The Washington Post published an article about the new reginfo online version of the federal regulatory agenda. "For U.S. rule-watchers who live in the digital world, the new searchable online version of the Bush administration's semi-annual regulatory agenda is an early holiday gift. For those who like to scoff at 1,500-page lists of documents, it's cause for Scrooge-like complaints. In print, the agenda is slimmed down to a mere 483 pages in the Dec. 10 Federal Register. That compares with the 1,700-page online edition, which contains the administration's full list of proposed and expected health, safety and other rules....Now you can search for a 2005 proposal by the Department of Health and Human Services to set standards for a sort of retirement home for chimpanzees used in federal research. Or you can discover a recent rulemaking to determine whether passengers on small planes should get compensation when they are bumped off of a flight on which they have reservations."
If I take 10 minutes, I can come up with ten better ways this information could have been made publicly available online, some of which are suggested by the article. Other ideas?
1) List rules in terms of priorities, not agencies. Let's see what matters!
2) Make rules taggable and therefore searchable by subject more readily. Now they can only be searched by name of agency.
3) Post a list of questions with each rule on which citizen participation is sought or let people come up with their own questions.
4) Show, using a timeline or some other visual metric, how a rule has progressed and whether stated targets have been met.
5) Offer an API to allow others to mash-up and make good use of this data.
6) Connect the rules to opportunities for action - allow people to comment on pending rules or at least link back to www.regulations.gov.
7) Show the connections between the stated regulatory priorities enunciated in each agency's statement and the agency rule list.
8) Link back to the rules themselves. Now I can see a summary and then I have to go to another website type in the legal citation and then pull up the rule.
9) Tell me something about what a rule is likely to cost. Show me the environmental and other impact statements that might have been filed in connection with the rule.
10) Taking a cue from the Washington Watch wiki, create a mirror version of each regulatory agenda and each rule and let people annotate them.
Thanks to Prof. Cary Coglianese for pointing me to the article.
Very interesting set of ideas for improving the E-Reg Agenda.
Here are a few more:
1) Let people use the E-Agenda to sign up for updates on individual rules. Information could be pushed to the interested parties when the rule is proposed, and perhaps at other points in the process. If it is too costly to do this for all rules, do it for those of greater public interest.
2) Use the NAICS code data included in some agendas to point to the geographic locations of those who will be regulated. While this wouldn't be a perfect indicator of the geographic areas affected by a potential rulemaking, it would provide a good start and be better than what is currently available.
3) Is it possible to include higher quality information in the database? For example, when corrections to the Agenda are published, they currently are not included in reginfo.gov. Include them. Is it possible to update the database more frequently than every six months for key events such as publication in the Federal Register, new judicial deadlines, and perhaps even updated schedules? DOT is already posting monthly updates for all of their significant rules that provide more information than is in Agenda entries at http://regs.dot.gov/Rulemakings/index.htm
It would be good if this type of higher quality information could be available at the E-Agenda website.
4) Data quality would be marginally improved if information on fast developing actions that are submitted for EO 12866 review were added to the Agenda database. The names of these actions (but not the rest of the Agenda information) which start up after the deadline for the Agenda, are included in another part of the reginfo website, but they are not mentioned in the E-Agenda.
5) Another way to provide timelier information would be to move back toward the pre-unified agenda days when an agency's Agenda information was released as soon as it was reviewed by OMB, or released in batches rather than held until the final agency's agenda was submitted and reviewed. For example, if the DOD Fall Agenda was submitted on August 27 and was reviewed by September 10, why embargo it until December 10 and restrict the public to the old information that was in the spring Agenda? If that calls too much attention to the final agenda(s) to be released, what about releasing them in groups?
In other words, which would provide greater value: information that is significantly timelier (on average one to two months fresher in the context of a six month update cycle), or information that is released for all agencies on the same date? Are there ways to present information that is released on different dates so it would not be confusing?
6) I think your idea about including environmental and other impact statements is a good one. Other required assessments which are not labeled impact statements such as those under the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act and the Children's Health Executive Order could also be summarized/made available.
7) Would it make sense to include the best features of reginfo.gov and regulations.gov on one website? If the resources devoted to posting Agenda information on the two sites were instead devoted to posting it on just one, e-Agenda enhancements such as those commenters have suggested could be available sooner.
Posted by: metaphrand | January 13, 2008 at 09:09 AM