Over the course of the Bush administration, OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which reviews and must approve all major regulatory proposals, has changed 53 out of 85 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules, 100 out of 157 rules from Health & Human Services (HHS), and 24 out of 30 Dept. of Labor (DOL) rules.

On the first anniversary of the implementation of a key federal law designed to improve technology access for all persons with, and within, federal agencies, questions and concerns about the level of compliance continue to loom.

By unanimous consent, on June 27, the Senate passed the E-Government Act (S. 803), which seeks to promote greater use of Internet-based information technology across the federal government. The administration opposed the bill as originally introduced by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), but following negotiations over the last year, Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) became a cosponsor and a compromise agreement was eventually struck, clearing the way for passage.

VeriSign is the dominant domain name registrar on the Web. Among other things, it has had an exclusive lock on registering domain names that end in .org and .net. On March 1, 2001, VeriSign gave notice that it was giving up its exclusive arrangement in order to focus its registry services on commercial and individual customers. Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) used to be the major Internet registrar, having benefited from what was, in effect, a monopoly granted by the federal government in 1993, to register Internet name space that ended in .com, .net, and .org.