What's New

Plan for Retrospective Analysis of Existing Rules, 8/23/11
PDF (164KB) | MS Word (128KB)

Federal Register Notice
PDF (214KB)

Preliminary Plan for Retrospective Analysis of Existing Rules
PDF (52KB) | MS Word (124KB)

As part of its implementation of Executive Order 13563, "Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review," [PDF, 144KB] issued by the President on January 18, 2011, the Department of Education (Department) has issued its final "Plan for Retrospective Analysis of Existing Regulations." Executive Order 13563 recognizes the importance of maintaining a consistent culture of retrospective review and analysis of regulations throughout the executive branch, consistent with law and each agency's resources and regulatory priorities. The Department's plan is designed to create a defined policy, method, and schedule for identifying significant regulations, as determined under Executive Order 12866, that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, as well as regulations that can be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed to be more effective and efficient, achieve better outcomes for students, and be easy to understand.

You can view the Department’s reports on the status of its efforts in implementing its plan and anticipated efforts over the next several months at Retrospective Review Plan Report [MS Word, 48KB] and Retrospective Review Plan Report (May 14, 2012) [MS Word, 70KB].

We view the issuance of this plan as only one step in an ongoing process for improving the quality of our regulations and regulatory process in accordance with the overarching goals of Executive Order 13563. We will evaluate closely the implementation of this plan and the results of the regulatory analyses and reviews that we conduct to determine where we can make improvements. We look forward to working with all stakeholders in this effort and will be updating this page as we implement our retrospective review plan.

If you have questions about the plan, the recently-issued report, or the Department's retrospective review in general, please send them to Reg-Review@ed.gov or to the U.S. Department of Education, Office of the General Counsel, 400 Maryland Avenue, S.W., Washington, DC 20202.