State Regulatory Relief (In Progress)

Project: State Regulatory Compliance Processes: Lessons Learned from Covid-19

Description: Over the past 18 months, the nation’s economy and society have been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. To protect public health while minimizing economic disruption, state and local governments took action to improve the regulatory compliance process, such as:

• Utilized additional online mechanisms for some regulatory compliance processes;
• Addressed business pain points and concerns about timeliness; and
• Improved sequencing and routing of regulatory approvals (for example, by allowing offices to do concurrent reviews)

Supported by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Academy's Center for Intergovernmental Partnerships has been enlisted to:

• Identify the challenges that the pandemic and economic recession posed to state regulatory compliance systems;
• Identify key regulatory compliance process innovations at the state level during COVID-19;
• Determine which of these are permanent and which are temporary;
• Evaluate the impact of these innovations, including whether they are long-term improvements or short-term fixes; and
• Develop recommendations for how states can improve regulatory compliance processes in a post-COVID-19 world.