A New York executive order signed this week names both fax and telegram in the same sentence. Governor Kathy Hochul signed it on July 8, 2026, after an AI-assisted review of roughly 18 million words of state regulations turned up the pairing.
Executive Order 61 directs every state agency to identify submission rules that still require:
“delivery by mail or facsimile (fax), multiple printed copies, obsolete communications (e.g., telegram), check payment, or wet signature, where digital or other alternative submissions or payment methods would be more efficient.”
Read that clause slowly. Fax is on the list of things agencies should let people do digitally. Telegram is on the list too, but as the example of an obsolete communication. Same sentence. Different labels. That split is the story.
What the order actually says
Hochul’s “Regulatory Reset” does not retire fax. It asks agencies to offer a digital alternative wherever accepting a fax, a paper packet, or a wet signature adds friction without a real reason. Mail, printed copies, check payments, and fax get treated as living channels that need a modern option next to them. Telegram gets a parenthetical, the way a museum treats an exhibit whose original visitors have all gone home.
The distinction matters. State agencies still receive fax submissions from filers who make it the practical choice: law offices, small businesses, licensed professionals working from older systems, and people filing from areas where broadband is not reliable. Their workflows push paper along the fastest path they have. Telegram submissions, if any rule technically still allows them, are not showing up in anyone’s inbox. Both survived in the code for the same reason, and only one of them survived in practice.
How AI found fax and telegram in the same sentence
New York asked Stanford Law School’s Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab to help. RegLab’s team ran AI-assisted tools across roughly 18 million words of New York regulations and statutes, sorting them into piles that agency staff could actually read through. A prior wave, called EXPRESS NY, produced 50 reforms across 22 agencies in June. The new order asks every agency to keep going.
The projected numbers are the kind of numbers press releases love: tens of millions of dollars saved each year, more than a million hours of paperwork returned to New Yorkers. Whether those land is a question for the first-wave results later in 2026. What is already clear is that a language model reading the state code faster than a human ever could kept flagging the same handful of words: mail, facsimile, wet signature, telegram.
Why fax outlasted telegram in the same code
Both were written into New York’s submission rules when they were the modern option. Telegram carried short official messages before the telephone was standard equipment. Fax carried signed documents once fax machines became standard equipment. Unlike telegram, it moved a picture of the original on any phone line, with a delivery confirmation, and it did not ask either side to share software or accounts. That is a real utility. It is why fax outlived the medium it was originally listed beside.
Other governments are working through the same sorting exercise. Toronto is quietly phasing out its municipal fax lines, keeping virtual fax as an email-based fallback. Germany’s ministries still operate about 1,400 fax machines between justice, interior, and emergency work, because the rules those departments enforce still name fax as an acceptable channel. The White House has run a similar review of federal service delivery. New York now joins that pattern, and its AI-assisted approach is the newer piece.
The people caught in the middle are usually filers who need to get a signed document to a government office by end of day. Most of them do not want to buy a machine to do it. That is why services that let you send a fax from your computer exist. They cover the gap while agencies work through 18 million words of instructions written across a century.
Executive Order 61 does not draw a line under fax. It asks agencies to build a digital lane beside it, so New Yorkers who would rather file electronically can. The strangest part of the order is not that fax is on the list. It is that fax spent long enough on the books to end up in the same sentence as telegram. Only one of them still shows up when the paper arrives.