This issue began with considerations about traffic, but what deserves greater discussion is how a regulation is made and enters practical life.

If a regulation is out of touch with reality or difficult to comply with, it must be reconsidered. Laws ultimately must be validated by real life.

And this phenomenon does not happen with traffic alone. Not a few regulations have barely been issued before requiring explanation, extension, modification, or even temporary suspension. If that situation recurs across multiple fields, the question no longer lies in individual documents, but in the very way policy is designed.

The lesson from Decree 15

Decree 15/2018 on food safety demonstrated that we once accomplished such a reform. This document shifted strongly from pre-audit to post-audit, allowing businesses to self-declare and take responsibility, and enable regulatory agencies to focus on high-risk areas.

Reports showed that more than 90 percent of administrative costs were cut, saving approximately 10 million working days and VND3,700 billion.

Yet the greatest lesson of Decree 15 did not lie in the VND3,700 billion saved, but in the finding that the State can manage better without necessarily managing more.

However, in 2026, Decree 46 was issued to replace Decree 15, causing congestion at seaports and border gates. The Government subsequently had to temporarily suspend the validity of Decree 46 and continue applying Decree 15 while perfecting new regulations.

So where did the experience of Decree 15 go?

Institutional memory

A successful reform must become institutional experience for the entire apparatus, rather than existing solely in the minds of a few officials or in summary reports.

If experience does not become the apparatus's operating method, when personnel changes occur, that experience can be lost as well. Matters thought to have been reformed years ago may have to be redone, even reverting to management approaches that were previously recognized as ineffective.

That represents a form of institutional memory loss.

What has proven effective must become the benchmark. If state management agencies want to replace it with a new mechanism, they have to prove the new mechanism manages better, costs less, or resolves issues the old mechanism left unaddressed.

If an agency eliminates a procedure and an incident later occurs, the immediate question is often: why did you not manage it? But if that agency adds a procedure that costs hundreds of thousands of businesses additional money and time, very few ask the reverse: why did you force all of them to do this?

For regulators, adding a procedure is often safer than removing one. Meanwhile, the price of that safety is paid primarily by society.

Party General Secretary and State President To Lam has repeatedly emphasized the requirement to innovate mindsets in lawmaking and law enforcement, reducing compliance costs, ensuring stable, predictable policies, and abandoning the mindset of "banning what cannot be managed." The question is whether that spirit penetrates every clause, decree, and circular.

Before placing an additional obligation on citizens or businesses, drafting agencies must answer the questions: does the State truly need to intervene, is there a less costly way to achieve the objective, and how much must society pay for that intervention?

Vietnam has applied Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) and the Standard Cost Model (SCM).

However, these tools are only meaningful if evaluation results can alter policy. If impact assessment serves merely to finalize dossiers while management approaches were decided in advance, RIA easily becomes a procedure within the very process of making procedures.

The principle must be clear: any agency wishing to increase compliance costs must prove that the added social benefit outweighs the price the regulation forces society to pay. If unproven, it shall not be issued.

Breakthroughs in process and mindset

Vietnam is revising a vast volume of laws. That is necessary, but the number of laws revised is not the ultimate measure of institutional reform.

For citizens and businesses, a good institution must also be stable, understandable, and predictable. If a document enters into force only to face immediate revision, societal costs can still rise despite revising numerous laws.

Therefore, institutional breakthroughs sometimes lie not in issuing more, but in daring to cut. State management agencies must not force one million people to perform procedures just to manage a few thousand or even a few risky cases; and must not replace a well-functioning mechanism without proving the new mechanism is superior. And if a newly issued regulation proves unsuitable for real life, they must revise it immediately.

Nguyen Dinh Cung