the rulemaking record before publication of any proposed or final rule a document clearly identifying the changes made to the draft submitted to OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), including and separately identifying the changes made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA. These requirements are intended to permit the public to understand the source of changes to proposed rules, and are very similar to requirements in section 6 of the executive order. However, whereas the bill requires that the changes be recorded in a single document in the rulemaking record, the order does not specify how agencies must identify the changes for the public. Mr. Chairman, at your and Senator Glenn’s request, we have been reviewing the implementation of these executive order provisions at 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). Of the 129 regulatory actions that we reviewed in those agencies, fewer than 25 percent had a clear and simple document in the rulemaking docket illustrating the changes made to the rules while at OIRA for review or the changes made at OIRA’s recommendation. Where we found documentation, it was either a “redline/strikeout” version of the rule showing the changes made, a memo to the file listing the changes, or a memo certifying that there were no such changes. While some dockets for the other rules had indications of changes made during OIRA’s review and by OIRA, it was not clear that all changes had been recorded. Most commonly, however, the rulemaking dockets simply had no information on whether changes had been made to the rules. In those cases it was impossible for us to know whether changes had not been made to the rules, or whether documentation of the changes was missing. In some cases the agencies had clear documents that delineated the changes made to their rules while at or by OIRA, but those documents were not available to the public. For example, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) in DOT often prepared detailed summaries of these kinds of changes, but USCG officials said that these summaries were internal communications that were not available to the public. OSHA had comprehensive documentation of their interactions with OIRA, but the information was maintained in files separate from the public docket. OSHA officials said that they would make this information available to the public upon request. However, in order for individuals to request the information they must first know that the documents exist. Also, the dockets varied in the degree to which they could be used by the public to find the information required by the executive order. First, it is important to realize that the docket for a single rule can be extremely voluminous. For example, the docket for one of the rules we reviewed at DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) contained 17 folders of material, some of which were nearly a foot thick. However, the docket for this rule and all of the others that we examined at FRA, HUD, and some other agencies had no indexes. Therefore, the public would have to review the entire docket to find any documentation of changes made at the suggestion of OIRA or changes in the draft submitted to OIRA. In contrast, the Office of Air and Radiation’s docket at EPA had a consistently structured index for all its rules, with specific sections in which information related to OIRA’s reviews could be found. At the time of our review, the Office of the Secretary of DOT was automating its dockets so that both indexes and eventually the entire rule making record could be accessed on-line. In testimony last September before this Committee, the OIRA Administrator, acknowledged that agencies had not “been scrupulously attentive” to the executive order’s requirement that they document the changes made at OIRA’s suggestion or recommendation. She also said, however, that the executive order had “created a more open and accountable review process” and that she had heard “no complaints about accountability and transparency.” We believe that these public disclosure requirements in the executive order, combined with the administration’s assertion of their effectiveness, have resulted in a public perception that changes made to a regulation while at OIRA and by OIRA are readily identifiable. However, our review indicated that this was usually not the case. Enactment of the public disclosure requirements in S. 981 would provide a statutory foundation for the public’s right to regulatory review information. In particular, we believe that the bill’s requirement that these rule changes be described in a single document would make understanding regulatory changes much easier for the public. suggestion of OIRA, and how agencies could organize their dockets to best facilitate public access and disclosure. We have also done work relevant to Subchapter III of S. 981, which requires agencies to review existing rules identified by an advisory committee representing a balanced cross section of public and private interests. The agencies must then decide whether to retain, amend, or repeal the rules it reviews. There have been several previous requirements by both Congress and previous presidents that federal agencies review their existing regulations. Most recently, section 5 of Executive Order 12866 required agencies to submit a program to OIRA by December 31, 1993, under which they would periodically review their existing significant regulations to determine whether any should be modified or eliminated. According to the 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 in the order. On June 12, 1995, the President announced that a page-by-page review of the CFR 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. savings, the reduction of burden,” would come from the CFR pages that were being revised. Mr. Chairman, at your request we have been further examining the administration’s page elimination and revision effort. We found that the four agencies that we reviewed (HUD, DOT, OSHA, and EPA) were adding pages to the CFR at the same time that pages were being deleted. As a result, although the four agencies reported to OMB that they eliminated 5,500 pages from the CFR during this initiative, as of April 30 of this year the agencies’ net reduction in CFR pages when page additions are taken into consideration was about 900 pages. Two of the four agencies’ CFR parts actually grew during their page elimination effort—DOT by about 300 pages and EPA by nearly 1,000 pages. The four 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 retained at the request of those entities. Our review of 422 CFR revision efforts in the 4 agencies indicated that about 40 percent should reduce the burden felt by regulated entities, and another 15 percent should make regulations easier to find or to understand. For example, one EPA action that appeared to reduce regulatory burden involved 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 OSHA action that appeared to be a minor burden reduction proposed to “eliminate the complexity, duplicative nature, and obsolescence” of certain standards and “write them in plain language.” However, about 8 percent of the actions appeared to increase the burden felt by those being regulated, and another 27 percent did not appear to affect regulatory burden at all. For example, OSHA proposed revising its general industry safety standard for training powered industrial truck operators and to add equivalent training requirements for the maritime industries. OSHA estimated that the first year cost of compliance with the proposed standard would be $34.9 million, with annual costs thereafter of $19.4 million. one DOT action that did not appear to affect regulatory burden proposed amending the Transportation Acquisition Regulations to change organizational names and renumber and rename certain sections of the CFR. We could not determine what effect about 9 percent of the actions would have on regulatory burden, either because the information available describing the actions contained elements of both burden reduction and burden increase that could be offsetting or because the information was vague. We recognize that directly measuring changes in regulatory burden is extremely difficult. However, we also believe that the administration’s chosen metric of pages in the CFR that are eliminated or revised is a poor proxy for changes in regulatory burden. Eliminating or changing hundreds of pages that are obsolete or rarely enforced can have little practical effect on regulatory burden, whereas slight changes in wording of a single sentence can have a tremendous effect. Enactment of the review requirements in S. 981 would provide a statutory basis for periodic examinations of existing rules. We believe that such examinations are a good idea in that they can determine the continued relevance of regulatory requirements and help ensure that the requirements impose as little burden as possible. Identification of rules for review by the advisory committee that would be established by the bill may lead to more substantive changes than have heretofore been made by the agencies on their own. Although both S. 981 and Executive Order 12866 require agencies to conduct cost-benefit analyses for major rules and to make the results available to the public, the bill goes farther than the order in requiring disclosure of how those analyses are conducted.