Good Housekeeping at HHS: A Win for Burden Reduction

By Nick Hart, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Data Foundation

If you have ever tried to read the Code of Federal Regulations cover to cover — and I would gently suggest you find a better hobby — you know that federal regulations have a way of piling up. Programs sunset, technology moves on, Congress amends the underlying statute, and yet the regulatory text describing all of it tends to sit quietly on the books for years, sometimes decades, after it has stopped meaning anything. That backlog is not harmless. It confuses grantees, eats up staff time at state and local agencies trying to figure out what still applies, and erodes public trust in the basic legibility of government.

So I want to give credit where it is due, as we like to do at the Data Foundation. On June 9, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a final rule rescinding portions of 45 CFR Parts 96, 1000, and 1080. In plain English: HHS’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF) cleaned up regulations governing block grants, the long-defunct Assets for Independence program, and the Emergency Community Services Homeless Grant Program, a program Congress actually repealed in 1998.

Among the items removed is a Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) reporting appendix that still instructed grantees to submit data on PC diskettes formatted for Lotus 1-2-3, a piece of software that left active service in 2014. There were transition provisions describing the 1981 stand-up of the block grant system. Contact information for staff who, in HHS's own words, can no longer be reached at the numbers listed. An entire regulatory part for a grant program that has not been funded since 2016. None of this text was doing useful work, and some of it was actively misleading the people trying to comply with it.

Importantly, the rule does not eliminate any active program or authority. Where requirements still matter, they remain in statute. This is housekeeping in the truest sense — clearing the cobwebs without moving any of the furniture.

Reducing unnecessary administrative burden is a core objective of the Data Foundation's policy agenda, and it is a theme we return to often: federal data and reporting infrastructure should be current, usable, and trustworthy, and the rules that govern that infrastructure should meet the same standard. Stripping out obsolete reporting instructions, defunct program regulations, and provisions that simply duplicate statute is exactly the kind of work that lowers burden on grantees and state administrators without weakening accountability one bit.

HHS deserves credit for this round of cleanup. I hope other agencies are watching, and that they take a similarly disciplined look at the regulatory text governing their own grant and data programs. Good housekeeping is not the most glamorous part of public administration, but it is one of the most respectful things an agency can do for the people it works with.