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.” 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.” “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. . . .” 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each agency to conduct a page-by-page review of all its regulations in force and eliminate or revise those that were outdated or in need of reform.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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We initially reviewed descriptive abstracts for these actions that were included in the Unified Agenda. 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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.