E-king Out the Rules

The sometimes arcane world of federal rule-making is about to get a lot more accessible. The Office of Management and Budget is working with an interagency project office to launch the new and improved Regulations.gov Web site. For the first time, citizens will be able not only to comment on proposed regulations using the Internet-as they do now on the site-but also will have access to supporting agency documents, every public comment and rules that are already in place.

"Rule-making can affect us as citizens far more than the statutes they are derived from," says Oscar Morales, an Environmental Protection Agency technology director who is heading up the e-rule-making initiative for OMB. Regulation "affects us day to day. It's how much pesticide can farmers apply, or how much pollution electrical utilities [can] put in the air."

If all goes according to plan, the new Federal Docket Management System will launch on the Regulations.gov site in the summer and provide information on rules published by 200 agencies. Lockheed Martin has won the contract to set up the system.

Regulation has long been an area of mystery to average Americans. Most people don't have a clue about where and when regulatory proposals are posted, or how to submit their comments. Often it's only when interest groups take notice and mobilize citizens that regulations are fully reviewed or publicly evaluated. Scholars and researchers who study rule-making often must travel to Washington to examine comments or rulings, which has limited the scope of knowledge about regulation.

OMB first identified rule-making as an area ripe for improvement in 2002, including it among 25 initial e-government projects that aimed to use technology to improve efficiency in everything from security clearance processing to payroll operations. The docket management system will expand on the e-government initiative's first success, Regulations.gov, which launched in January 2003.

Regulations.gov contains basic information on pending rules and policies and allows citizens to file comments online. So far, the site has logged 6.2 million hits. About 600,000 unique visitors have come to the site and filed more than 10,000 comments. Evidence is anecdotal, but Sharon Whitt, who has worked on the project for the National Archives and Records Administration, believes that public comments have increased since the site was launched. Still, Regulations.gov is a simple Web portal. People cannot view every comment, supporting documents or historical rule information, because of its technology limitations.

The new system will expand the scope of research tools, which initially focused on only a few standards, or on case studies of a single regulation. With the new docket system, people will be able to conduct much broader studies, looking at an entire agency's rule-making or proposals over the course of a year.

In the past, regulatory researchers have faced the perennial "lamppost problem," says Cary Coglianese, associate professor of public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "If you drop a quarter walking down the block at night, you're most likely to look for it where the light is," he says.

In November, Coglianese, along with more than four dozen colleagues, wrote to Karen Evans, administrator of OMB's Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, providing suggestions on how to make the new docket management system as user-friendly as possible. They urged Evans to make sure the new system allows for intuitive searches and that it includes all the information that agencies post to the Federal Register. "Our main point was that this new system will have important implications for how the public will get access to regulatory information, and how it's designed really matters," he says.

Morales shares those goals. "We're not necessarily looking for quantity here," he says. "It's not a question that we want every person to start taking a look at rules and regulations. It's accessibility. We're making it possible for those who couldn't [access information about regulation] and want to."