The Freedom Frequency
Hoover Institution's Substack, The Freedom Frequency, has a lot of good content. You should subscribe.
I recently wrote a column that was published on The Freedom Frequency, which is a relatively new Substack maintained by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. You might consider subscribing. One of the nice features of Hoover is the breadth of knowledge represented by its scholars. If you read Third Order, you’re probably a regulatory/admin law geek, or at least interested in how regulations do or don’t fit into economic models. But over at The Freedom Frequency, you’ll see stuff ranging from insights about inflation and fiscal profligacy to distillation of the works of Adam Smith to discussions of authoritarian regimes and their human toll. And links to the Goodfellows podcast, which I thoroughly enjoy.
Below is some of what I wrote in my column about the policy influence of the RegData project. Do give it a read, and while you’re there, maybe subscribe too:
The most important milestone for any measurement project is adoption—when institutions start treating it as a legitimate input, not a curiosity.
Here are three concrete examples that matter because they sit at different choke points of policy-making: macro policy discussion, congressional analysis, and state-level reform.
The Federal Reserve: measurement becomes a macro input. In a January 14, 2026, speech on regulation and the supply side, Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran pointed to “progress in measuring regulation” using advances in natural language processing and highlighted QuantGov as a concrete example—moving beyond page counts toward counting restrictions and quantifying regulations by industry. That is a notable shift: it signals that regulatory accumulation is increasingly viewed as something that can be discussed with evidence, not just asserted.
CBO: regulatory measurement enters scorekeeping. In materials discussing its work, the Congressional Budget Office has noted that it “relied in part on RegData—a database linking federal regulations to industries” in its analysis of H.R. 1. That single sentence matters because CBO is the institution Congress leans on for neutral analysis; if regulation can be measured well enough to appear in that analytical machinery, it is less likely to remain an unscored, untracked policy lever. See the CBO blog post and the related CBO presentation.
Texas, Virginia, Idaho, Ohio, and more states: measurement as a reform baseline. In April 2025, when Texas created the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office, Governor Greg Abbott cited one of my studies that, using RegData, showed that Texas was the fifth most regulated state in the country, with 274,469 regulatory restrictions in its administrative code (See reporting and the underlying policy brief). Virginia, taking inspiration from the RegData approach, has spent the past four years inventorying its regulatory restrictions and tracking progress toward its goal of cutting red tape by 25 percent (it actually topped that—cutting about 33 percent by the end of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s term). Several other states, including Idaho and Ohio, have overtly followed the RegData methodology for similar red tape reduction. This is what progress looks like: reform debates anchored to quantitative baselines that can be checked after the bill-signing ceremony. The business adage, “What gets measured, gets managed,” is also true in government.