OIRA Looks to Improve Online Access to Rulemaking Material

White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator Cass Sunstein issued a memo Friday that could expand public access to rulemaking documents. The memo encourages agencies to align their paper rulemaking dockets, housed in agency offices and difficult for most citizens to access, with their online dockets on Regulations.gov.

filing cabinets The memo says agencies should make online dockets consistent with their hard-copy counterparts “to the extent feasible.” That is basically a reiteration of the E-Government Act which instructs agencies to make available online documents found in the paper docket “to the extent practicable.”

Unfortunately, many agencies have not taken the law seriously enough leaving many online dockets barren in comparison to the paper versions. Some agencies post all relevant material on Regulations.gov, but others post only their proposed and final rules and, in many but not all cases, the comments received on the proposed rule.

At a bare minimum, all agencies should post all the public comments they receive. Sunstein’s memo recognizes not only the need to post comments, but the need to do so promptly. “OMB expects agencies to post public comments and public submissions to the electronic docket on Regulations.gov in a timely manner, regardless of whether they were received via postal mail, email, facsimile, or web form documents submitted directly via Regulations.gov.”

Sunstein’s memo should remind agencies of their obligation and improve the quality and reliability of online dockets. The White House’s commitment to online access to rulemaking material should make agencies stand up and take notice.

Sunstein’s memo also goes one step further by naming several classes of documents that agencies will be expected to post online. “To the extent that they are part of a rulemaking, supporting materials (such as notices, significant guidances, environmental impact statements, regulatory impact analyses, and information collections) should be made available by agencies during the notice-and-comment period by being uploaded and posted as part of the electronic docket.”

The memo also instructs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which actually manages and operates Regulations.gov, to develop within six months best practices for classifying documents and establishing data protocols.

Historically, Regulations.gov has been difficult to use, and the dockets of all the agencies using it have been inconsistent. Recently, the site has been improving incrementally, but OMB Watch has encouraged the White House to provide an overarching vision in which future reforms and improvements can occur and flourish. Implementing reforms to docket practices will still be a challenge, but hopefully Sunstein’s memo will prove to be one important component of that vision.

Image by Flickr user redjar, used under a Creative Commons license.

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