When Reporting Becomes an Obstacle to Government Performance
In “The Abundance of Reports and Incapacity of States,” forthcoming in the Yale Journal on Regulation, Daniel E. Ho, Ananya Karthik, Emily Robitschek, Gabe Malek, and Derek Ouyang examine a deceptively ordinary administrative practice: the legislatively mandated report. Their central argument is not that reporting is inherently wasteful, but that reporting obligations accumulate without any reliable institutional mechanism for measuring their collective cost, continuing usefulness, or effect on government’s ability to perform substantive missions.
The authors place reporting mandates within the contemporary “abundance” debate, which asks whether procedural safeguards intended to promote accountability have gradually weakened state capacity. To test that proposition empirically, the researchers used the Statutory Research Assistant, an artificial-intelligence-based legal research system, to examine more than 500 million words across all fifty state statutory codes. Their methodology identified tens of thousands of provisions potentially requiring state executive agencies to prepare formal written reports and combined that statutory inventory with state data, agency surveys, filing records, cost estimates, and collaborations with officials in California, Maryland, and New York.
The findings complicate partisan explanations. Democratic-leaning jurisdictions generally impose more reporting requirements, even after accounting for government size, but partisanship explains only a small portion of the overall variation. The deeper problem is structural and nationwide: individually plausible mandates accumulate into a reporting thicket that no legislature or agency comprehensively manages.
California illustrates the consequences. The authors estimate that its reporting requirements increased by more than 400 percent between 2000 and 2025 without a comparable expansion in the civil service. Approximately 30 percent of the state’s continuing, recurring reporting requirements may never have been fulfilled. In Maryland, four participating agencies recommended eliminating nearly one-fifth of the requirements reviewed. The study also exposes extraordinary cost variation. Some reports are inexpensive, while one required approximately 3,500 staff hours and more than $870,000 to produce. Yet report use varies just as sharply, and cost does not appear systematically connected to readership or policy value.
The article’s most important contribution is therefore institutional rather than ideological. Transparency cannot be evaluated solely by counting how many reports government requires. A reporting mandate that is obsolete, duplicative, unread, or disconnected from an active program can consume capacity while producing little accountability. Conversely, strategically important reports can improve oversight and decision-making. Reform must distinguish between the two.
The authors propose default sunset dates, automatic expiration when the underlying program ends, prospective and continuing cost estimates, centralized digital repositories, unique report identifiers, and replacement of static quantitative reports with automated dashboards or queryable open data. These reforms would not eliminate accountability. They would make accountability measurable, reviewable, and proportionate.
For federal contractors, the analogous lesson is clear: contractual reporting obligations should be inventoried, assigned, costed, documented, and periodically tested for continuing relevance. Compliance should support performance rather than become an unmanaged substitute for it. The broader principle is disciplined obligation management: organizations should know what must be reported, why it matters, who owns it, and what evidence proves completion.
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FedClause360™ - The tracker helps contractors extract and organize FAR and DFARS obligations, record compliance status, and identify the documentation needed to demonstrate performance. Applied to reporting obligations, it can help prevent contract clauses, certifications, notices, disclosures, and recurring deliverables from becoming the contractor’s own unmanaged “reporting thicket.”
This article is provided for general informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, regulatory, compliance, public-policy, or government-contracting advice. Government contractors should evaluate reporting and recordkeeping obligations under their specific contracts, incorporated clauses, agency requirements, and applicable laws in consultation with qualified counsel.