This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Inside a sweltering warehouse in July, a crowd huddled around portable air conditioners, gathered for an announcement from Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The governor, suit jacket off, said he had already reduced 25% of Virginia's regulatory requirements — and wanted to cut 10% more with the help of artificial intelligence.
“When I made a promise that we were going to reduce the regulatory burdens on businesses in Virginia by 25%, I didn't know how we were going to do it, but I knew we could,” he said. “My friends, it's about setting targets and hitting them and then blowing through them and doing even more.”
The new goal is to make cuts to 35% of regulations. Helping him do that is a small team of 20-somethings working for Vulcan Technologies, an AI company that wants its product to replace much of government.
“We started this company with the idea that with AI, you can actually supplant the unelected administrative state and actualize the will of the elected officials,” said Vulcan CEO Tanner Jones in an interview with VPM News. “The vision is: The elected officials are equipped with the most sophisticated technology ever devised, and they can actually implement what they were voted to do.”
Vulcan’s three-month, $150,000 contract was set to wrap by the end of August. If successful, it would mean that by the end of Youngkin’s term in January 2026, he and his administration would have made a massive influence on Virginia’s regulatory state. It already means Virginia is an early adopter in a largely uncharted territory of AI in government: San Francisco, South Carolina, and Ohio have also made efforts in the space.
“It's sort of another set of eyes,” said Reeve Bull, director of Virginia’s Office of Regulatory Management, which oversees regulation and permitting statewide. “These agentic AI tools go in and do some additional analysis, and then the agencies will get these reports, and then, based on that, decide what additional cuts they may be able to make.”
Bull confirmed that the AI-aided deregulation efforts would shrink the size of Virginia’s state workforce: “We will need humans in the loop to ensure the goals of the elected officials are reflected in the technology. But these teams can be much smaller and therefore friendlier to the taxpayer.”
Full effects of regulatory change are unclear
In June 2022, Youngkin established ORM as a new agency and charged it with the regulatory reduction. It supplanted an effort by Democratic former Gov. Ralph Northam to also reform regulations.
According to the governor’s office, Virginia has 340,000 regulatory requirements, which Bull said were counted by each agency at ORM’s request.
Youngkin told press at the warehouse in July that the 25% figure comes from 89,000 of those regulations being “cut, combined, streamlined, and as a result, collectively reduced.”
Examples included the Department of Environmental Quality’s stormwater manual being shortened by 75%, a Department of Housing and Community Development regulation allowing stairs to be narrower and taller, and changes to how the Department of Transportation regulates access to state highways.
Some of these changes are large chunks: The VDOT state highway access change accounted for 21,684 of the 89,000 changes, according to an ORM tally.
The Youngkin administration said this saves Virginians $1.2 billion a year, but the full effect of this change will have to shake out over time, experts told VPM News.
Cary Coglianese, the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Program on Regulation, said it is easy to exaggerate the extent of deregulation by citing topline numbers like fewer pages or words.
“There might be 25 or 35% of those pages or words that nobody reads anymore or even cares about anymore,” he said. “It's not clear that, if no one really cares about them anymore, they really result in any meaningful economic benefits.”
Philip Agee, a professor of construction at Virginia Tech, said the housing changes will have to be looked at holistically: “What we really need to do is study some of the outputs and outcomes of these buildings and these changes. We tend to make changes and don't ever go back and look systematically at what the output or the outcome leads to.”
Now, another 10% of statewide regulations are in Youngkin’s sights.
“Thousands of agents running concurrently”
Cutting regulations is tedious and difficult work. Virginia’s red tape consists of millions of words on its own — to say nothing of references to federal and state law, which are lengthy too. Sometimes, those underlying laws have been changed or repealed.
The task is being tackled by Bull, the son of a plumber who speaks with a little twang, and Jones, who powerlifted competitively at Dartmouth College and references the French philosopher Montesquieu and James Madison as inspirations for the work he does.
Vulcan’s AI product, “Justinian” — named for the Byzantine emperor who rewrote Roman law — works broadly in six steps, according to the company’s website.
The product gathers the commonwealth’s regulations and state and federal law and divides them into discrete provisions. Then, Jones says, “thousands of [AI] agents running concurrently trained on American case law” determine what could be changed and draft potential rule changes.
Generally speaking, regulations have to conform with state and federal law, as well as other regulations. Jenn Pahlka, a founder of the US Digital Service (now the US DOGE Service) and a fellow at the Niskanen Center, said that regulations have grown “by adding and adding and never subtracting.”
“I think the public has not been as aware as they should be of how regulations, and processes and procedure, has really accumulated over time, and the ways in which that creates real sclerosis in government,” she said.
Virginia’s state agencies should now be making recommendations for what the new regulations should say, an economic impact analysis, and a roadmap for a statewide rollout, according to Vulcan’s contract with ORM. (VPM News could not independently confirm this with ORM before publication; we will update the story as needed.)
It’s not clear what sort of opposition, if any, there has been in Virginia to the efforts. VPM News contacted prominent environmental and housing groups, a member of the state’s Administrative Law Commission, and several Democratic lawmakers — all of whom indicated they weren’t following the deregulation effort.
“The scrutiny needs to be more serious”
Jones, the Vulcan Tech CEO, is a former regulatory policy fellow at the Cicero Institute — a conservative think tank founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. He's also advised by Jonathan Wolfson, formerly Cicero’s policy director and chief legal officer, as well as a former US Department of Labor official focusing on deregulation.
“The fact that you're seeing jurisdictions as politically different as a state led by a Republican governor and a city like San Francisco — which is deeply Democratic — both apply this tool indicates that we have enormous bipartisan agreement here,” Jones said.
How these efforts evolve — and how humans and political ideology affect the process — is a key space to watch as other governments explore incorporating AI into their regulatory landscapes. Coglianese says the scrutiny of these models will only need to become more involved.
“That scrutiny would entail, I think, testing of multiple models or multiple variations on models, and more rigorous and ongoing oversight of the models’ performance,” he said. “As the potential impact gets to be more serious, then the scrutiny needs to be more serious.”