The digitalization of public administration in the Russian Federation refers to one of the main strategic tasks. At the same time, in order to solve it, it is necessary to identify and eliminate existing legal restrictions that prevent not only the introduction of  digital technologies into existing administrative procedures, but also the digital transformation of  state functions in  general, which until now has not been the focus of the Russian public administration science and the practice of its digitalization. Research hypotheses state that for successful digitalization it is necessary to identify and eliminate such legal restrictions, which are of  a  systemic nature, and the existing rule-making mechanisms are focused on eliminating restrictions only within the framework of  certain regulatory legal acts, or  in relation to  certain public services, and not public functions and public administration in general. Based on a comparative legal analysis of regulatory control and the practice of implementing strategic planning mechanisms; assessment of the regulatory impact of draft regulatory legal acts; measurement of the actual impact and monitoring the enforcement of existing acts, the «regulatory guillotine» mechanism and ongoing experiments in  the application of digital technologies in public administration, the research revealed the fragmentation of the identification and elimination of certain legal restrictions on digitalization, substantiated the prospects of creating a mechanism for identifying systemic legal restrictions in the process of developing departmental digital transformation programs. Based on the structural and functional analysis of the existing rule-making mechanisms, a model of the mechanism for identifying and eliminating systemic legal restrictions on the digitalization of public administration is proposed, including cognitive, regulatory and organizational elements, as well as a sequence of procedures for identifying systemic legal restrictions, assessing risks and opportunities for their removal, forming relevant rule-making proposals, including experimental legal regimes.