Plain-English Law to Simplify Laws Requires 1,200 Pages to Explain What Plain English Is

WASHINGTON — Congress passed the Legislative Simplification and Accessibility Act of 2024 by a vote of 387 to 34 last Tuesday, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle praising it as a historic breakthrough in making government comprehensible to ordinary citizens. The bill's mandatory plain-English summary, released simultaneously, runs to 1,200 pages and opens with a 40-page preface explaining why the summary needed to be as long as it is.

The original bill is 34 pages.

"This is democracy working the way it was intended to work," said Rep. Sandra Howell (D-MI), who co-sponsored the legislation and has not yet read the summary. "For too long, Americans have been shut out of the legislative process by impenetrable legal language. Today, we change that. Today, we give the people a document they can understand. A different document. About the first document."

She held up a copy of the summary. It was the size of a small phone book.

How a 34-Page Bill Became a 1,200-Page Summary

The journey of the Legislative Simplification and Accessibility Act through Congress offers what political scientists are already calling "a perfect case study in why things are the way they are."

The bill was introduced in February with a straightforward premise: any legislation passed by Congress must be accompanied by a plain-English summary, written at no higher than an eighth-grade reading level, explaining what the bill does and how it affects Americans.

It was referred immediately to the Subcommittee on Legislative Affairs, which noted that the bill did not define "plain English." The subcommittee spent six weeks producing a 90-page addendum defining plain English, written, several staffers later admitted, in language that was not plain English.

The bill then moved to the Subcommittee on Regulatory Language, which observed that the 90-page definition of plain English contained seventeen terms that themselves required definition. The subcommittee added a 140-page clarifying appendix.

The Subcommittee on Government Accessibility reviewed the combined document and determined that the 140-page appendix was "not accessible" and required its own plain-English explanation, which it provided in an additional 200 pages.

This process repeated, with minor variations, across fourteen subcommittees over the following eight months.

The Addendum to the Addendum to the Addendum

By the time the bill reached the full Judiciary Committee, the attached summary material had grown to 847 pages. Committee Chairman Robert Ash (R-TX) ordered a comprehensive review to "streamline the document and get it back to basics."

The review added 353 pages.

"Each subcommittee was acting in good faith," explained Dr. William Crane, a congressional procedure specialist at Georgetown University who studied the bill's progress. "Each one looked at what the previous committee had written and correctly identified that it was confusing. The solution each time was to explain it further. The problem is that further explanation generates further confusion, which generates further explanation, and so on until you have something that can only be moved by forklift."

The final summary document includes a 17-page glossary of terms used in the summary. Page 4 of the glossary contains a note directing readers to a secondary glossary explaining the terms used in the primary glossary. The secondary glossary is 23 pages.

There is a tertiary glossary. It was added by the Subcommittee on Definitional Clarity in what a staff memo describes as "an abundance of caution."

'Basically Working,' Say Experts

Reaction from the legislative reform community has been carefully calibrated.

"Is it longer than the original bill? Yes," said Margaret Voss, director of the Center for Legislative Modernization, a nonpartisan think tank that advised on the bill's drafting. "Is it more complex than the original bill in several measurable respects? Also yes. But the intent is sound, and the framework is in place, and I think if you squint at it from a certain angle, you can see the outline of a system that is basically working."

She was asked to squint at it from that angle and explain what she saw.

"I'd need to consult the glossary," she said.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that implementing the new summary requirement will cost federal agencies approximately $340 million annually in additional drafting, review, and printing costs. The CBO noted that its own estimate required a plain-English summary under the new law, which it is currently preparing. Early projections suggest the CBO's summary of its cost estimate for the plain-English summary law will be ready by spring.

What Ordinary Americans Can Expect

Under the new law, all future bills must be accompanied by their plain-English summaries at the time of passage. The summaries will be posted on a government website, which the Office of Legislative Digital Services confirmed will be built by a contractor, launched in approximately 18 months, and will initially host only the summary for this bill.

A sample page of the summary was released to the press. It read, in full: "This law is about making laws easier to understand. For the purposes of this law, 'easier' means [see Appendix D, Section 14, Subsection ii, Glossary Term 'easier (comparative adjective, legislative context)']. For the purposes of this law, 'understand' means [see Appendix F]."

Appendix F begins: "The term 'understand' is used in this document in accordance with the Standard Legislative Definition of Comprehension, established in the Comprehension Standards Act of 1997, the plain-English summary of which is available upon written request."

Rep. Howell, when shown the sample page, said she thought it was "a strong start."

The Bottom Line

The Legislative Simplification and Accessibility Act is now law. Future bills will have plain-English summaries. Those summaries may be longer, denser, and more technically demanding than the bills they describe. Fourteen subcommittees will continue to exist for the purpose of making them that way.

A bipartisan press release called Thursday "a great day for American democracy."

It was 340 pages long.

A plain-English summary is forthcoming.