THE FEDERAL REGISTER

MARCH 14, 1936 — MARCH 14, 2006

THE FEDERAL REGISTER 

MARCH 14, 1936 — MARCH 14, 2006 

OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL REGISTER

NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
THE OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL REGISTER 

A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary 

of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register 

MARCH 14, 1936 

First cover of the Federal Register, March 14, 1936. 
The Federal Register 

The Federal Register is the legacy of a “perfect storm” 

of events that peaked as a public policy concern in 

December 1934. In response to those events, the 

Federal Register Act was approved on July 26, 1935, 

and the first issue of the Federal Register was published 

on March 16, 1936. Throughout the remainder of the 

20th Century, the Federal Register system expanded 

and evolved as the nation’s leaders gained experience 

using the system to conduct the business of government 

Setting Up Operations

the Panama Oil case 

and forced the hand 

of the committee 

studying the issue for 

President Roosevelt. 

Congress passed legislation 

to create the Federal Register, and the 

President signed it into law 

(Pub. L. 74-220, July 26, 1935). 

The Act created a lasting partnership 

between the National Archives and 

the Government Printing Office. The 

Archivist of the United States, acting 

through a Division in the National 

Archives, was charged with custody of 

and, with the Public Printer, prompt 

and uniform printing and distribution 

of public documents in a publication 

designated the Federal Register. The 

documents were to include: Presidential 

proclamations and Executive orders; 

documents the President determined to 

have general applicability and legal effect; 

documents required to be published 

by Act of Congress; and documents 

authorized to be published by regulations. 

Agencies were to compile and file 

a complete set of all their documents 

that were in force as of January 26, 

1936, and they were to begin filing new 

documents by September 26, 1936. The 

Act provided for the immediate public 

inspection of all documents filed with the 

Division, established an Administrative 

Committee to issue relevant regulations, 

and stated that documents could not be 

valid against any person until filed at the 

Federal Register. The Division was to be 

headed by a Director appointed by the 

President and acting under the general 

direction of the Archivist. 

In 1935 the National Archives was as new as the Division 

of the Federal Register that was placed within it. The 

first Director of the Federal Register, retired Army 

Major Bernard R. Kennedy, was appointed by President 

Roosevelt, effective September 3, 1935. On November 8, 

1935, he joined the first Archivist, Robert D.W. Connor, 

and the heads of the four other divisions of the newly 

formed National Archives in relocating from temporary 

quarters in the Justice Department building to occupy 

the newly opened National Archives Building. 

The Administrative 

Committee, comprised of the 

Archivist, the Public Printer, 

and a representative of the 

Attorney General, held its 

first meeting on September 

27, 1935, and met regularly 

thereafter. Based upon 

their recommendations, the 

President issued the first 

regulations governing the 

process of filing documents 

on February 18, 1936, in 

Executive Order 7298. 

In September 1935, even before 

regulations had been issued, the new 

staff sent letters to 123 different agencies 

to explain the requirements of the 

Federal Register Act. The Administrative 

Committee approved the format of 

daily issues of the Federal Register, its 

subscription price of $10 per year, 

and rules governing Federal Register 

publication, all of which were issued as 

regulations signed by the President on 

March 2, 1936. Based on these procedures, 

the first documents for publication were 

filed with the Division on March 12, 1936, 

and the first issue of the Federal Register 

was published on March 14, 1936. It 

contained sixteen pages. 

in times of peace and war. 

On December 10, 1934, at the Supreme 

Court, the Assistant Attorney General 

of the United States had been grilled 

during oral arguments in the first case 

to reach the Court challenging the 

constitutionality of the centerpiece of 

President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” — the 

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). 

The critical constitutional issues at stake 

were mostly ignored that day while the 

Justices focused on the fact that the 

defendants, two Texas oil companies, had 

been charged with violating a provision of 

regulations that technically did not exist 

at the time the companies were charged. 

The defects in the case highlighted a 

fundamental problem facing a democratic 

government that was exploding with new 

agencies and new regulations. Amidst 

the ferment of orders and codes issuing 

from agencies, even individuals working 

at the highest levels of government found 

it difficult or impossible to keep track of 

all of them. And for the regulated public, 

this new body of “executive legislation” 

was inaccessible and virtually hidden. 

The next day, at the White House, 

where the great men of the New Deal 

had been arguing over the value of 

publishing a gazette containing the 

orders issued by Executive Branch 

officers, President Roosevelt laid aside his 

misgivings about possible misuse of the 

publication for propagandistic purposes 

and appointed a committee of the 

National Emergency Council to make a 

special study of the idea. 

Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes 

maneuvering by lawmakers and 

influential legal minds, including Supreme 

Court Justice Louis Brandeis, culminated 

in the publication on December 11, 

1934 of a Harvard Law Review article by, 

Ervin Griswold entitled “Government in 

Ignorance of the Law – A Plea for Better 

Publication of Executive Legislation.” The 

arguments Griswold made for orderly 

publication of the official actions of the 

Executive Branch were underlined when 

the Supreme Court issued its opinion in 

Major Bernard R. Kennedy, first Director 

of the Federal Register (1935-1959) and 

his small staff began startup activities 

immediately: 

“It was necessary to establish contacts with 

the many agencies of the Government, to 

explain to them the requirements of the 

act, and to request that the submission of 

compilations be undertaken immediately 

and that liaison officers be appointed for 

contact work with the Division” 

[2nd Annual Report of the Archivist 

of the United States 1935-1936]. 

2 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 3 
The Code of Federal Regulations The Winds of War

Today the Office of the Federal Register, in partnership 

with the Government Printing Office (GPO), publishes 

eleven separate series of government publications as a 

part of the Federal Register system. Seventy years ago 

the Federal Register was the sole publication required by 

the Federal Register Act. But the need for supplementary 

publications became apparent during the first year of 

operations. The Federal Register Index was the first such 

supplementary publication which the Division began to 

produce immediately as a reference guide to the material 

in the daily publication. 

During its first year of operation, the As the Codification Board met and 

Administrative Committee proposed considered the needs of agencies and the 

amending the Federal Register Act to public, it came to the conclusion that 

provide for a codification, rather than a codification should be done on the basis 

mere compilation, of the vast amounts of a common structure with common 

of materials being identified by agencies elements. At the recommendation of the 

as regulatory material. The amendment, Administrative Committee, on October 

introduced by the sponsor of the original 11, 1938, the President authorized a 

act, Representative Emanuel Celler (D- new publication: the Code of Federal 

NY), became Public Law 75-158 when Regulations. The new Code was made 

approved by the President on June 19, up of 50 Titles, or subject areas, to be 

1937. Each agency was to prepare and updated with annual supplements until 

file with the Administrative Committee 1943 when a general codification would 

a complete codification of all documents again be required from all agencies, then 

having legal effect and in force on June and every five years thereafter. 

1, 1938. The codifications were due by In anticipation of the new codification 

July 1, 1938, and a re-codification was system, the June 4, 1938 issue of 

required every fifth year thereafter. The the Federal Register for the first time 

amendment established a Codification grouped documents according to the 

Board made up of Federal Register and titles in the Code, and the number of 

Justice Department attorneys to set columns increased from two to three to 

policy for the new codification. accommodate printing in the Code. The 

needs and capabilities associated with 

the printing processes of the Federal 

Register always have played a central role 

in the policies and procedures of the 

Federal Register system. At times those 

needs and capabilities have been the 

driving force for change. At other times, 

GPO has adjusted its processes to the 

needs created by the legal requirements 

of the Federal Register system. But the 

relationship between the Federal Register 

and GPO always has been a partnership, 

as envisioned by the Federal Register Act. 

The Codification Board was abolished 

and its functions transferred to the 

Federal Register Division in 1939, the 

same year that the first volume of the first 

edition of the 15-volume series appeared. 

The first annual Supplement was 

published in 1940. Although the Code 

of Federal Regulations would change in 

significant ways during the next 65 years, 

the major components of the Federal 

Register system remain the Code, referred 

to as a special edition, and the Federal 

Register. In reality, the Federal Register is 

a daily edition of changes to the standing 

Code of Federal Regulations. 

The Administrative Committee’s 

proposal to create a codification of 

Federal regulations was the first of 

many alterations and enhancements to 

the Federal Register system that have 

demonstrated its flexibility and resilience. 

The system has been adapted to changing 

needs and circumstances, but its purpose 

remains essentially that envisioned in 

1935 – a source for and record of the 

official actions of Executive Branch 

officers of the Federal Government. 

After four years of editorial and publishing experience, the 

Federal Register Division confronted enormous changes 

wrought by the demands of a government gone to war 

following the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941. 

Some of the changes were temporary — the dramatic 

rise in the number of documents published, for example 

— while others left a permanent imprint on both the 

publication and the Division. The number of documents 

printed jumped from 7,850 in Fiscal Year (FY) 1941 

to 18,569 in FY1943, then returned closer to pre-war 

levels by FY1947. The nature of the information in the 

documents reflected the nation at war: price schedules, 

preference orders, export control regulations, selective 

service regulations, rationing orders; documents on aliens 

and nationality, consumer credit, and the establishment of 

new war agencies. One class of documents was no longer 

published: summaries of contracts for manufacture of 

munitions and implements of war. 

Considerable assistance not directly During the war some trade journals 

connected with the publication of the and other papers began a daily practice 

Federal Register began to be given to of telephoning to ask whether regulations 

Government officials and business leaders on particular subjects had been filed for 

unfamiliar with the Federal regulatory publication the next day. Others sent 

process. The Division aided officials typists to copy the documents before 

of many war agencies in drafting and they were printed in the Federal Register. 

issuing rules and regulations guiding not These practices continue today in the 

only the public but also their own large Public Inspection area of the Office, 

and scattered staffs. Providing drafting although researchers now use copying 

assistance to agencies has remained a part machines, computer terminals, and digital 

of the work of the staff of the Federal cameras to do their work. 

Register since that time. 

Because so many of the regulations 

in effect on June 1, 1943, when the 

Federal Register Act required a new 

codification of all documents, were of a 

temporary nature relating to war needs, 

Congress authorized the publication 

of a cumulative supplement that year 

instead of a completely new Code, and 

additional annual supplements were 

authorized for the duration of the war. 

In 1944 David C. Eberhart, Jr., moved 

into the post of Chief Editor, a role 

as second in command to Major 

Kennedy that he was to play, with 

varying titles, until he succeeded 

the Director in 1959. When Eberhart 

retired in 1970, the Division of the 

Federal Register had been led by 

only two men for 

the entire first 

thirty-five years 

of its existence, 

and their tenure 

had overlapped 

for fifteen of those 

years. At its 70th 

Anniversary the 

Federal Register has 

known three primary 

generations of editors – those who 

set up the publication systems in 

the 1930s and 1940s; those who 

knew and learned from that first 

generation; and a generation trained 

by those once-removed from the first 

generation. During the past decade 

this latter generation has begun 

passing the torch to a new, fourth 

generation of staff. 

4 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 5 
The Administrative Procedure Act Years of Change

On June 11, 1946, only months after the 10th anniversary 

of the publication of the first issue of the Federal Register, 

by means of which the results of agency rulemaking were 

placed in the public domain, the Administrative Procedure 

Act (APA) (5 USC 552) was approved to place the 

rulemaking process itself in the public domain as well. 

The APA established a new process for informal (nonjudicial) rulemaking: Agencies were required to publish 

notices of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register 

and provide the opportunity for public comment before 

final rules could be put into effect. In addition most 

agencies were required to publish statements of general 

policy, descriptions of organization, procedure, and 

delegations of final authority in the Federal Register. 

The issue of January 1, 1947 was the first 

to have a Proposed Rule category. The 

requirement to publish organizational 

information resulted in publication of 

the largest single issue up to that date 

on September 11, 1946, containing 

1,094 pages. The APA transformed the 

Federal Register from being merely a 

source of authoritative information about 

regulations to being an integral part of the 

democratic, quasi-legislative process by 

which those regulations were formed. 

The Supreme Court’s decision in 

Federal Crop Insurance Corp. v. Merrill 

(332 U.S. 380) on November 10, 1947, 

substantiated the importance of the 

process of publishing regulations in 

the daily Federal Register. The Court 

determined that the appearance of rules 

and regulations in the Federal Register 

gives legal notice of their content and 

they are accordingly binding regardless 

of actual knowledge of their content 

or of hardship resulting from innocent 

ignorance – approving the principle of 

constructive notice with regard to rules 

and regulations and placing them on a par 

F with statutory law. ifty years after enactment of 

the Administrative Procedure 

Act, the National Archives 

and Records Administration 

and the American Bar 

Association commemorated 

the event on October 6, 

1995, and singled out two of 

the Act’s “founding fathers” 

Clark Byse (left) and Walter 

Gelhorn (right). 

President Reagan took note 

of the 50th Anniversary of the 

Federal Register Act in 1985. 

As the middle decade of the 20th Century neared, the 

nation seemed anxious to put away the last vestiges of 

its war footing. A movement to modernize government, 

to make it more efficient, and to apply principles of 

business to government took hold. The Federal Register 

and its companion publications felt the force of these 

movements in a variety of ways. 

Upon recommendation of the 

Administrative Committee, President 

Truman on February 4, 1948, authorized, 

in Executive Order 9930, the first 

complete revision of the Code of Federal 

Regulations, to be issued in 1949. In 

working on the 1949 edition, the staff of 

the Division of the Federal Register had 

to cover a ten-year period, instead of the 

intended five-year period, and the new 

edition required changes in both scope 

and content. Editors added a table linking 

statutory law and related administrative 

regulations, tables that are still revised 

and maintained today. The new Code 

was to be updated by cumulative pocket 

supplements to each volume rather than 

by single annual supplements to the 

entire Code. 

The efficiencies applied to the new 

Code reduced the total pages in it from 

the 39,000 in the original Code plus its 

Supplements to 22,000 in the new Code. 

The complete set of 45 total volumes was 

available by June 30, 1950. 

On June 30, 1949 the Federal Property 

and Administrative Services Act (63 

Stat. 381) was approved by the President 

and the functions of the Director of the 

Federal Register Division were transferred 

to the Administrator of the new General 

Services Administration (GSA). The 

Archivist, now the head of the National 

Archives and Records Service (NARS) 

within GSA, retained the role of 

Chairman of the renamed “Administrative 

Committee of the Federal Register” and 

the Division of the Federal Register was 

retained within NARS. 

New Responsibilities 

Since the founding of the American 

republic the Department of State had 

served not only as the arm of the President 

in the conduct of foreign relations, but 

as the office handling his ministerial 

duties. On May 24, 1950, President 

Truman separated these duties in his 

Reorganization Plan No. 20, removing all 

activities not related to foreign affairs to 

other agencies in the Executive Branch. 

In this process four new responsibilities 

were assigned to the General Services 

Administration and delegated to the 

Federal Register Division within it. 

The Statutes at Large is the 

chronological compilation of all the 

public and private laws of the United 

States and Presidential Proclamations. 

When transferred to the Federal Register 

Division, work on Volumes 63 and 

64 from the 81st Congress (1949-50) 

was shared with the State Department 

which continued to edit the Treaties and 

International Agreements contained in 

the Statutes volumes. After that, those 

materials were published separately by 

the State Department in a new series. 

Volume 71 of the Statutes at Large, for 

the 1st Session of the 85th Congress, 

published in 1958, rounded out a series of 

improvements instituted by the Division 

to make the volumes more useable and 

available on a timely basis. 

Publication of the Statutes at Large is 

preceded by the publication of pamphletsized editions of each law, called Slip 

Laws. The responsibility to receive the 

original documents approved by the 

President, or approved by Congress over 

the President’s veto, to assign public law 

numbers to them, and to publish them 

as Slip Laws, also was delegated to the 

Federal Register Division. 

Another ministerial function transferred 

from the Department of State was 

the responsibility for the receipt and 

publication of amendments to the 

Constitution of the United States and the 

organization of the process surrounding 

ratification of amendments within 

the States. Shortly after taking on this 

responsibility, the Federal Register Division 

handled the certification and publication 

of the 22nd Amendment to the 

Constitution. Five more followed, most 

recently the 27th Amendment, certified on 

May 7, 1992, an amendment historically 

significant for being among the original 

twelve resolutions, ten of which became 

the first ten Constitutional Amendments 

known collectively as the “Bill of Rights.” 

6 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 7 
Serving the Government in New Ways

The decade of the Nineteen Fifties featured a number 

of innovations in the publications of the Division of 

the Federal Register aimed particularly at assisting 

the agencies that produced the rules published in 

the Federal Register and collected in the Code of 

Federal Regulations. The flare-up of the Cold War 

and commencement of the Korean Conflict resulted 

in renewed mobilization authorized by the Defense 

Production Act of 1950 and the prospect of accelerated 

rulemaking activity. 

Recalling the inefficiencies during World 

War II involved in amending regulations 

that were scattered across many titles 

of the Code, the Division created a new 

Title 32A, National Defense, Appendix, 

to include all rules issued pursuant to 

the Act and related Executive orders, as 

a means of not disturbing the peacetime 

structure of the Code. The resulting 

volume was, by far, the largest single 

volume ever to be published by the 

Federal Register in seventy years – 

3 1/2 inches thick and 2,799 pages long. 

By 1954 the special volume had quickly 

shrunk to a mere 430 pages as the 

mobilization program wound down, but 

Title 32A was not finally vacated until 

July 1, 1980. 

Government regulatory activity slowed 

once again with the substantial reductionin-force and the rapid dismantling of 

emergency economic controls that began 

in 1953, and the size of the Federal 

Register decreased by 30%. However, its 

importance was reaffirmed by the U.S. 

9th Circuit Court on March 22, 1954 

in Hatch v. The United States. The Court 

held that a rule involved in the case could 

not be enforced, even against a party 

having actual notice of it, because the 

issuing agency had not published it in the 

Federal Register. 

In 1954, the President’s Conference 

on Administrative Procedure adopted 

recommendations made by the Federal 

Register for uniform numbering, citation, 

and method of printing agency rules, 

changes that would have a lasting impact 

on the structure and ease of use of the 

Code. 

A further aid to government agencies 

was the publication in 1955 of the first 

Guide to Records Retention Requirements. 

Intended to be the first of several guides 

that would gather together similar 

regulations across Titles for ease of use, 

it continued to be a Federal Register 

publication until 1989, although other 

guides envisioned by the Division were 

never published. 

Presidential Documents 

A final responsibility delegated to 

the Federal Register Division with the 

President’s reorganization plan was to 

carry out the ministerial procedures 

related to the operations of the Electoral 

College during each Presidential election. 

These duties include receiving and 

making available for public inspection 

the Certificates of Ascertainment of 

electors from the states and receiving 

the official sealed Certificates of Vote 

for transmission to the Congress. In 

preparation for the 1952 election, the 

first during which the Division had this 

responsibility, the legal staff prepared a 

pamphlet for distribution to state election 

officials containing all laws relating to 

activities of Presidential electors. Similar 

pamphlets have been re-issued for each 

succeeding Presidential election. 

Documents of an informational nature 

submitted under the APA were dropped 

from the Code and published in digest 

form in the renamed United States 

Government Organization Manual, which 

was transferred from the Office of 

Government Reports within the Bureau of 

Budget when that Office was abolished 

on June 30, 1948 and was given the 

status of a special edition of the Federal 

Register. The first manual produced 

under the authority of regulations of the 

Administrative Committee was issued 

on August 4, 1949 and sold for $1.00 

per copy. Now known as the United 

States Government Manual, it continued 

to be one of GPO’s “best sellers” until 

recently when agency directories on the 

Internet supplanted it as the chief means 

of finding information about Federal 

agencies. 

The role of the President in Federal rulemaking has 

evolved in the past seventy years along with the Federal 

Register system. At the time of the establishment of the 

Federal Register, most Federal agency rules were issued as 

“orders” signed by the President. Over time, the authority 

to issue and sign regulations binding on the public was 

delegated by various laws to department and agency 

officials, and the President’s use of Executive orders and 

Proclamations was restricted largely to managing the 

operations of the Executive Branch. 

The method of publishing Presidential 

documents evolved as did the President’s 

use of them. Beginning in 1938, they first 

were included as citations in tables in Title 

3 contained in the annual Supplements to 

the Code, and then published in full text 

separately in annual Compilations. From 

1949 to 1964 Title 3 was published in two 

volumes, the first containing the tables 

of all Presidential documents published 

each year, and the second, an Appendix 

containing the text of selected documents 

that were codified. Since 1976 Title 3 has 

been published as a compilation of the 

full text of Presidential documents. The 

codified set of Presidential documents was 

published separately in 1976, 1979, 1981, 

and, most recently, in 1989. In addition, 

eight separate cumulations of Presidential 

documents were published between 1938 

and 1975. 

From its inception, the Federal Register 

Division had a central role in the drafting 

of Presidential Executive orders and 

Proclamations, examining and editing 

drafts immediately before Presidential 

signature, a role retained until the Carter 

Administration. Until that time the 

Division also notified agencies affected 

by Executive orders and proclamations, 

as well. 

In 1957 plans were developed for 

publishing an annual volume of messages 

and other papers of the President. The 

first volume, Public Papers of the Presidents 

of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 

1957, attempted to bring together material 

which, until that time, had been scattered 

through the Congressional Record and 

the press generally, or which had existed 

only as White House mimeographed 

releases. The volume was presented to the 

President on May 15, 1958, establishing a 

tradition whereby the Director and editors 

of the first volume of the series of Public 

Papers for each new President participate 

in the presentation ceremony for that 

volume, usually held in the Oval Office. 

Creation of the Public Papers of the 

Presidents series birthed an editorial 

project directed both forward, for future 

Presidents, and backwards, for the earlier 

papers of President Eisenhower and those 

of Presidents Truman and Hoover. The 

Franklin D. Roosevelt papers already had 

been privately published. The Division 

completed the first historical compilation 

of Public Papers, the Truman Papers, in 

October 1961. The first volume of the 

Hoover Presidential papers was published 

in 1974. 

President Eisenhower receives the first volume 

of the Public Papers of the Presidents from 

Archivist of the United States Wayne C. Grover, 

accompanied by Mrs. Grover, May 15, 1958. 

8 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 9 
Passing the Torch 

In 1959, after 26 years at the helm of the Division of 

the Federal Register, Major Kennedy handed over its 

reins to his deputy, David C. Eberhart, Jr. As part of a 

reorganization within GSA, the Division became the 

Office of the Federal Register with the National Archives 

and Records Service. The Office was organized into 

two major units, the Executive Agencies Division and 

the Presidential and Legislative Division, a structure 

that remained largely intact until 1995. The first 

Federal Register Handbook, issued in 1960, described 

an ambitious new program aimed at bringing about 

continuous Government-wide improvements in drafting 

and publishing rule documents. The handbook, which 

has been revised and re-issued numerous times and is 

now known as the Document Drafting Handbook, was 

one of the means developed to clarify and expand upon 

the regulations governing the program. 

Another was the commencement of 

technical instruction courses, led by 

Federal Register staff members, for 

executive agencies. A third aspect of 

the program was the development of 

a new codification system designed to 

simplify Federal procurement procedures 

and make them more readily available. 

Beginning “at home” with publication 

of the GSA’s Federal Procurement 

Regulation, the Division embarked on the 

task of bringing together all procurement 

regulations in a single volume under a 

common numbering system. 

These reform efforts were timely by 

any measure, for the years 1960 – 1967 

marked the longest sustained period 

of growth in the number of pages of 

documents printed in the daily Federal 

Register and in the number of pages 

and volumes of the Code of Federal 

Regulations. During those years the 

Federal Register experienced an increase 

of 89% in the number of pages, from 

11,116 in 1959 to 21,088 in 1967. 

During that same period, the number 

of volumes in the CFR grew from 60 to 

110, encompassing a 131% increase in the 

number of pages. Part of the growth in 

the size of the Federal Register came from 

the increasing use of extensive preambles 

in Rule and Proposed Rule documents, 

beginning in the mid-1960s. 

But one of the most significant 

developments to impact operations during 

the 1960s was passage of the Freedom 

of Information Act (Pub. L. 89-487) in 

1967 and the resulting increase of more 

than 40% in the number of requests from 

agencies seeking assistance in meeting 

their responsibilities under the Act. 

Although FOIA, as that Act has become 

known, increased the number of customer 

requests, it reduced the volume of material 

published in the Federal Register and the 

CFR in at least one way – agencies were 

permitted to incorporate by reference 

certain documents in their regulations, 

in lieu of publishing them in full text. 

The law gave the Director of the Federal 

Register authority to regulate this means 

by which Government and regulated 

entities rely on existing industry standards 

and test methods rather than creating their 

own. The Office of the Federal Register 

Library now contains more than 550 cubic 

feet of “IBR” materials which, like the rest 

of the Code of Federal Regulations, has the 

force and effect of law. 

Weekly Compilation of 

Presidential Documents 

In 1965 President Johnson, concerned 

that his appointed officials speak with 

a united voice, requested that a new 

publication be developed to contain 

the statements, messages and other 

Three Directors of the Federal Register, 

Richard Claypoole (1995-1997), Martha 

Girard (1989-1995), and Fred Emery 

(1970-1979) are pictured at the center of 

this photograph of GSA Administrator Joel 

W. (Jay) Solomon presenting President 

Carter with the first volume of his Public 

Papers, October 31, 1978. At far left is 

Archivist James R. Rhoads. 

Presidential materials released by the 

White House. In response, the Office 

of the Federal Register commenced 

publication of The Weekly Compilation 

of Presidential Documents on August 2, 

1965. During the Carter Administration 

the Office established a direct link 

between the Weekly Compilation 

and the Public Papers of the Presidents 

series: the volumes of Public Papers 

became compilations of the weekly 

series. Encompassing approximately a 

six-month time period, each volume of 

the Public Papers contains the material 

in the weekly compilations with 

appropriate emendations and additions, 

rather than a set of selected papers 

edited separately. 

As a fitting bookend to this period of 

transition, Fred J. Emery was appointed 

the third Director of the Federal 

Register in 1970. He served until 1979. 

Innovation and Experimentation

The Seventies was a period of creativity, experimentation, 

and innovation as well as a time of expansion of the 

organization to its largest size in its seventy-year history. 

On May 1, 1971 the distinctive modern logo that became 

so well-recognized over the following 29 years first 

appeared on the cover of the daily Federal Register. In 1973 

the Office relocated from Indiana Avenue to the 8th and 

9th floors of a GSA-leased building at 1100 L Street, NW. 

The move provided an opportunity to 

experiment with new ways of organizing 

the editorial work of the office around 

teams of editors assigned to work on 

multiple publications. Although the 

organization of work based around 

multiple publications was eventually 

abandoned, the emphasis on teamwork, 

promoted by cross-training and the 

sharing of ideas and experiences across 

publications, was not. 

The Administrative Committee of 

the Federal Register (ACFR) grappled 

with many additional new ideas: creating 

a separate publication for the List of 

Sections Affected; adding “Highlights” of 

the contents of the daily Federal Register 

to the cover; staggering the revision dates 

of CFR volumes; expanding the Weekly 

Compilation of Presidential Documents to 

cover the “Presidency;” and establishing 

morning and afternoon editions of the 

Federal Register. While many of these 

proposals were rejected, at the end of 

1976 the ACFR approved rules that 

changed the face of every rulemaking 

document in the Federal Register. 

Effective April 1, 1977, rulemaking 

agencies were required in their 

documents to summarize the action being 

taken, state its intended effect and supply 

the name and number of a person in the 

agency able to answer questions about the 

action. The now familiar seven headings 

— Agency, Action, Summary, Dates, 

Addresses, For Further Information 

Contact, and Supplementary Information 

— which continue to appear in regulatory 

documents, first appeared in Federal 

Register documents on that date. 

This change was the culmination of 

many successive efforts to improve the 

clarity of rulemaking documents and to 

try to eliminate the use of “bureaucratese” 

in writing documents. 

10 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 11 
Plain Language for a Change

Efforts to write regulations in plain English, and to 

reduce their number, received renewed attention under 

the Carter Administration. Following the President’s 

promise that Federal regulations would be “written in 

plain English for a change,” the Office carried out an 

active outreach program to regulatory agencies to assist 

them in achieving the goal of better written documents. 

Staff in the Special Projects Unit within 

the Office taught legal drafting courses 

and carried out policy analysis leading 

to significant changes and enhancements 

in the rulemaking process. In 1977 

alone, fourteen four-day workshops for 

regulation-writers were held, and more 

than 11,000 people attended over 130 

introductory workshops across the nation. 

The vertical logo which first appeared on 

the cover in 1970 has remained a well 

recognized trademark although it has 

been displayed in three different fonts. 

Innovations in Printing

In the mid-1970s, the Office was informed by the 

Government Printing Office that GPO was converting 

from “hot metal” printing processes to the then-emerging 

electronic photo-composition technology. Soon the 

linotype and monotype machines, and tray upon tray of 

lead type, long associated with printing, would be gone 

from the GPO. At the Office of the Federal Register glue 

pots and brushes, along with the processes of manually 

cutting and pasting manuscript, would disappear. By the 

end of the decade the conversion project carried out in 

collegial fashion by the OFR and GPO was complete. 

The April 2, 1979 issue of the Federal Register was 

the first issued with the new typography and other 

enhancements made possible by the conversion. At the 

time, the creation of an electronic publication database 

was seen largely in the context of a better way to print 

paper. However, it set the stage for the virtually limitless 

access and information delivery options that began to be 

available a few short years later through the Internet. 

Using a more conventional means 

of improving access to the material 

published in the Federal Register, the 

Administrative Committee of the Federal 

Register issued a rule in 1980 requiring 

agencies to identify topics and categories 

of persons affected by rules using 

common indexing terms. The resulting 

Thesaurus of Terms was required to be 

used for indexing of published documents 

beginning April 1, 1982. 

Recently, renewed appreciation for the 

importance of the thesaurus has come 

with private sector efforts to improve the 

organization of Federal information for 

digital searches. 

Commencing in 1980 and using Title 

40, Protection of the Environment as a 

test title, CFR editors began to edit the 

database of CFR titles on a daily basis to 

enable quicker turnaround of the annual 

revision of the title after its revision date. 

That this innovation could have farreaching impact was evident to the Office 

at the time: the National Archives 1980 

Annual Report noted prophetically that 

“A side benefit may well be the creation 

of an on-line current CFR data base for 

information retrieval.” 

In 1981 John E. (Jeb) Byrne 

became the fourth Director 

of the Federal Register, 

serving until 1989. 

In the 1980s the clear lines 

distinguishing editing processes from 

printing processes began to blur as 

advances in technology pushed into both 

professions. A concrete expression of this 

transformation was GPO’s placement of 

an “outpost” of its production network 

within the physical office space of the 

Federal Register in 1980. As with the 

conversion from “hot metal” to electronic 

processes, this transformation was, first, a 

transformation related to improving the 

printing processes to permit collaboration 

of the editors and printers earlier in the 

production process. But it also made 

available to editors a new apparatus 

— a computer terminal — that would 

become the gateway to additional, farreaching changes in business practices. 

Office of the Federal 

Register staffers use 

electronic typewriters 

to produce and update 

publications such as 

the Code of Federal 

Regulations. During 

1979, the office 

completed conversion 

of its typesetting 

operations from manual 

to electronic. 

In 1977 Congress for the first 

time required agencies to pay GPO 

for publication of their documents 

in the Federal Register. One result of 

this new policy was a trend among 

agencies to publish fewer documents for 

informational purposes only. 

Another result was to add a new 

dynamic to the interaction between 

the Office of the Federal Register and 

agencies publishing documents – give 

and take over the legal sufficiency of 

documents edited by agencies seeking 

to save space and reduce their costs of 

publishing in the Federal Register. 

Adoption of the Privacy Act of 

1974 (5 USC 552a) brought new 

responsibilities to the Office. Where 

the Freedom of Information Act had 

sought to open up government and its 

activities to the people, the Privacy Act 

sought to close up unauthorized access to 

government records containing personal 

information about citizens. Under the 

Act, agencies were required to publish 

in the Federal Register digests of their 

systems of records containing personal 

information about individuals. The Office 

then printed the first annual Privacy 

Act Compilation, 1975. The publication 

became a biennial issuance beginning in 

1989. The Privacy Act Compilation was 

the first to be published also in CD-Rom 

format (in 1993) and the first official 

Federal Register publication not to be 

printed on paper (beginning in 1995). 

12 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 13 
As if to herald those changes, in 1985 

the Administrative Committee of the 

Federal Register approved a pilot plan for 

the Office to receive machine-readable 

documents from designated agencies. 

During the Reagan Administration, 

the regulatory landscape shifted with the 

increasingly active involvement of the 

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) 

in the review of agency regulations, a 

trend that has become standard practice 

and was made official with the creation of 

the Office of Information and Regulatory 

Affairs. The “Supplementary Information” 

sections of rule documents in the Federal 

Register contain administratively and 

legislatively required agency analyses of 

the impact of the rules on a multitude of 

subject areas. 

NARA Independence 

During Congressional negotiations 

relating to legislation proposing to 

remove the National Archives from the 

General Services Administration and to 

create the National Archives and Records 

Administration as an independent agency, 

the Office of the Federal Register, was 

briefly “in play” as one of the negotiable 

items. But when approved by President 

Reagan on October 19, 1984, the newly 

independent agency retained the Office 

of the Federal Register and the Office 

joined the agency-wide celebrations 

when Public Law 98-497 became 

effective April 1, 1985. That same year, 

coincidentally, the Office celebrated the 

50th anniversary of its establishment. 

The Information Age

By the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first issue 

of the Federal Register on March 14, 1986, many of the 

legal and administrative issues associated with defining 

and organizing the Federal Register system had been 

largely resolved. The system by which agencies promulgate 

proposed rules by publishing them in the Federal Register, 

seeking comment from the public, responding to those 

comments, and issuing Final Rules in the Federal Register; 

and by which editors incorporate those new and amended 

rules in to the Code of Federal Regulations, was welldefined and its legitimacy established. 

Thus, while the Office of the Federal System, created to parallel and monitor 

Register has maintained and refined this the movement of paper documents 

system and grappled with additional through the production processes and 

legal issues during the last two and a half to produce management reports and 

decades, the focus of its innovative and various elements of the Federal Register’s 

creative energies during that time shifted Finding Aids. 

to the challenges and opportunities The need to renovate the office 

presented by advances in technology and building in which the Office of the 

most recently, the universal access to Federal Register was located caused 

technology. the General Services Administration to 

In November 1989, Martha L. Girard relocate the Office, in July 1992, to 800 

was appointed the fifth Director of North Capitol Street, NW, a location 

the Federal Register, and that year the directly across the street from the 

office took its next step along the road Government Printing Office and a move 

to automation with the introduction of that could not have been better timed 

the first “local area network” of personal to benefit the production processes of 

computers. For the first time, a computer Federal Register publications. The daily 

terminal was placed on the desk of every movement of GPO employees, Federal 

OFR staff member. One of the most Register staff, and the documents back 

important technical innovations for which and forth between the two agencies was 

these personal computers were put to use greatly facilitated by the relocation. 

was the automated Document Tracking 

Every hour GPO messengers pick up 

materials from the Office of the Federal 

Register, and every afternoon editors from 

the Federal Register walk to the GPO to 

proofread copy for the next day’s issue. 

However, the most significant movement 

between the two buildings became that 

of electrons carrying the bits and bytes of 

electronic files that are the building blocks 

of the Federal Register, the Code of Federal 

Regulations, the Weekly Compilation of 

Presidential Documents, and all of the 

other publications of the Office. The laser 

beam link between the two building across 

which these electronic files travel was 

installed in 1993. 

These innovations never changed one 

operational assumption that has been in 

place since the commencement of the 

publication of the Federal Register: the 

Federal Register is published every Federal 

business day without regard to weather 

emergencies or other disruptions that 

close other Federal agencies. With its 

partner, the GPO, the Office of the Federal 

Register has never failed in this goal. 

The Office of the Federal Register 

entered the era of Internet access to 

information on October 1, 1992 with 

the debut of FREND, the Federal 

Register Electronic News Delivery 

System. This electronic bulletin board 

provided immediate access to selected 

Federal Register finding aids and was 

enthusiastically embraced by customers 

until replaced by the next generation of 

Internet-based resource. 

That resource came when Congress 

directed GPO to make the Federal 

Register available on-line. Intense 

negotiations and planning between the 

OFR and GPO followed and on June 8, 

1994 the first electronic version of the 

Federal Register appeared on a newly 

inaugurated GPO Access service. Along 

with it, GPO posted the full text and 

graphics of all the daily Federal Registers 

issued since January 3, 1994. The Code 

of Federal Regulations was added to 

GPO Access in 1995. At its September 

19, 1996 meeting the Administrative 

Committee of the Federal Register gave 

the on-line version of the Federal Register 

and its companion publications the status 

of official editions. 

Richard L. Claypoole, appointed the 

sixth Director of the Federal Register in 

1995, reorganized the Office to create 

the structure that remains in place 

as the 70th Anniversary issue of the 

Federal Register is issued. Supervising 

production in five units is the Managing 

Editor. Three of the production units 

are focused on publishing the daily 

Federal Register: Customer Service, 

Scheduling, and Daily Issue. The CFR 

Unit edits and publishes revisions to 

the Code of Federal Regulations, and the 

Presidential and Legislative Publications 

Unit has responsibility for the remaining 

publications of laws and Presidential 

materials. The work is supported by the 

Legal Services and Policy Staff and by the 

Technical Services Staff. The size of the 

staff has ranged from 60 to 65 since the 

reorganization. 

The seventh and current Director of 

the Federal Register, Raymond A. Mosley, 

was appointed in November 1996. 

Although the Office of the Federal 

Register is not often directly involved 

in litigation, in 1995 and 1996 the 

Office became entangled in a lawsuit 

The U.S. Government Printing Office and 

the Office of the Federal Register are 

partners in publishing the daily Federal 

Register. Here a GPO employee operates 

one of the bindery machines, ca. 1960. 

that resulted in a reaffirmation of the 

substantive role of the Office in ensuring 

an orderly process for filing and publishing 

regulations. In Kennecott Utah Copper 

Corp. v. U.S. Dept. of Interior the court 

ruled that the Office has the authority 

to review documnets in confidential 

consultation with agencies and to enforce 

publication and codification requirements. 

[88 F.3d 1191 (D.C. Cir. 1996)]. 

Public Printer Bruce James, Archivist 

Allen Weinstein and the seventh Director 

of the Federal Register Raymond A. 

Mosely, presented the Public Papers of 

the Presidents, 2001, Book I to President 

George W. Bush. 

WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY ERIC DRAPER 

14 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936 15 
The Age of the Internet 

the wealth of information published each day in the 

Federal Register and its companion publications. 

In the last decade, the tools of the information age have 

been more fully integrated into production processes, 

and the vast power of new technologies has been 

harnessed as never before to provide instant access to 

www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/index.html 

The volume of that information has never 

been greater. With the exception of two 

years in the 1970s and one in the 1980s, 

the annual editions of the Federal Register 

published between 1991 and 2005 

contained more pages than the editions 

in any previous years. Since 2002, each 

annual edition has contained more than 

70,000 pages of text, with the largest 

edition, published in 2004, containing 

75,675 pages. The largest single 

document ever published in the Federal 

Register was a 6,653 page report of the 

Justice Department’s proposed settlement 

in its antitrust case against Microsoft 

contained in the issue of May 3, 2002. 

The Office has continued to experiment 

with a number of typesetting style 

changes, some of which were adopted to 

make this vast quantity of information 

more readable and easier to use. With the 

first issue in the 21st Century, published 

on January 3, 2000, the Office unveiled a 

new cover, as well. 

The Office also responded to the 

interest expressed by agencies in having 

the capability to submit documents to the 

Office electronically. The most significant 

hurdle to providing such capability was 

the requirement that documents be 

signed in a manner that the Director 

could authenticate. With this requirement 

in mind, and contemplating a time when 

documents might exist only in electronic 

form, the Office launched its Electronic 

Editing and Publishing System (or 

eDOCS) development project in 2001. 

Working with GPO under the leadership 

of Public Printer Bruce James, the Office 

of the Federal Register published the first 

Federal Register to contain documents 

submitted electronically and managed 

by the eDOCS system on October 

5, 2003. Approximately one-half of 

the documents contained in the 70th 

Anniversary issue of the Federal Register, 

published on March 14, 2006, will have 

been processed through the eDOCS 

system. One-fourth of those documents 

will have been submitted to the Office by 

e-mail and digitally signed. 

Ultimately, improving processes is 

all about improving the presentation 

of the information and access to the 

information for which the Office of the 

Federal Register is responsible. That work 

of innovation, ongoing for 70 years, has 

not ended. Beginning on February 15, 

2001, and every working day since that 

date, every one of the more than 200 

volumes of the 50 Titles of the Code of 

Federal Regulations has been revised and 

made available online in its most current 

form. This Electronic Code of Federal 

Regulations (e-CFR) is the realization of 

the dream described in NARA’s Annual 

Report 25 years ago. Editors in the CFR 

Unit revise each Title of the CFR each 

day based on the amendments published 

in that day’s issue of the Federal Register. 

The electronic database generated by 

their work is both the source for printing 

annual revisions of the books, as has been 

done since 1967, and the source of the 

on-line e-CFR version. 

When the first issue of the Federal 

Register came off the presses on March 

14, 1936, the modest sixteen-page 

booklet was bundled and wrapped and 

presented to the public by mail. Some 

subscribers waited two weeks to receive 

it. On March 14, 2006, when the 70th 

Anniversary issue of the Federal Register is 

ready, it will be placed on the Worldwide 

Web at approximately 6:00 a.m., 

and by the end of the day more than 

150,000 individuals will have searched 

its contents for information critical 

to their lives. Later that day, editors 

at the Office of the Federal Register 

will insert all the amendments to the 

Code of Federal Regulations contained 

in the 70th Anniversary issue into their 

appropriate locations within one of the 

220 volumes of the electronic CFR. The 

vision of public access to the actions and 

documents of Government will have been 

realized one more day. . .. 

Cover of the Federal Register, March 14, 2006. 

16 A Brief History Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Issue of the Federal Register March 14, 1936