Many federal statutes, and the regulations that implement them, impose requirements on state, local, and tribal governments or private sector parties in order to achieve certain legislative goals. Such statutes and their regulations can provide substantial benefits, as well as imposing costs. OMB’s 2003 final report on the costs and benefits of federal regulations estimated that the total annual quantified benefits of major rules issued from October 1, 1992, to September 30, 2002, ranged from $146 billion to $230 billion, while the total annual quantified costs ranged from $36 billion to $42 billion. Title I of UMRA focuses on the legislative process, and title II focuses on the regulatory process. For both legislation and regulations, UMRA was intended to provide more information on and prompt more careful consideration of the costs and benefits of federal mandates that affect nonfederal parties. UMRA generally defines a federal mandate as any provision in legislation, statute, or regulation that would impose an enforceable duty on state, local, or tribal governments or the private sector or that would reduce or eliminate the amount of funding authorized to cover the costs of existing mandates. However, as discussed in the body of this report, some other definitions, exclusions, and thresholds in the act vary according to whether the mandate is in legislation or a rule and whether a provision imposes an intergovernmental or private sector mandate. If legislation or a rule contains a federal mandate, as defined by UMRA, a major consequence is that other requirements in the act are triggered. Under title I, when a committee of authorization of the Senate or the House of Representatives reports a bill or joint resolution that contains any federal mandates to the full legislative body, the committee is required to provide the bill or resolution to the Director of CBO and identify the mandates it contains. UMRA then requires CBO to analyze each of these bills and resolutions—and, on request, other legislative proposals—for the presence of such mandates and to estimate their associated costs. CBO prepares UMRA statements that are to be included in the authorizing committees’ reports. The CBO mandate statements must also include an assessment of whether the legislation authorizes or otherwise provides funding to cover the costs of any new federal mandates. UMRA’s specific enforcement mechanism for the requirements of title I is a point of order, which a member of Congress may raise to indicate that a rule of procedure has been or will be violated. Generally, a point of order is available under UMRA if there is no CBO UMRA statement for the legislation or if the legislation contains an unfunded intergovernmental mandate with costs over UMRA’s threshold or if it was not feasible to estimate the costs of the intergovernmental mandate. However, points of order are not available under UMRA for private sector mandates that exceed the cost threshold or if the private sector mandates’ costs are not feasible to estimate. UMRA’s rules are not self-enforcing and a point of order must be actively raised to hinder the passage of unfunded federal mandates. Specifically raising an UMRA point of order may serve to heighten the profile of “unfunded mandate” implications in the challenged legislation. As of March 2004, 13 points of order had been raised in the House of Representatives and no points of order had been raised in the Senate under UMRA. Only 1 of these 13, regarding the minimum wage in the Contract with America Advancement Act in 1996, resulted in the House voting to reject consideration of a proposed provision. For rules that contain federal mandates, title II of UMRA requires the agencies to prepare written statements containing specific descriptions and estimates, including a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the anticipated costs and benefits of the mandate. For such rules, agencies are to “identify and consider a reasonable number of regulatory alternatives and from those alternatives select the least costly, most cost-effective, or least burdensome alternative that achieves the objectives of the rule” or explain why that alternative was not selected. UMRA requires OMB to collect the written statements prepared by the agencies on federal mandates in rules and periodically forward them to CBO. UMRA also requires OMB to submit annual reports to Congress detailing agencies’ compliance with title II. OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has the primary responsibility for monitoring agencies’ compliance with this title. CBO and OMB regularly produce reports on, respectively, activities under titles I and II of UMRA. CBO has prepared an annual report on its activities under title I each year since UMRA’s enactment. Included in these reports is information on two requirements placed on CBO by title I, identifying (1) proposed legislation that would have imposed federal mandates on another level of government or the private sector and (2) the subset of the legislation examined by CBO that was found to contain mandates with costs at or above the relevant thresholds. Although not required by UMRA to do so, CBO also reviews all statutes enacted to identify mandates enacted into law for its annual reports. Since 2001, OMB has fulfilled its requirement to report to Congress on compliance with title II in the same document used to fulfill a statutory requirement for reporting to Congress on the costs and benefits of federal regulations. OMB’s reports provide information on the rules that agencies have identified as containing federal mandates and also discuss agencies’ efforts to consult with state, local, and tribal governments in the development of significant rules. To describe the applicable procedures, definitions, and exclusions for identifying federal mandates in statues and rules under UMRA, we reviewed the act, other related guidance documents, and CBO and OMB reports on the implementation of UMRA. We also interviewed persons knowledgeable about the implementation of UMRA in OMB, CBO, and other congressional offices. To identify statutes and final rules that were and were not identified as containing federal mandates under UMRA and analyze the reasons for those determinations, we focused our review on statutes enacted and final rules published during 2001 and 2002, as agreed with your staff. For our review and analysis of the implementation of title I, we relied on information provided to us by the CBO officials responsible for preparing UMRA statements on proposed legislation and the annual CBO reports on UMRA. At our request, CBO identified from that 2-year period the 5 statutes that contained federal mandates at or above UMRA’s cost thresholds and 43 examples of statutes that were not so identified but nevertheless contained provisions having impacts on nonfederal parties. We did not ask CBO to compile a comprehensive list of all statutes in those years that might have impacts on nonfederal parties. For our review and analysis of the implementation of title II, we reviewed all 122 major and/or economically significant final rules—generally, those that would have an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more or raise other significant economic or policy issues—that federal agencies issued during 2001 and 2002. Parallel to the information on statutes provided by CBO, we focused on identifying two sets of final rules—those that were identified as containing federal mandates at or above UMRA’s threshold and those that were not but included provisions affecting nonfederal parties that might be perceived by those parties as potential “unfunded mandates.” To determine whether the statutes and final rules we examined were perceived by affected parties as potentially having “unfunded mandate” implications, we shared them with the following national organizations representing nonfederal levels of government: National Association of Counties, National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), National Governors Association, the National League of Cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. We then analyzed the statutes and rules to identify how they had been treated under UMRA, in particular identifying the application of procedural, definitional, and other provisions of UMRA that guide the identification of federal mandates. The scope of our review was limited to a 2-year period and, within that period, only to examples of legislation enacted and rules that were finalized (i.e., we did not include all legislation considered by Congress or rules that were proposed but not finalized). Therefore, the examples we reviewed might not illustrate all possible ways that a statute or rule with a perceived mandate could be enacted or issued without being identified as a federal mandate under UMRA. However, the representatives from external public sector organizations who reviewed the statutes and rules we examined generally concurred that they were perceived as potential “unfunded mandates” and that we did not exclude any major examples that they believed should have been included. It is also important to recognize that perceived “unfunded mandates” could result from nonstatutory, nonregulatory federal actions, such as Homeland Security threat level adjustments, which are not covered by UMRA and therefore were outside the scope of our specific objectives. (See app. I for a more detailed description of our objectives, scope, and methodology.) Statutory provisions that impose requirements on nonfederal parties might not be identified as federal mandates under UMRA because some legislative actions do not trigger a review and even if the provisions are subject to review, UMRA circumscribes the definition of a federal mandate. When legislation containing “mandates” does undergo UMRA’s formal scrutiny, it has to meet three definitional requirements, not fall into any of seven exclusions, and impose costs at or above certain thresholds to be identified as containing federal mandates exceeding the cost thresholds under UMRA. In 2001 and 2002, 5 of the 377 statutes enacted were identified as containing provisions that were federal mandates exceeding the thresholds. From the remaining statutes, CBO identified 43 examples that had some kind of impact on nonfederal parties but were not identified during the legislative process as containing federal mandates at or above UMRA’s thresholds. For 24 of those examples, this was because their estimated direct costs were below the thresholds. There is some evidence that the existence of UMRA served to hinder the introduction of intergovernmental mandates, or led to their modification before enactment in the past. There is also evidence that suggests that some of CBO’s cost estimates under UMRA may have led lawmakers to reduce the cost of some mandates before enactment.