.
Some of the core features include:
- Collaborative drafting with versioning and redlines
- Workflow and approval routing (assign owners, set deadlines, send reminders)
- Automated publishing in appropriate formats
- AI-enabled search to quickly find portions of regulations with citation support
- Task management and visibility into bottlenecks
Esper maintains all drafts, redlines, and versions within a single system. That ensures every change is tracked, auditable, and tied to the appropriate approval steps, so stakeholders can always see “who changed what when.”
Every rulemaking task (e.g. drafting, review, public comment, approval) is assigned an owner and due date. The system sends reminders, tracks overdue items, and makes bottlenecks visible so leadership can intervene.
