Executive Order 12291, which was issued by President Reagan in 1981, authorized OMB to review all proposed and final federal regulations, except those of independent regulatory agencies. The order also required OMB to monitor agencies’ compliance with the order’s requirements and to coordinate its implementation. OIRA’s reviews under this order were highly controversial, with critics contending that OIRA exerted too much control over the development of rules and that decisions were being made without appropriate public scrutiny. Executive Order 12866 revoked Executive Order 12291 but continued the basic framework of the regulatory review process. It also reaffirmed the legitimacy of OIRA’s centralized review function and its responsibility for providing guidance to the agencies. However, Executive Order 12866 also made changes to address criticisms of the regulatory program under Executive Order 12291. In its recent draft report to Congress on the costs and benefits of federal regulations, OMB said that one of these changes was “to increase the openness and accountability of the review process.”Specifically, section 6 of Executive Order 12866 requires OIRA to “make available to the public all documents exchanged between OIRA and the agency during the review by OIRA under this section.” Section 6 of the order also requires agencies to (1) “dentify for the public, in a complete, clear, and simple manner, the substantive changes between the draft submitted to OIRA for review and the action subsequently announced” and (2) “dentify for the public those changes in the regulatory action that were made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA.” The order does not require agencies to document when no changes are made during OIRA’s review or at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA. In October 1993, the OIRA Administrator issued guidance to the heads of executive departments and agencies regarding the implementation of Executive Order 12866. The section of that guidance on “Openness and Public Accountability” that discussed the order’s transparency requirements essentially repeated those requirements without elaboration. “Executive Order 12866 created a more open and accountable review process. The order called for more public involvement, and it specifically delineated who is responsible for what and when, so that interested parties would know the status and results of the Executive review. I have since heard no complaints about accountability and transparency—and I take that as a success.” However, in response to our testimony at the same hearing that EPA and DOT frequently had not documented the changes made to their rules that had been suggested or recommended by OIRA, the Administrator acknowledged that agencies had not “been scrupulously attentive” to that requirement in the order. S. 981, the proposed “Regulatory Improvement Act of 1997,” includes several provisions to strengthen and clarify the executive order’s requirements for public disclosure of and access to information on regulatory review actions. One section of the bill requires agencies to include in the rulemaking record (1) a document identifying in a complete, clear, and simple manner, the substantive changes between the draft submitted to OIRA and the rule subsequently announced; (2) a document identifying changes in the rule made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA; and (3) all written communications exchanged between OIRA and agencies during the review. The bill differs from the order in that it requires (1) agencies (not OIRA) to include in the rulemaking record all written communications (not “documents”) exchanged between OIRA and the agencies and (2) agencies to identify changes made to rules while they were at OIRA and changes made at the suggestion of OIRA in a single document. Our first two objectives were to determine whether EPA, DOT, HUD, and OSHA had (1) identified for the public the substantive changes between the draft submitted to OIRA for review and the regulatory action subsequently announced and (2) identified for the public those changes in the regulatory action that were made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA. Our third objective was to determine whether OIRA had made available to the public all documents exchanged between OIRA and the agency during the review process. We included in our review all of the four agencies’ regulations that were reviewed by OIRA before publication as final rules between January 1, 1996, and March 1, 1997. We obtained a list of all such rules and any related notices of proposed rulemaking from the Regulatory Information Service Center (RISC). We deleted from the list all rules that were withdrawn by the agencies and all proposed rules that were reviewed by OIRA before Executive Order 12866 was issued on September 30, 1993. The proposed rules and final rules comprised the universe of regulatory actions that we reviewed. Table 1 shows the number of proposed rules, final rules, and the total number of regulatory actions that we examined in each agency. We asked officials in each agency how to locate the information that is required by Executive Order 12866 for these rules. In almost all cases, the agencies said that the information was in their public rulemaking dockets. We then reviewed those dockets and other agency files to determine the extent to which documentation of changes made while under review at OIRA met the requirements of executive order. The order says that the agencies must “identify for the public, in a complete, clear, and simple manner, the substantive changes made” between the draft submitted to OIRA for review and the regulatory action subsequently announced. However, the order does not define these terms or provide criteria for determining whether agencies have complied with these provisions. To describe differences in the extent of documentation available to the public in the agencies’ files, we coded each regulatory action into one of the following three categories: (1) complete documentation, which could be a “redline/strikeout” version of the rule showing all changes made during the review, a memorandum to the file listing all of the changes, or a memorandum indicating that there were no such changes; (2) some documentation, which means we found indications of changes that had been made during OIRA’s review (e.g., memorandums or redline/strikeout versions), but the files did not indicate whether all such changes had been documented; and (3) no documentation, which means that there were no changes made during the review or that changes were made, but were not documented. The last two descriptive categories do not necessarily indicate whether the agencies have complied with the executive order. However, the categories do provide a relative sense of how transparent a regulatory review is to the interested public. If the agencies’ files indicated that all changes had been documented, we did not verify that assertion. We followed the same general procedure to describe the extent to which the agencies had documented for the public the changes made to the regulatory actions at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA. The OIRA Administrator’s October 1993 guidance on the implementation of Executive Order 12866 indicated that the changes made to a regulatory action at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA were a subset of changes made during the period of OIRA’s review. However, in this review we examined the implementation of these requirements separately because changes made at OIRA’s suggestion or recommendation are not necessarily a subset of changes made during the period of OIRA’s review. Both OIRA and agency officials have said that OIRA frequently comments on draft rules before they are formally submitted for review. Changes made to rules as a result of those comments would not be the same as changes made “between the draft submitted to OIRA for review and the regulatory action subsequently announced.” Therefore, in this part of the review we looked for documentation of changes that were made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA whenever they occurred. We also noted the extent to which the agencies’ documents for the regulatory actions that we reviewed were actually accessible to the public in the agencies’ public dockets or elsewhere. Both EPA and DOT had a number of public dockets, generally corresponding with different subunits in the agencies. For example, within DOT we examined files in the dockets of eight departmental units: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Maritime Administration (MARAD), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Research and Special Programs Administration (RSPA), the United States Coast Guard (USCG), and the Office of the Secretary of Transportation (OST). In HUD, there was one public docket covering all of the rules in our review. In OSHA, the information for our review was not part of the public docket, but was provided by agency officials. As part of the second objective, we also examined EPA and DOT actions after September 1996 to document changes suggested by OIRA. In our September 1996 testimony, we reported that EPA and DOT frequently had not documented changes to their rules that OIRA had suggested or recommended. As a result of that testimony, both EPA and DOT issued guidance to certain employees emphasizing the executive order’s requirement for documenting such changes. We examined EPA and DOT actions after the hearing to determine whether the agencies’ staff were better documenting OIRA-suggested changes. We also determined whether OIRA had taken any actions after the hearing to require agencies to document changes made at OIRA’s suggestion. Regarding the third objective, which was to determine whether OIRA had made available to the public all of the documents exchanged between OIRA and the agencies during the reviews by OIRA, we first noted any evidence in the agencies’ files that documents had been exchanged between the agencies and OIRA during the rulemaking process. In this review, we defined “documents” to include not only drafts of the rule sent to OIRA, but also letters, faxes, memorandums of telephone conversations, and decision memorandums.