State legislature organized for upcoming 2025 session

By Rep. Jeff Bradley

Contributor

Last month, our South Carolina House leadership met in Columbia to organize for the upcoming session, which begins this week.

In that organizational meeting, I was very grateful to be re-elected to again serve as chairman of the House Regulations Committee, that now has been combined with the special AI, Cybersecurity & Cybercrime Committee, which I also chaired in the last session following its formation.  Our new committee is one of 13 “standing committees” in the House and has a long name: Regulations, Admin Procedures, AI and CyberSecurity.

Additionally, Bluffton’s representative in the House, Weston Newton, was re-elected as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, while Bill Herbkersman of Bluffton chairs the House Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee, and Shannon Erickson of Beaufort chairs the Education and Public Works Committee.

This means that with four members of Beaufort County chairing these premier committees, the strength of our county delegation is currently unmatched in the Statehouse.

Regulations and AI

Personally, I am very excited about what this means for my Regulations Committee where we have the potential with AI algorithms to comb through the enormous volume of words and see duplication that human effort would find impossible to look across and see.

Also, by linking artificial intelligence activities directly with our Regulations Committee, I believe South Carolina will become nationally recognized for leading the way in effectively decluttering redundant, outdated and incongruous regulations. These regulations have been clogging for decades our 10-million word “SC Code of Regulations,” which touches on every aspect of our state from agriculture to Medicare, law enforcement, education, housing, restaurants – and the list goes on.

In explaining this re-organization to the media, our Speaker of the House, Murrell Smith was quoted last month in news reports that our new committee will be partnering with Google to “declutter outdated South Carolina regulations and thereby setting an example for the nation.”

I have been intimately involved with this initiative. We have customized a version of Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence tool to identify the outdated and redundant regulations that have historically hampered efficiency.  In fact, our efforts are following along the same lines as President Trump’s new push for government efficiency.

This past summer, I got the idea that Google could help us immensely with our goal of trimming our regulations when I met with Chris Hein (Google’s head of engineering for the public sector) at a conference we both attended in Chicago. I explained what we were trying to accomplish and asked if Google could help. He said yes.

We have already done a small test of the concept with the Gemini product AI algorithm to sift through and show the myriad regulations that deal with our state’s regulations governing school absences and how they could be streamlined.

As it was pointed out to me, the goal of this regulatory cleanup is like decluttering a 200-year-old house. We are not removing safeguards. We are making things better by making sense of the complexity that now exists.

Jeff Bradley is the representative for District 123 in the State House of Representatives.