Uncontroversially good legislation

Here are some ideas. I'm not sure if these are uncontroversial, but they at least seem to have very few obvious downsides:
 

1. Open the border between the United States and Canada. Practically all the arguments given against immigration liberalization don't apply to the border between Canada and the United States. Canada's crime rates are generally lower than the United States', and their wages aren't much different, implying that an inflow of workers would not substantially affect the price of labor in the US.
2. Legalize drugs that have no reported history of major harmful or addictive effects, without a prescription. The most common argument against drug legalization is that people will harm themselves. Fair enough, but this doesn't really apply to the numerous drugs that are banned from the market that aren't addictive, like Metformin. Anecdotally, I've heard a lot of people are able to get Metformin without a prescription anyway, but the price of many drugs is typically higher than they otherwise would be if they were treated like supplements instead.
3. Allow essentially all pharmaceuticals to be imported from outside the United States. This is a crazy one because many people don't even realize that it's a thing, but, many classes of drugs are way more expensive in the United States because it's illegal to import them from other countries. Here's an article discussing the effects of the import bans.
4. Replace the minimum wage with a wage subsidy. The minimum wage is essentially a tax on employers, paid to their employees. Whether or not the minimum wage is good or bad overall is secondary to the question of whether employers should be the one's paying the tax in the first place.
5. Allow citizens the choice of how their social security tax is invested. This one is probably the weakest one on my list because it could entail a partial collapse of Social Security in the United States if the money were wisely invested (though the long-run effects would probably outweigh this harm). Currently, FICA taxes (which are used to fund Social Security in the United States) are paid into the Social Security trust fund. But since the Social Security Trust fund buys US Treasury bonds, this is just a fancy way of saying that the US government promises that it will tax people in the future, in order to pay for your retirement. By contrast, if individuals could choose how their money is invested, they could invest it into productive enterprises, providing a higher rate of return. Some people are bound to make bad investments, but there's already a degree of redistribution in the Social Security system, which would be more than enough to smooth out these effects.

Basically any voting system but plurality voting for mutually exclusive choices.

I have lately been using FDA delenda est as a sort of "you must be at least <this> sane about governance for me to think that your votes will add usefully adequate information to elections". (Possible exception: if you just figure out if your life is better or worse in a high quality way, and always vote against incumbents when things are getting worse, no matter the incumbent's party or excuses, that might be OK too?)

The problem with "FDA delenda est" is that while I do basically think that people who defend or endorse the FDA are either not yet educated yet about the relevant topics or else they are actively evil...

...this "line in the sand" makes it clear that the vast vast majority of voters and elected officials don't have any strong grasp on the logic of (1) medicine or (2) doctor's rights or (3) patient's rights or (4) political economy or (5) risk management or (6) credentialist hubris or (7) consumer freedom... and so on.

And applying the label "not educated enough (or else actively evil)" to "most people" is not a good move at a dinner party <3

So...

My current best idea for a polite way to talk about a nearly totally safe political thing that works as a "litmus test" and slam dunk demonstration that there are lots of laws worth fixing is:

The 13th amendment, passed in 1865, which legalized penal slavery, should itself be amended to have that loophole removed.  

Like seriously: who is still in favor of slavery?!?!?!

The 14th amendment (passed in 1868) made it formally clear that everyone in the US is a citizen by default, even and especially black people, and thus all such people are heirs by birth to the various freedoms that were legally and forcefully secured for "ourselves and our posterity" during the revolutionary war.

So then with the 14th amendment the supreme court could have looked at the bill of rights in general, and looked at who legally gets rights, and then just banned slavery for everyone based on logical consistency.

We don't need a special amendment that says "no slavery except for the good kinds of slavery" because there are no good kinds of slavery and because the rest of the constitution already inherently forbids slavery in the course of protecting a vast array of other rights that are less obvious.

Here's the entire text of the 13th, with a trivially simple rewrite:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

See how much cleaner that would be? :-)

Everyone agrees that bureaucracy overall is a problem in the abstract but when it comes to particular policy issues people are often in favor of using bureaucracy to solve them.

There should be a government department that has the job of reducing bureaucracy. It's staffed with people who go through existing laws and regulations and then publish suggestions for reform that reduces bureaucracy. 

I don't see an interest group that has an interest in opposing such a proposal. 

Some automated phone queuing systems systems (the things where you call in and get put on hold for three days listening to music) offer a service where you can press a button, hang up and they'll call you back when you would have gotten to the end of the queue.

This should be a mandatory for all these systems.

Thinking at the federal level, and mostly thinking about big stuff, but not claiming either choice is optimal. Explanation omitted because I don't have time to explain everything. Not systematic; not optimized for tractability; unordered.

1. FDA reform.
2. Biosecurity: regulation of hazardous research + pandemic preparedness + promoting biosecurity research.
3. Medical licensing reciprocity (h/t Scott Alexander).
4. Hospitals: the federal government could better-coordinate hospitals and make them more transparent (h/t Scott Alexander).
5. Fund the IRS: auditing the rich cheating on taxes is an efficient way to increase revenue; see, e.g., Matt Yglesias. Additionally, replace private debt collection, which is quite inefficient.
6. Housing & zoning deregulation and increasing supply of housing (h/t Matt Yglesias).
7. Law enforcement & criminal justice reform: see, e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky.
8. End corporate welfare: especially fossil fuel and agriculture subsidies.
9. Officials involved in legislation or regulation shouldn't invest in specific companies, nor should their spouses, nor perhaps sufficiently senior staffers. Perhaps they should not invest in specific industries/sectors/markets either, depending.
10. Legislate Bostock v. Clayton County: explicitly make it illegal to discriminate in employment based on sexual orientation or transgender status. (I omitted some other obvious-to-me-but-controversial-sounding policies, but LGBT rights poll pretty well and I don't think this would be as controversial as it might sound.)

• Other areas where I have at least a vague sense that there are potential uncontroversial reforms: education, immigration, health insurance & prescriptions, animal welfare.

11. End "Buy American". (Disclaimers: pet issue, relatively intractable.) 97% of spending by US federal agencies and programs goes to US firms (and often only for goods produced in the US with US materials), not because that is most efficient but because it is generally required by law. This results in significantly higher costs with minimal benefits for the US economy or national security (and may have negative effects on international relations). Miscellaneous made-in-US and made-in-US-with-materials-produced-in-US requirements exacerbate waste.

• +1 to almost everything else suggested in this post.

Laws should be written more like code is written. It should not be written by passing Word documents around but there should be software like Git that makes it clear who made what amendments and that makes changes to laws transparent.

Having good software here will be a quality of life improvement for lawmakers the same way Git is a quality of life improvement for programmers. It will also help all other parties that want to follow the legislative process. 

I would expect that it improves the quality of the average law because it's clear to more of the people working on the law what the law actually will do. 

Finishing the repeal of Certificate of Need laws:

Certificate of Need (CON) laws are state regulatory mechanisms for approving major capital expenditures and projects for certain health care facilities. In a state with a CON program, a state health planning agency or other entity must review and approve projects like establishing a new health care facility or expanding a facility’s health service capacity in a specified area. CON programs primarily aim to control health care costs by restricting duplicative services and determining whether new capital expenditures meet a community need.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/con-certificate-of-need-state-laws.aspx

The laws intentionally stifle competition between healthcare providers, and somehow people thought this was a cost-cutting measure at one point. They're slowly being repealed but speeding that up should be pretty uncontroversial?

End Social Security and Other Defined-Benefit Pension Schemes They are intrinsically racist and sexist.

Consider two people, Alice and Bob. Alice is an Asian-American female, while Bob is an African-American male. From the point of view of Social Security, they are identical in every respect: they are the same age, they make the same contributions of the same amount on the same date, and retire at the same time. For the sake of argument, suppose they begin taking SS payments at age 70.

Given that Alice and Bob have made exactly equivalent contributions to the system, you would expect their payout to be roughly comparable. This is not even close to being the case, because of differences in life expectancy between different demographic groups. Asian-American life expectancy is 86.3 years, while for African-Americans, it is 75.0 (source) Furthermore, women enjoy about a 4 year life expectancy advantage over men. So Alice can expect to live to about 88 years, while Bob can only expect to live to about 73. That means Alice receives a 6x greater benefit from SS than Bob - 18 years of payments vs 3 years, in expectation - even though they contributed the exact same amounts.