United States General Accounting Office

GAO Report to the Chairman, Committee on

Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate

October 1997 REGULATORY

REFORM

Agencies’ Efforts to

Eliminate and Revise

Rules Yield Mixed

Results

GAO/GGD-98-3

GAO United States

General Accounting Office

Washington, D.C. 20548

General Government Division

B-276797 

October 2, 1997

The Honorable Fred Thompson

Chairman, Committee on Governmental Affairs

United States Senate

Dear Mr. Chairman:

The federal regulatory system has long been the subject of controversy,

with both the legislative and executive branches making numerous

attempts to reform regulatory processes during the past 20 years. In

June 1995, President Clinton said that, as part of his administration’s

regulatory reform initiative, federal agencies would eliminate 16,000 pages

of regulations from the 140,000-page Code of Federal Regulations (CFR),

and that another 31,000 pages would be revised.1

 Since that time, agencies

have periodically reported to the Office of Management and Budget’s

(OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on their progress

in eliminating and revising rules. OIRA, in turn, has reported on this

progress to the President and to the public.2

Last year we testified that, as of June 30, 1996, federal agencies said they

had eliminated 11,569 pages of the CFR and revised another 13,216 pages.3

However, we concluded that most of the agencies’ CFR page elimination

efforts did not appear to reduce regulatory burden. As for the effort to

revise the regulations, we said we could not determine whether burden

was likely to be reduced as a result of most of the revisions. At the same

hearing, the Administrator of OIRA testified that she had not expected that

the page elimination effort would reduce burden. However, she said that

“the real savings, the reduction of burden,” would come from the CFR

pages that were being revised.

This report responds to your request that we update and expand our

previous review of the CFR page elimination and revision initiative. Our

objectives were to determine whether (1) agencies’ reported page

elimination totals took into account any pages added to the CFR during the

same period, (2) agencies’ CFR revision efforts would reduce regulatory

burden, and (3) the administration has any mechanism in place for

1

The CFR is a compilation of the current general and permanent regulations of federal agencies.

2

More Benefits Fewer Burdens: Creating A Regulatory System that Works for the American People,

Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Washington,

D.C.: Dec. 1996).

3

Regulatory Reform: Implementation of the Regulatory Review Executive Order (GAO/T-GGD-96-185,

Sept. 25, 1996).

Page 1 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

measuring burden reductions as a result of its CFR page elimination and

revision initiatives. As you requested, we limited the scope of our work on

the first two objectives to four agencies: the Departments of Housing and

Urban Development (HUD) and Transportation (DOT), the Department of

Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Results in Brief Officials in each of the four agencies we reviewed said that the page

elimination totals that their agencies reported to OIRA did not take into

account the pages that their agencies had added to the CFR while the

eliminations were taking place. EPA and DOT estimated that they added

more pages to the CFR than they removed during their page elimination

initiatives. HUD and OSHA, on the other hand, estimated that they deleted

more pages than they added. Overall, when estimated page additions were

counted, the 4 agencies’ CFR sections decreased in size by about 926

pages—about 3 percent of the CFR pages at the start of the initiative, or

about 17 percent of the amount reported to OIRA. The agencies pointed out

that pages are often added to the CFR because of statutory requirements or

to clarify requirements placed on regulated entities and that pages are

sometimes not eliminated at the request of those entities.

Our review indicated that about 40 percent of the 422 CFR revision actions

in the 4 agencies would substantively reduce the burden felt by regulated

entities as a result of such actions as eliminating paperwork requirements

and providing compliance flexibility. Another 15 percent of the actions

appeared to be minor burden reductions in that they seemed to make the

regulations easier to find or to understand but would not change the

underlying regulatory requirements or scope of applicability. We

concluded that about 27 percent of the CFR revision actions would have no

effect on the burden felt by regulated entities and that about 8 percent

could increase regulatory burden. We could not determine what effect

about 9 percent of the CFR revision actions would have on the regulated

entities, either because the actions had multiple parts that potentially

could offset each other or because the information available was unclear.

OIRA officials said that the administration has no mechanisms in place for

measuring burden reductions as a result of the CFR page elimination and

revision effort. However, they believe that the initiative is having a

beneficial effect and also pointed out that the CFR page elimination and

revision efforts are only part of a larger set of actions the administration is

taking to reform the nation’s regulatory system.

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Background Executive Order 12866, issued on September 30, 1993, is administered by

OIRA and is intended to enhance regulatory planning and coordination with

respect to both new and existing regulations. Section 5 of the executive

order required agencies to submit to OIRA by December 31, 1993, a program

for periodically reviewing their existing significant regulations to

determine whether any should be modified or eliminated. According to the

executive order, the purpose of the review was to make the agencies’

regulatory programs more effective, less burdensome, or better aligned

with the President’s priorities and the principles specified in the order.

There have been several previous requirements that federal agencies

review their existing regulations. For example, in 1979, President Carter

issued Executive Order 12044, which required agencies to review their

existing rules “periodically.” The Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980

required agencies to publish in the Federal Register a plan for the periodic

review of rules that “have or will have a significant economic impact upon

a substantial number of small entities.”4

 In 1992, President Bush sent a

memorandum to all federal departments and agencies calling for a 90-day

moratorium on new proposed or final rules during which agencies were

“to evaluate existing regulations and programs and to identify and

accelerate action on initiatives that will eliminate any unnecessary

regulatory burden or otherwise promote economic growth.”5

In an October 1993 memorandum to the heads of federal departments and

agencies, the Administrator of OIRA noted these previous efforts but said

that some of them had been “so broad in scope that necessary analytic

focus has been diffused, or needed followup has not occurred.” In its

report on the first year’s implementation of Executive Order 12866, OIRA

further clarified the intent of the Clinton administration’s rule review

initiative:

“It is important to emphasize what the lookback effort is and is not. It is not directed at a

simple elimination or expunging of specific regulations from the Code of Federal

Regulations. Nor does it envision tinkering with regulatory provisions to consolidate or

update provisions. Most of this type of change has already been accomplished, and the

additional dividends are unlikely to be significant. Rather, the lookback provided for in the

Executive Order speaks to a fundamental reengineering of entire regulatory systems. . . .”

4

In Regulatory Flexibility Act: Status of Agencies’ Compliance (GAO/GGD-94-105, Apr. 27, 1994), we

reported, among other things, on the results of a study by the Small Business Administration that

indicated many agencies had not planned for or conducted a review of their rules.

5

This moratorium was ultimately extended for a full year.

Page 3 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
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On March 4, 1995, President Clinton sent a memorandum to the heads of

departments and agencies describing plans for changing the federal

regulatory system because “not all agencies have taken the steps

necessary to implement regulatory reform.” Among other things, the

President directed each agency to conduct a page-by-page review of all its

regulations in force and eliminate or revise those that were outdated or in

need of reform. In June 1995, 28 agencies provided reports to the President

describing the status of their regulatory reform efforts, often noting the

number of pages of federal regulations that would be eliminated or

revised. On June 12, 1995, the President announced that the page-by-page

review effort had resulted in commitments to eliminate 16,000 pages from

the 140,000-page CFR and modify another 31,000 pages either through

administrative or legislative means.

In a December 1996 report to the President, the OMB Director and the OIRA

Administrator said that agencies had made “significant progress toward

fulfilling these commitments” but recognized that more work remained to

be done.6

 They said that despite the addition of new regulations while

regulations were being eliminated, the CFR was about 5,000 pages smaller

at the end of the first three quarters of 1996 than it had been a year earlier.

The report went on to say that agencies had revised or proposed to revise

nearly 20,000 pages of the CFR.

Scope and

Methodology

A detailed explanation of our scope and methodology is in appendix I. To

address our first objective of determining whether agencies’ page

elimination totals accounted for pages added, we obtained CFR page

elimination and revision totals as of April 30, 1997, from OIRA and

interviewed agency officials at HUD, DOT, OSHA, and EPA. The officials said

that the elimination totals did not include pages added while the

eliminations occurred.7

 They also said that their agencies had not been

required to count the number of pages added during this period and that it

would be extremely difficult for them to identify and provide an accurate

count of those additions as part of this review because some of the

regulatory actions had taken place early in the initiative.

6

More Benefits Fewer Burdens, December 1996.

7

The dates the agencies used to track page eliminations varied. DOT started tracking page eliminations

from the beginning of the Clinton administration in January 1993. HUD began tracking its eliminations

from March 1994. OSHA and EPA began tracking their eliminations from the date of the

administration’s March 1995 call to eliminate and revise pages in the CFR.

Page 4 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

As discussed with your office, in order to gauge the effect of CFR page

additions without imposing a major burden on the agencies, we asked the

agencies to count the number of pages added for those actions that they

believed had increased their sections of the CFR by five or more pages and

that occurred during the same periods that they said they had eliminated

CFR pages. Three of the four agencies also compared editions of their

sections of the CFR near the beginning and end of their page elimination

initiatives to determine net page changes and page additions. Using both

these estimated page additions and reported eliminations, we calculated

the net increase or decrease in each agency’s CFR page totals. (See

appendix I for more detail on how the agencies estimated the number of

CFR pages added.)

To address our second objective of determining whether agencies’ CFR

revision actions would reduce regulatory burden, we reviewed

descriptions of all 422 such actions in the 4 agencies that appeared in at

least 1 edition of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and

Deregulatory Actions between October 1995 and April 1997.8 We initially

reviewed descriptive abstracts for these actions that were included in the

Unified Agenda.

9

 However, many of the abstracts did not clearly indicate

what actions were being proposed. In those cases, we attempted to obtain

additional information about the actions from any related proposed or

final rules printed in the Federal Register. If more information was still

needed, we contacted agency officials.

We used all of the information available to assess what effect the

initiatives were likely to have on regulated entities (e.g., individuals,

private companies, state or local governments, or federal agencies other

than the issuing agency). We coded each action into one of the following

five categories: (1) substantive burden reduction (e.g., eliminating

paperwork and other requirements, giving regulated entities more

flexibility in how they can comply with or implement the rule, or lowering

compliance costs); (2) minor burden reduction (e.g., clarifying the

language in the CFR to make it easier to read or understand or combining

8

This document, which is issued twice a year since 1983 by the Regulatory Information Service Center,

is a compendium of each executive and independent agency’s regulatory activities that are being

developed, planned for the future, or completed. It provides such information as the status of the

regulation, a timetable for further action, any statutory or judicial deadlines, and the name and

telephone number of an agency contact. We used the October 1995 Unified Agenda as the starting

point of our review because it was the first edition published after the President’s June 1995

announcement of page revisions.

9

Thirty-one of these entries had no abstract describing the initiative in the Unified Agenda, so we

obtained abstracts or proposed or final rule preambles directly from the agencies for each of these

actions.

Page 5 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

existing sections of the CFR to make the requirements easier to find);

(3) burden increase (e.g., adding reporting requirements, requiring

additional training or testing procedures, or expanding the scope of a

regulation to new entities); (4) no burden change (e.g., eliminating

obsolete or duplicative regulations, establishing a committee to study an

issue, or changing requirements that will primarily affect the agency

promulgating the regulation); or (5) cannot tell (e.g., actions that had

multiple parts that could potentially offset each other or were unclear as

to their effect on the regulated entities). Each of the 422 actions was

reviewed by several different members of our staff, including those with

extensive subject matter expertise, to help ensure validity and consistency

of judgment in assessing the impact of the actions on regulatory entities.

Agency officials were given an opportunity to review and comment on our

assessment of all the actions during the assignment, and their comments

were taken into consideration in making our final determinations about

the actions’ effect on regulatory burden.

To address our third objective of determining whether the administration

had any mechanisms in place to measure burden reductions as a result of

the CFR page elimination and revision initiatives, we interviewed officials

at OIRA.

We did not verify the agencies’ CFR page elimination totals or their page

addition estimates.10 The agencies’ estimates of the pages added to the CFR

may not include all added pages because, in response to agency concerns

about the effort it would take to count all pages, we agreed that the

agencies could exclude any action that added less than five pages. Also,

although we validated our judgments about the possible effect of the

proposed changes by using multiple judges and consulting with

knowledgeable members of our staff and agency officials, some of our

assessments were based on relatively little information. We did not

differentiate between actions in terms of scope of the effort involved (e.g.,

whether the action would affect many or only a few regulated entities).

Finally, we did not render a judgment regarding the wisdom of any of the

CFR revision actions, only whether they would affect the burden felt by

regulated entities.

We conducted our work at OMB, HUD, DOT, OSHA, and EPA headquarters in

Washington, D.C., between February 1997 and September 1997 in

accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. We

10However, we did analyze EPA’s and DOT’s page elimination totals as part of last year’s testimony on

this issue (GAO/T-GGD-96-185, Sept. 25, 1996). We concluded that the agencies’ page elimination

claims were generally valid.

Page 6 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
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made a draft of this report available to the Director of OMB, the Secretaries

of HUD, Labor, and DOT, and the Administrator of EPA for their review and

comment. Their comments are discussed at the end of this letter.

CFR Page Elimination

Reports Do Not

Reflect Page

Additions

Any analysis of the effect of reductions in the number of pages of

regulatory text must initially recognize that one sentence of a regulation

can impose more burden than 100 pages of regulations that are

administrative in nature. Therefore, the number of pages eliminated from

the CFR is, at best, an indirect measure of burden reduction. Nevertheless,

the number of CFR pages eliminated is one of the measures that the

administration is using to gauge its own efforts.

As of April 30, 1997, 15 agencies reported to OMB that they had eliminated

79 percent, or more than 13,000, of the 16,627 pages they had targeted for

elimination.11 The 4 agencies that we examined reported that they had

eliminated a total of 5,532 (85 percent) of the 6,529 pages they had

targeted. However, officials at each of those four agencies told us that

these page elimination totals did not include the pages that they had added

to their parts of the CFR at the same time that pages were being removed.

As table 1 shows, after taking into account the 4 agencies’ estimates of the

major CFR page additions that were made during the same period that

pages were eliminated, the agencies’ CFR sections decreased in size by

about 926 pages—about 3 percent of their total CFR pages at the start of

their initiatives and about 17 percent of the 5,532-page elimination total

that had been reported to OIRA by these agencies. The effect of accounting

for pages added to the CFR varied across the four agencies. EPA and DOT

estimated they added more pages to the CFR than they removed during

their page elimination initiatives. As a result, the size of their CFR sections

increased by an estimated 966 and 283 pages, respectively. HUD and OSHA,

on the other hand, estimated they deleted more pages than they added

during their initiatives, so the size of their CFR sections decreased.

11The 15 agencies were the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and

Human Services, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, HUD, and DOT,

as well as EPA and the Small Business Administration.

Page 7 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
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Table 1: Agencies’ CFR Page Totals, Targets, Eliminations, Additions, and Net Change

Pages eliminated/added as of April

30, 1997

Agency

Total CFR pages

at start of agency

initiative

Pages targeted

for elimination

Gross pages

eliminated

Pages added

(estimated)

Net page change

(estimated)

HUD 4,023 2,802 –1,992 +651 –1,341

DOT 10,663 1,221 –1,282 +1,565 +283

OSHA 3,495 1,049 –920 +86 –834

EPA 14,312 1,457 –1,338 +2,304 +966

Total 32,493 6,529 –5,532 +4,606 –926

Sources: OIRA, HUD, DOT, OSHA, and EPA.

Note: The agencies’ page elimination initiatives began at different points in time.

Figure 1 depicts the result of the CFR page elimination effort in each

agency both before (gross) and after (net) accounting for estimated CFR

page additions.

Page 8 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

Figure 1: EPA’s and DOT’s CFR Pages

Increased During Their Page

Elimination Initiative

(2,500)

(2,000)

(1,500)

(1,000)

(500)

0

500

1,000

(1,992)

(920)

(1,282) (1,341) (1,338)

(834)

283

966

Number of pages

Gross page elimination

Net page change

HUD OSHA DOT EPA

Note 1: Gross page eliminations are the totals reported by the agencies to OMB.

Note 2: Net page changes equal the difference between gross pages eliminated and total

estimated pages added to the CFR between the beginning of the agencies’ initiatives and

April 30, 1997.

Note 3: The agencies began the page elimination initiatives at different points in time.

Sources: OMB, HUD, OSHA, DOT, and EPA.

Agencies Said CFR Pages

Are Added or Retained for

Many Reasons

Agency officials said there are a number of reasons why pages are added

to or kept in the CFR, many of which are beyond the agencies’ control or

are beneficial to regulated entities. The officials frequently said that

statutory requirements imposed by Congress often drive CFR page

Page 9 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

additions. For example, an EPA official said that the growth in the number

of their CFR pages was primarily driven by statutory requirements to

develop new Clean Air Act regulations. A HUD official estimated that the

agency added about 18 pages to the CFR in 1996 with the regulations

implementing the Community Development Block Grants for Indian Tribes

and Alaska Native Villages. According to HUD, the “principal impetus for

this rulemaking process was the need to implement various statutory

mandates included in Section 105 of the Department of Housing and Urban

Development Reform Act (P.L. 101-235) as amended by the National

Affordable Housing Act of 1990.” The official also said HUD added more

than eight pages to the CFR in 1995 as a result of a rule implementing the

Base Closure Community Redevelopment and Homeless Assistance Act of

1994 (P.L. 103-421). DOT officials said that all of the CFR page increases in

the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit

Administration and the bulk of the increases in other parts of DOT were

statutorily mandated. For example, they said that the National Highway

Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) added 68 pages in response to

congressional mandates contained in the Intermodal Surface

Transportation Efficiency Act and the American Automobile Labeling Act.

They said that DOT’s Office of the Secretary added 18 pages of rules to set

out procedures for statutorily mandated alcohol testing of

“safety-sensitive” employees.

Agency officials also said that pages are sometimes added to the CFR in

order to clarify regulatory requirements. For example, DOT officials said

that they have added charts and examples to clearly illustrate how

regulated entities can comply with their rules. Also, they said that in future

regulations, they plan to incorporate question-and-answer formats and

checklists to assist regulated entities. Therefore, they said the additional

pages actually decrease the burden imposed on those entities.

EPA officials pointed out that pages are often added to the CFR that permit,

not restrict, actions by other entities. For example, they said that pages are

added to allow farmers to use new pesticides and expand the use of

existing pesticides on food crops. Without those regulations, which

establish the allowable levels of pesticide residues in food crops, use of

the pesticides would be prohibited.

Finally, agency officials said that pages are sometimes not eliminated from

the CFR as a result of requests from regulated entities. For example, DOT

officials said they had proposed streamlining the procedures regarding

marine industry manufacturers’ use of independent laboratories instead of

Page 10 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
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the Coast Guard to inspect lights and fog signal emitters. However,

according to the officials, the “project was withdrawn due to substantial

issues raised by public comments. . . .”

Overall, DOT officials said that CFR page counts are not always an accurate

proxy for regulatory burden. For example, they noted that the size of CFR

typeface or the format used periodically changes, each of which can have

a big impact on the number of CFR pages. They also said that after a rule is

published there is usually a period before it goes into effect in which both

the old and the new rules are published. Finally, they said that editorial

notes are added by the Office of the Federal Register when publishing the

CFR, which increases the number of pages.

Some CFR Revision

Efforts Will Not

Reduce Regulatory

Burden

As figure 2 shows, about 40 percent of the 422 CFR revision actions in the 4

agencies appeared to substantively reduce the burden felt by regulated

entities through such actions as eliminating paperwork requirements and

providing compliance flexibility. Another 15 percent were minor burden

reductions in that they made regulatory requirements easier to find or to

understand but did not change the rules’ underlying requirements or scope

of applicability. Therefore, taking these two categories together, about

55 percent of the CFR revision actions appeared to reduce the level of

regulatory burden to at least some extent. However, about 8 percent of the

actions seemed to increase regulatory burden, and another 27 percent did

not appear to affect regulated entities’ burden. We were unable to

determine what, if any, impact about 9 percent of the actions would have

on regulatory burden. (The numbers do not add to 100 percent due to

rounding.)

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Figure 2: CFR Revision Actions

Appear to Have Varying Effect on

Regulatory Burden

40%

15%

27% 9%

8%

Substantive burden reduction

No burden change

Burden increase

Cannot tell

Minor burden reduction

Note: The numbers do not add to 100 percent due to rounding.

Source: GAO analysis of effect of CFR revision actions on regulatory burden.

As table 2 shows, there were some differences across the agencies in the

degree to which their CFR revision actions appeared to affect regulatory

burden. For example, our analysis indicated that about 11 percent of the

OSHA actions could be substantive reductions in regulatory burden but that

more than 50 percent of the EPA actions appeared to be so. Conversely,

nearly 37 percent of the DOT actions did not appear to change regulated

entities’ burden compared with about 11 percent at OSHA.

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Table 2: Effect of Revision Actions on

Burden Varied by Agency Percent of actions that resulted in:

Agency

Number

of actions

Substantive

burden

reduction

Minor

burden

reduction

No

burden

change

Burden

increase

Cannot

tell

HUD 107 37% 30% 25% 5% 3%

DOT 183 38 7 37 9 9

OSHA 19 11 21 11 16 42

EPA 113 52 14 15 9 10

Note: Some of the numbers do not add to 100 percent due to rounding.

Source: GAO analysis of agencies’ CFR revision actions on regulatory burden.

Substantive Burden

Reduction Actions

Included Less Paperwork

and More Flexibility

The 170 CFR revision actions that appeared to substantively reduce

regulatory burden took a number of different forms, including reducing

paperwork or other requirements, giving the regulated entities flexibility in

how to comply with or implement the regulations, lowering compliance

costs, and/or allowing the regulated entities to file or transmit reports

electronically.12 About half (90) of these actions appeared to reduce

burden by eliminating paperwork and/or other requirements. For example,

one EPA action proposed changing the frequency with which states must

submit information related to state water quality standards under section

303(d) of the Clean Water Act from every 2 years to every 5 years.

Lessening the frequency with which this information must be submitted

should reduce the paperwork burden imposed on the states. One HUD

action proposed to reorganize six separate grant programs into a single

formula-based program, eliminating the need for both annual notices of

funding availability and annual submission of applications. Also, by

consolidating these programs into one program, HUD expected that the

reporting and recordkeeping requirements would be dramatically reduced

as grantees would only be required to maintain records on one program.

Another HUD action would allow the use of classes of innovative products

without having each manufacturer apply for a material release for a

specific product. HUD said these changes would save suppliers and

manufacturers thousands of dollars in application fees and materials

preparation.

About half (86) of the 170 CFR actions appeared to reduce regulated

entities’ burden by giving them more flexibility in how they comply with or

12A single regulatory action could contain more than one of these elements. For example, one action

could both eliminate certain recordkeeping requirements and give regulated entities greater flexibility

in how they comply with regulatory requirements.

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implement the regulations. For example, the Federal Aviation

Administration (FAA) proposed revising “the Federal Aviation Regulations

to provide for the granting of relief from the literal compliance with

certain rules,” provided the applicant justified this relief and FAA

concluded that the provisions not complied with had no adverse impact on

safety or were compensated for by other factors. FAA also revised its

regulations governing portable protective breathing equipment that is

required for crew members’ use in combatting in-flight fires, eliminating

the requirement that airlines have portable equipment in each

compartment and giving the airlines flexibility in the number and

placement of this equipment in the aircraft. In another example, EPA said it

revised its regulations for municipal solid waste landfills to allow local

governments greater flexibility to demonstrate compliance with financial

assurance requirements.

Other examples of agencies’ actions that appeared to result in substantive

burden reduction for the regulated entities included the following:

• OSHA proposed revising the shipyard employment safety standards

regarding safety systems and work practices for entering and exiting the

workplace, eliminating many provisions that limit employer innovation.

According to the notice of proposed rulemaking, OSHA expected that

regulated entities’ costs would decrease if employers could use alternative

safety systems and work practices that were not allowed by the existing

requirements.

• HUD revised its rules concerning the Board of Contract Appeals to make

the Board’s actions less costly and time-consuming to appellants,

including allowing appellants to use expedited small claims procedures,

raising the threshold for using accelerated procedures in claims from

$10,000 to $50,000, and advising claimants of the availability of alternative

dispute resolution techniques. This action made revisions required by the

Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which amended the Contract

Disputes Act of 1978.

• DOT proposed allowing airlines to electronically file tariff rules governing

the availability of passenger fares and their conditions, which they said

would save the airline industry over a million dollars in tariff submissions,

printing, and distribution costs.

• EPA said it would propose modifying its pesticide experimental use permit

regulations to permit expanded testing without a permit, reducing burden

on pesticide producers.

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According to agency officials, some of these actions to reduce regulatory

burden were statutorily mandated. For example, DOT said two of its

actions giving states additional flexibility implements “a statutory

requirement that directs the Secretary of Transportation to issue

regulations. . . .” HUD said that it revised certain regulations in part “to

incorporate the statutory amendments in the Housing and Community

Development Act of 1992.”

Minor Burden Reductions

Made Rules Easier to Find

or to Understand

Our analysis indicated that about 15 percent of the 4 agencies’ CFR revision

actions (65 of the 422 actions) would result in minor reductions in

regulated entities’ burden. These minor burden reductions included

actions that made rules easier to understand (e.g., writing rules with less

technical jargon) or easier to find (e.g., consolidating related sections of

the CFR into one section) but did not change the regulations’ underlying

requirements. CFR revision actions that we considered minor burden

reduction actions included the following:

• HUD consolidated its fair housing and equal opportunity requirements for

its programs. In addition to eliminating redundancy from title 24 of the

CFR, HUD said that this action makes its nondiscrimination regulations more

concise and simpler to understand.

• OSHA proposed consolidating its general industry standards (29 C.F.R.

1910) with its shipyard employment standards (29 C.F.R. 1915) into one

comprehensive CFR part that would apply to all activities and areas in

shipyards. The implementation of this action should make it easier for

regulated entities to find and comply with all relevant OSHA standards for

shipyards. In another action, OSHA proposed to “eliminate the complexity,

duplicative nature, and obsolescence” of certain standards and “write

them in plain language.” OSHA said that this change would improve

comprehension and compliance with those standards.

• EPA proposed reorganizing and reformatting its national primary drinking

water regulations to make them easier for public water system officials to

understand and comply with and easier for state, local, and tribal

governments to implement.

• DOT’s Office of the Secretary proposed reorganizing the regulations

governing the conduct of all aviation economic proceedings, streamlining

the regulations to remove redundancies, grouping procedures relating only

to oral evidentiary hearings together and separating them from procedures

pertaining to only nonhearing cases, and updating terminology in the

regulations.

Page 15 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

Some CFR Revision

Actions Appeared to

Increase Regulatory

Burden

Our review also identified 34 CFR revision actions (about 8 percent of the

422 actions) that appeared to increase regulatory burden by expanding the

scope of existing regulations, establishing new programs and/or new

requirements, creating more paperwork, or increasing costs for regulated

entities.13 Actions that our analysis indicated would increase regulatory

burden included the following:

• NHTSA proposed updating its lists of passenger motor vehicle insurers that

are required to annually file reports on their motor vehicle theft loss

experiences. As a result of this rule, NHTSA indicated that the number of

insurers who must file these annual reports would increase, resulting in a

cost increase to insurers of “less than $100,000.” In another action, DOT’s

Research and Special Programs Administration proposed extending the

application of its interstate hazardous materials regulations to intrastate

transportation of those materials in commerce.

• OSHA proposed revising its general industry safety standard for training

powered industrial truck operators and to add equivalent training

requirements for the maritime industries. The new standards require

periodic evaluation of each operator’s performance and periodic refresher

or remedial training. OSHA estimated that the annualized cost would be

$19.4 million.

• EPA proposed establishing “new source performance standards and

emission guidelines for new and existing solid waste incineration units.”

The new standards were to “specify numerical emission limitations” for 11

substances and were to include “requirements for emissions and

parameter monitoring and provisions for operator training and

certification.”

• HUD proposed to extend the applicability of its standards for approval of

sites based on avoidance of minority/racial concentration for HUD-assisted

rental housing to the Community Development Block Grant Program and

to broaden the standards to include reviews of poverty concentration.

For many of the actions that appeared to increase regulatory burden, we

found that the burden increase was the result of agencies’ implementation

of legislative requirements. For example, EPA officials noted that although

the previously cited new source requirements may increase regulatory

burden, the new rules were required by section 129 of the Clean Air Act, as

amended in 1990. One HUD action proposed establishing new regulations

implementing the Secretary of HUD’s authority to regulate Government

13In some cases, the rules indicated that the actions would increase costs for regulated entities (e.g.,

companies) but provide more than offsetting benefits to other entities (e.g., workers). However, we

coded these actions as burden increases unless the offsetting benefits were provided to the same

entity that bore the costs.

Page 16 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) (e.g., the Federal National Mortgage

Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) under the

Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992.

According to the final rule in the December 1, 1995, Federal Register, this

act “substantially overhauled the regulatory authorities and structure for

GSE regulation and required the issuance of this rule.”

Many CFR Revision

Actions Did Not Appear to

Affect Regulatory Burden

Our analysis indicated that about 27 percent of the 4 agencies’ CFR revision

actions (114 of 422) would have little or no effect on the amount of burden

felt by regulated entities. More than half of these actions involved the

elimination of CFR “deadwood,” such as regulations that the agencies said

were obsolete or were duplicative of other text. Other such actions were

minor technical corrections, such as changes to agency organization

charts, telephone listings, or addresses. The following examples illustrate

agencies’ actions that appeared to have little to no effect on regulated

entities’ burden:

• DOT proposed amending the Transportation Acquisition Regulations to

change organizational names (e.g., “OST—Office of the Secretary” was

replaced by “TASC-Transportation Administrative Service Center”) and

renumber or rename certain sections of the CFR.

• HUD proposed removing the detail in its program regulations regarding the

application and grant award processes, noting that a full description of the

application and grant award process would instead be published in the

Federal Register in a notice of funding availability.

In several instances, the agencies’ actions appeared more likely to affect

the promulgating agencies than the amount of burden felt by the regulated

entities. For example, HUD proposed amending its rule on rules to make

possible the “more timely implementation of new and changed policies of

the Department in circumstances where notice and comment rulemaking

is not required by law.” According to HUD, one of the purposes of this

action was to provide greater flexibility to the Department in

implementing statutory and other changes to its program authorities. In

another such action, HUD issued revised ethics standards for its employees

in accordance with the revised standards issued by the Office of

Government Ethics.

Several of the actions did not appear to affect the level of burden felt by

regulated entities because the agency was only proposing to study an

issue, and no specific proposal had been put forward at the time the action

Page 17 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

was described. For example, one HUD action was a joint proposal with the

Federal Reserve Board “to initiate fact-finding to assist the agencies in

revising disclosures to consumers under the Real Estate Settlement

Procedures Act and the Truth in Lending Act.” According to HUD, the

agencies were soliciting comments on what regulatory and legislative

changes might be made to achieve consumer protection goals and

minimally affect compliance burdens. OSHA said in one of its CFR revision

abstracts that it intended to issue a proposal to prevent accidents during

equipment repair and maintenance for the construction industry.

However, an OSHA official told us that no specific proposal would be issued

until 1999. EPA said in one action that it was initiating a technical review of

the possible risks associated with management of silver-bearing wastes.

However, no specific proposal was presented.

A few of the actions that the agencies characterized as CFR revisions will

have no effect on the burden felt by regulated entities because the

agencies withdrew the proposal after receiving public comments. For

example, in one action, FAA said it withdrew a proposal to clarify or change

the number of flight attendants required when passengers are on an

airplane “in view of the opposition and alternative proposals presented by

a number of commenters.”

Effect of Some CFR

Revision Actions Was

Difficult to Determine

As noted previously, we attempted to obtain additional information from

the Federal Register and/or the agencies about each of the 422 CFR revision

abstracts that seemed unclear. Although we were able to resolve many of

the cases with this additional information, we were still unable to

determine the effect that 39 of the 422 actions (about 9 percent) would

have on regulated entities.

In 23 of the 39 cases, the abstract and/or any supplementary information

indicated that the CFR revision action had some elements that would

increase burden and other elements that would reduce burden, making it

difficult to determine the net effect. Those potentially offsetting cases

included the following:

• One OSHA abstract stated that the agency was writing the final rule on

standards for walking and working surfaces and personal fall protection

systems “in plain language” and making it “flexible in the means of

compliance permitted.” These elements appeared likely to reduce

regulatory burden. However, in another part of the same abstract, OSHA

indicated that criteria for personal fall protection systems would be added

Page 18 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

to the regulations because the existing standards did not contain those

criteria—an action that could increase burden.

• In one DOT abstract, DOT proposed revising and updating the aviation

insurance requirements “to recapture administrative expenses incurred,”

which could represent a burden increase on the regulated entities.

However, the abstract also said that the action “will clarify the language

and make it conform with the current legislative language and intent,”

which could reduce regulatory burden.

For 17 of the 39 actions, we were unable to obtain enough information to

make a determination.14 Examples of those actions include the following:

• One abstract stated that EPA would “make over 50 modifications, additions,

and deletions to the existing PCB [Polychlorinated Biphenyls]

management program under the Toxic Substances Control Act. . . .”

However, no details on those changes were available from either the

Federal Register or EPA.

• One OSHA abstract indicated that a negotiated rulemaking process led to a

draft revision of its regulation that contained “innovative provisions” that

would help “minimize the major causes of steel erection injuries and

fatalities .” However, OSHA could provide no additional information about

the draft revisions.

• One DOT abstract proposed amending the “procedural regulations for the

certification of changes to type certificated products.” The abstract stated

that the “amendments are needed to accommodate the trend toward fewer

products that are of completely new design and more products with

repeated changes of previously approved designs.” Although this action

appeared to propose reducing the regulatory requirements for

manufacturing products of previously approved designs, it was unclear

from this abstract exactly what the new procedures would be or their

impact on the regulated entities, and DOT did not provide additional

clarification.

No Mechanism in

Place to Measure

Burden Changes

Section 5 of Executive Order 12866 required agencies to submit to OIRA a

program to review their existing regulations. The first listed purpose for

this review in the executive order is “to reduce the regulatory burden on

the American people.” However, OIRA officials told us that the

administration does not have any mechanism in place to measure changes

in regulatory burden as a result of agencies’ CFR page elimination and CFR

14The 17 include 2 of the 23 actions mentioned earlier that also had multiple and potentially offsetting

parts.

Page 19 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

revision initiatives. They said that the agencies’ accomplishments in these

areas “result from a wide variety of actions” and that there is “no single

common measure that can be used to summarize the beneficial impact of

this initiative given the breadth of activities it has encompassed.”

OIRA officials went on to note that some of the actions in the initiative were

significant rulemakings for which agencies conducted benefit-cost

analyses; some were actions to make current regulations more

user-friendly, and others were described as modest “housekeeping”

actions designed to consolidate or eliminate certain provisions. Overall,

they said that these efforts “have contributed to a more efficient and

effective regulatory system.” They also noted that the elimination and

revision actions are part of a larger set of initiatives designed to reform the

nation’s regulatory system.

Measuring regulatory burden and changes in that burden are extremely

difficult. Some commenters (including the President) have used relatively

simple indicators, such as the number of pages in the CFR or the total

weight of the rules. Other observers have characterized federal regulatory

burden in terms of federal spending on regulatory programs or the number

of federal employees assigned to regulatory activities. Others have used

the number of hours required to fill out federal paperwork. Still others

have tried to measure the cost borne by entities responsible for complying

with federal regulations. All of these measures have certain advantages

and disadvantages, and all require careful interpretation.15

In a previous report, we concluded that it was extremely difficult to

determine direct, incremental regulatory costs, even for an individual

business.16 Indirect effects of regulation, such as their effect on

productivity or competitiveness, and effects on all regulated entities are

even more difficult to measure. Trying to gauge other types of regulatory

burden (e.g., complexity, reasonableness) and then merge them with the

other burden measures further complicates the task. Therefore, in some

ways it is not surprising that the administration does not have a

mechanism in place to measure burden reductions as a result of its CFR

page elimination and revision initiative. However, in the absence of an

agreed upon and demonstrably valid measure of regulatory burden,

15For example, in Paperwork Reduction: Governmentwide Goals Unlikely To Be Met

(GAO/T-GGD-97-114, June 4, 1997), we noted that agencies have found it difficult to measure

paperwork burden.

16Regulatory Burden: Measurement Challenges and Concerns Raised by Selected Companies

(GAO/GGD-97-2, Nov. 18, 1996).

Page 20 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

disagreements are likely to continue regarding the effectiveness of the

page elimination and revision effort as well as other initiatives designed to

lessen the impact of federal regulations.

Agency Comments We sent a draft of this report to the Director of OMB; the Secretaries of HUD,

Labor, and DOT; and the Administrator of EPA. Officials from OMB said they

had no comments on the report. Officials from the other four agencies said

that they generally agreed with our characterization of their page

elimination efforts. Officials from DOT, HUD, and EPA also said that they

generally agreed with the information presented about their CFR page

revision efforts. However, for a few of the actions, they provided

additional information regarding the effect of the actions on regulatory

burden. Using this information, we reevaluated our conclusions regarding

these actions and in some cases changed our burden determinations.

On September 12, 1997, we received written comments on the draft report

from the Department of Labor’s Acting Assistant Secretary for

Occupational Safety and Health. (See app. II for a copy of those

comments.) He said that he had serious concerns about the methodology

we used to determine whether OSHA’s page revisions had resulted in

reductions in regulatory burden. First, he said that simply counting the

number of actions in each burden category does not accurately reflect

OSHA’s efforts because the agency combined many separate deregulatory

actions into several large packages. Because each package affected many

different regulations, he said it was not appropriate to treat them as a

single action. The Acting Assistant Secretary also said that the

methodology used in the report does not take into account the complex

interrelationships between factors within a single action that will both

increase and decrease regulatory burden. Finally, he said that by

describing their efforts to remove CFR pages and make rules easier to

understand as “minor burden reductions,” the report does not give OSHA

adequate credit and understates both the degree of improvement and their

importance in the overall regulatory program.

The Acting Assistant Secretary’s observations regarding aggregated

deregulatory actions are grounded in a different view from ours about how

to conduct this study. We gave each of the agencies’ proposals equal

weight because we believed it was the most objective method to quantify

our results. Any other method would have required us to make subjective

judgments concerning both the identification of discrete proposals and the

weight each proposal should be given. Criteria for such judgments are not

Page 21 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

readily available. Also, it is important to recognize that OSHA determined

how its CFR revision actions would be presented in the Unified Agenda.

OSHA sometimes chose to consolidate multiple proposals into several large

packages. In other cases OSHA appeared to present a single initiative in

several different packages. We used whatever groupings OSHA and the

other agencies used to present their revision efforts as our unit of analysis.

As the Acting Assistant Secretary noted, some of the agencies’ actions with

multiple proposals appeared to both increase and decrease the burden felt

by regulated entities. In a few cases, the bulk of the proposals appeared to

be either a burden increase or a burden reduction, so we could make a

burden change determination for the actions as a whole. However, in 23 of

the actions we could not reach an overall conclusion about the net effect

of multiple and potentially offsetting proposals on regulatory burden, so

we coded each of the actions as “cannot tell.” Therefore, we believe that

the report does recognize the complex interrelationships between factors

within a single action.

Finally, the Acting Assistant Secretary is incorrect in saying that we

described OSHA’s efforts to eliminate pages from the CFR as “minor burden

reductions.” We used that description for agencies’ CFR revision efforts

that clarified the language in the CFR to make it easier to read or

understand, or that combined sections in the CFR to make the requirements

easier to find but did not change the underlying requirements placed on

regulated entities. Although such clarifications and consolidations are

clearly desirable, we coded them as “minor burden reductions” because

we wanted to differentiate them from other agency actions that appeared

to change underlying regulatory requirements and result in substantive

reductions in burden.

We are sending copies of this report to the Ranking Minority Member of

the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee; the Director of OMB; the

Secretaries of HUD, Labor, and DOT; and the Administrator of EPA. We will

also make copies available to others on request.

Page 22 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
B-276797 

Major contributors to this report are listed in appendix III. Please contact

me on (202) 512-8676 if you or your staff have any questions concerning

this report.

Sincerely yours,

L. Nye Stevens

Director, Federal Management

 and Workforce Issues

Page 23 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix I 

Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

The objectives of this review were to determine whether (1) agencies’

reported Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) page elimination totals take

into account the pages added to the CFR during the same period,

(2) agencies’ CFR revision efforts will reduce regulatory burden, and (3) the

administration has any mechanism in place for measuring burden

reductions as a result of its CFR page elimination and revision initiatives.

As the requester specified, we limited the scope of our work on the first

two objectives to four major regulatory agencies: the Departments of

Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Transportation (DOT), the

Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration

(OSHA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

To address the first objective, we interviewed agency officials responsible

for the administration’s CFR page elimination initiative at HUD, DOT, OSHA,

and EPA. All of these officials said that their agencies did not track CFR page

additions during the initiative. They also said that it would be extremely

difficult and time-consuming to count the number of pages that had been

added in the years since their initiatives had begun.

Working with the agencies and with the requester, we developed a

methodology that each agency could use to estimate the number of pages

that had been added to the CFR while pages were being eliminated. We

obtained the agencies’ page elimination totals as of April 30, 1997, from the

Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Office of Information and

Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Then we asked the four agencies to identify their

major regulatory actions (those that had added five pages or more to the

CFR) and to estimate the number of pages that each of those actions had

added to their parts of the CFR between the start of their page elimination

initiatives and April 30, 1997.17 In three of the four agencies, the number of

pages added was also calculated by comparing the agencies’ CFR page

totals near the beginning and end of their page elimination initiatives,

calculating the net difference in pages, and using the number of pages

deleted to solve for pages added. For example, if an agency had 5,000

pages in the CFR as of July 1, 1995, and 5,100 pages as of July 1, 1996, the

net change during that 1-year period was an increase of 100 CFR pages. If

the agency said that it had eliminated 200 pages from the CFR during that

1-year period, the number of pages added during the period was 300 pages.

Similarly, using both the agencies’ estimates of their page additions and

their elimination figures as reported to OIRA for the entire period of the

17The dates the agencies started tracking their page eliminations varied. DOT started tracking page

eliminations from the beginning of the Clinton administration in January 1993. HUD began tracking its

eliminations from March 1994. OSHA and EPA began tracking their eliminations from the date of the

administration’s March 1995 call to eliminate and revise pages in the CFR.

Page 24 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix I 

Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

initiative, we calculated the net increase or decrease in each agency’s CFR

page totals.

To address the second objective, we reviewed descriptions of the four

agencies’ actions as part of the administration’s CFR revision initiative and

determined whether the actions would reduce the burden imposed on

regulated entities. Specifically, we reviewed the actions that were

described in the October 1995, April 1996, October 1996, and April 1997

editions of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory

Actions18 as part of the administration’s “reinventing government”

initiative and that involved “revision of text in the CFR to reduce burden or

duplication or to streamline requirements.” We obtained a computerized

data file of each of these actions in the Unified Agenda from the

Regulatory Information Service Center and combined the information into

one database, eliminating duplicate actions and retaining the most recent

abstract available for each action. We identified 422 such entries in the 4

agencies included in this review—107 for HUD, 183 for DOT, 19 for OSHA, and

113 for EPA.

19 Thirty-one of these entries had no abstract describing the

initiative in the Unified Agenda, so we obtained abstracts or proposed or

final rule preambles directly from the agencies for each of these actions.

We defined “regulated entities” as the organizations that must comply with

the regulations’ provisions, including individuals, businesses, state or local

governments, or federal agencies (other than the agency that enforced or

promulgated the regulation). We defined “regulatory burden” as the impact

of a rule on regulated entities, including the direct and indirect cost of

compliance; paperwork requirements; negative effects on competitiveness

or productivity; penalties for noncompliance; and confusion as a result of

unreasonable, inconsistent, hard-to-find, or hard-to-understand

regulations.

18This document, issued twice a year since 1983, is a compendium of each agency’s regulatory

activities, describing regulations that executive and independent agencies are currently developing,

planning for in the future, or have completed. It provides such information as the status of the

regulation, a timetable for further action, any statutory or judicial deadlines, and the name and

telephone number of an agency contact. We used the October 1995 Unified Agenda as the starting

point of our review because it was the first edition published after the President’s June 1995

announcement of page revisions.

19In addition to the 422 actions reviewed, there were 13 actions for these agencies that were not

included in the review. Three actions (one for HUD and two for EPA) were excluded because agency

officials told us the actions were listed in the Unified Agenda in error. The remaining actions were

related to DOT’s Surface Transportation Board and the former Interstate Commerce Commission.

Although the Board is listed in the Unified Agenda as part of DOT, a DOT official told us DOT does not

include this organization in its CFR revision initiative because the Board acts as an organization

independent of DOT and should not be included in our review as DOT actions. Similarly, this official

said the former Interstate Commerce Commission actions are not included in DOT’s counts and should

not be included in our review.

Page 25 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix I 

Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

We initially reviewed the abstracts or rule preambles for each action to

determine what effect the action would have on the burden felt by

regulated entities. However, many of the abstracts did not contain enough

information to allow us to assess the effect of the action on regulated

entities’ burden. For each such action, we obtained additional information

from the agencies and/or related proposed or final rules published in the

Federal Register. We matched the Unified Agenda entries with the

proposed or final rules by regulation identification number to ensure that

only relevant information was included.

After reading all of the available information, we coded each of the actions

into one of the following five categories:

(1) substantive burden reduction—actions that appeared to decrease the

burden on regulated entities, such as eliminating paperwork requirements,

allowing flexibility in how entities can comply with or implement the rule,

lowering compliance costs, or exempting certain organizations from the

regulations;

(2) minor burden reduction—actions that seemed to make regulatory

requirements easier to read or understand or to make them easier to find

(e.g., combining similar or related sections of the CFR into one section);

(3) burden increase—actions that appeared to increase the burden on

regulated entities, such as adding reporting requirements, requiring

additional training, requiring certain testing procedures, or expanding the

scope of a regulation to new entities;

(4) no burden change—actions that did not seem to change the burden on

the regulated entity or that primarily affected the promulgating agency,

such as eliminating obsolete or duplicative regulations, establishing a

committee to study an issue (with no specific proposal identified),

updating agency organizational charts and/or telephone numbers, and

establishing ethics regulations for employees of the promulgating agency;

and

(5) cannot tell—actions that had multiple parts which potentially could

offset each other or were unclear as to their effect on the regulated

entities.

To help ensure validity and consistency in our assessments of the potential

impact of the 422 actions on regulatory entities, we reviewed each of the

Page 26 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix I 

Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

actions at least 3 times. First, the abstracts were simultaneously and

independently reviewed and coded by two of our staff members who were

familiar with crosscutting regulatory issues. The staff members then

discussed their independent codes for each of the actions, obtained

additional information about the actions if necessary, and ultimately

agreed on a single code for each action. These codes and their associated

abstracts were then reviewed by members of our staff with expertise in

the relevant subject areas: transportation, housing, environmental

programs, and occupational safety. Their input was considered in reaching

a preliminary conclusion about each action.

We gave agency officials an opportunity to review and comment on our

assessment of the CFR revision actions. In many cases, the agencies

provided additional information in support of a different assessment than

the one we had made. When we took this additional information into

account, we changed our assessments of several actions. However, the

majority of our assessments were not affected by the agencies’ review.

To determine whether the administration had any mechanisms in place to

measure burden reductions as a result of its regulatory reform initiative,

we interviewed OIRA officials.

We did not verify the agencies’ CFR page elimination totals or their page

addition estimates. However, last year we evaluated EPA’s and DOT’s page

elimination claims and concluded that they were generally valid.20 The

agencies’ estimates of the pages added to the CFR do not include all added

pages because, in response to agency concerns about the effort it would

take to count all pages, we agreed that the agencies could exclude any

action that added less than five pages. Also, although we validated our

judgments about the possible effect of the proposed changes by using

multiple judges and consulting with knowledgeable members of our staff

and agency officials, some of our assessments were based on relatively

little information. Finally, we did not render a judgment regarding the

wisdom of any of the CFR revision actions, only whether they would affect

the burden felt by regulated entities.

We conducted our work at OMB, HUD, DOT, OSHA, and EPA headquarters in

Washington, D.C., between February 1997 and September 1997 in

accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. We

made available a draft of this report for comment to the Director of OMB;

20Regulatory Reform: Implementation of the Regulatory Review Executive Order (GAO/T-GGD-96-185,

Sept. 25, 1996).

Page 27 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix I 

Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

the Secretaries of HUD, Labor, and DOT; and the Administrator of EPA.

Designees of these agency heads provided comments on the report as a

whole and, in some cases, provided additional information. Their

comments were incorporated into the report accordingly.

Page 28 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix II 

Comments From OSHA

Page 29 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix II 

Comments From OSHA

Page 30 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
Appendix III 

Major Contributors to This Report

General Government

Division, Washington,

D.C.

Curtis Copeland, Assistant Director, Federal Management

 and Workforce Issues

Ellen Wineholt, Evaluator-in-Charge

Thomas Beall, Technical Analyst

Kevin Dooley, Technical Analyst

Kiki Theodoropoulos, Communications Analyst

(410120) Page 31 GAO/GGD-98-3 Regulatory Reform
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