Summary

The number of federal regulations and their effect on the U.S. economy have grown dramatically during the past 30 years. Accompanying this growth has been concern about how federal agencies develop their regulations. Executive Order 12866, which was issued in September 1993, outlines a process by which proposed significant rules of regulatory agencies are to be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). One of the purposes of the executive order is to make the federal rulemaking process "more accessible and open to the public." This report focuses on the regulatory review process at OIRA and at four agencies: the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Transportation, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. GAO discusses whether (1) the regulatory agencies had identified for the public the substantive changes made to their regulations between the draft submitted to OIRA and the regulatory actions later announced, (2) the regulatory agencies had identified for the public the changes made to their regulations at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA, and (3) OIRA had made available to the public all documents exchanged between OIRA and the selected agencies during OIRA's review.

GAO noted that: (1) EPA, DOT, HUD, and OSHA had complete documentation available to the public of all of the substantive changes made to their rules between the draft submitted to OIRA and the actions subsequently announced for about 26 percent of the 122 regulatory actions that GAO reviewed; (2) for about 30 percent of the regulatory actions, the agencies had some documentation available to the public indicating that changes had been made to the rules while at OIRA, but the information did not indicate whether all such changes had been documented; (3) for the remaining 44 percent of the regulatory actions, the agencies had no documentation available to the public of changes made during OIRA's review; (4) because Executive Order 12866 does not specifically require agencies to document that no changes were made to rules while they were under review at OIRA, the absence of documentation does not necessarily mean that the agencies were not complying with the order; (5) however, it was unclear whether the absence of documentation meant that no changes had been made to the rules or whether changes had been made but they had not been recorded; (6) the agencies had complete documentation available to the public of all of the changes that OIRA had suggested or recommended for about 24 percent of the 122 regulatory actions; (7) for about 17 percent of the regulatory actions, the agencies had some documentation available to the public indicating that OIRA had suggested changes to the rules, but the information did not indicate whether all such changes had been documented; (8) for the remaining 59 percent of the actions, the agencies had no documentation available to the public indicating whether changes had been made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA; (9) for some of these actions, the agencies had documentation available indicating that changes had been made to the rules during the rulemaking process, but it was unclear whether any of the changes were at OIRA's suggestion; (10) even those rules for which the agencies had complete documentation of all changes made while they were at OIRA and at the suggestion of OIRA, the documents were not always available to the public or easy to locate; and (11) GAO could not identify all of the documents that had been exchanged between the agencies and OIRA during the regulatory review process, so it could not be determined whether OIRA had made all such documents available to the public.