Introduction Donald J. Trump promised that if elected President, he would instruct federal agencies to reduce their regulations significantly. Because of certain federal rulemaking requirements, agencies must generally undertake rulemaking procedures when they are issuing new regulations and when they are changing or eliminating regulations. In other words, a change to or elimination of a regulation that was previously issued generally has to go through a rulemaking process—the President or his agency heads cannot unilaterally change or eliminate regulations without following rulemaking procedures. Such a rulemaking process typically requires the agency to issue a proposed rule, provide an opportunity for the public to provide comment, and then issue a final rule. During the first year of the Trump Administration, this deregulation was underway in agencies across the federal government. One way for Congress and the public to be informed about this deregulatory activity is to consult the "Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions" (hereinafter Unified Agenda). The Unified Agenda is a government-wide publication of rulemaking actions that agencies expect to take in the coming months, and it contains both regulatory actions (i.e., new regulations) and deregulatory actions (i.e., reductions in or elimination of current regulations). The Trump Administration's first edition of the Unified Agenda, which was issued on July 20, 2017, and was referred to by the Administration as the "Update to the 2017 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions," contains information on many deregulatory actions that the Trump Administration has undertaken so far and intends to undertake in the coming months. The subsequent edition is expected to be issued in late 2017 and may contain more detailed information on the implementation of the Trump Administration's regulatory budget, which was announced on September 7, 2017, in addition to serving as an update on the deregulatory actions occurring across federal agencies. This report provides an overview of the Unified Agenda, discusses the additional significance of the Unified Agenda in the Trump Administration, provides summary information about the first edition of the Unified Agenda released by the Trump Administration, and discusses what additional information can be expected in the subsequent edition of the Agenda. The Unified Agenda is typically published twice each year by the Regulatory Information Service Center (RISC), a component of the General Services Administration (GSA), for the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB's) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is the entity within OMB that has primary oversight responsibilities over most agencies' rulemaking activities. The Unified Agenda helps agencies fulfill two transparency requirements. First, Section 602 of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) requires that all agencies publish semiannual regulatory agendas in the Federal Register describing regulatory actions that they are developing that may have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities. The RFA also requires that agencies "endeavor to provide notice" of the regulatory agendas to small entities and "invite comments upon each subject area on the agenda." Second, Section 4 of Executive Order 12866 on "Regulatory Planning and Review" requires that all agencies, including independent regulatory agencies, "prepare an agenda of all regulations under development or review." The stated purposes of this and other planning requirements in the order are, among other things, to "maximize consultation and the resolution of potential conflicts at an early stage" and to "involve the public and its State, local, and tribal officials in regulatory planning." The executive order also requires that each agency prepare, as part of the fall edition of the Unified Agenda, a "regulatory plan" of the most important significant regulatory actions that the agency reasonably expects to issue in proposed or final form during the upcoming fiscal year. Neither of these requirements contains a penalty for issuing a proposed or final rule without having first provided notice of the rule in the Unified Agenda, and some prospective regulatory actions listed in the Unified Agenda are never finalized. The Unified Agenda lists upcoming activities, by agency, in four separate categories: 1. "active" actions, including rules in the prerule stage (e.g., advance notices of proposed rulemaking or other preliminary regulatory actions that are expected to be taken in the next 12 months); proposed rule stage (i.e., notices of proposed rulemaking that are expected to be issued in the next 12 months, or for which the closing date of the comment period is the next step); and final rule stage (i.e., final rules or other final actions that are expected to be taken in the next 12 months); 2. "completed" actions (i.e., final rules that have been promulgated or rules that have been withdrawn from the Unified Agenda since the Fall 2016 edition because agencies are no longer actively working on them); 3. "long-term" actions (i.e., items under development that agencies do not expect to take action on in the next 12 months); and 4. "inactive" actions, a category of rules that was created during the Obama Administration and was not visible to the public. All entries in the first three categories listed above have uniform data elements that are searchable in a database. The searchable data elements typically include the department and/or agency issuing the rule, the title of the rule, the Regulation Identifier Number (RIN), an abstract of the action being taken, and a timetable of past actions and a projected date (sometimes just the projected month and year) for the next regulatory action. Each entry also indicates the priority of the regulation (e.g., whether it is considered "economically significant" under Executive Order 12866, or whether it is considered a "major" rule under the Congressional Review Act), and other characteristics that agencies are required to identify when issuing regulations (e.g., whether the rule has federalism implications or international impacts). At present, the Unified Agenda does not have a data element to separate deregulatory actions from regulatory actions. In many cases, the abstract states or implies whether the action is deregulatory in nature. In part, the lack of such a data element may be because agencies are reviewing previous regulatory actions and are not yet clear whether a deregulatory action will follow. According to OIRA Administrator Neomi Rao, the forthcoming editions of the Unified Agenda may have a different classification system, allowing agencies to indicate which items are regulatory and which are deregulatory. As will be discussed later in this report, future editions of the Unified Agenda may also include information about agencies' compliance with and implementation of the Trump Administration's regulatory budget, which OIRA announced in September 2017. Developments in the Trump Administration have led to two notable aspects of the "Update" edition of the Unified Agenda, which was issued on July 20, 2017. First, the focus on deregulation makes the Unified Agenda particularly valuable for tracking agency deregulatory activity. Second, the Trump Administration made public an additional list of regulations that had been established during the Obama Administration and had previously not been published. As mentioned previously, no penalty exists for issuing a rule without having first published it in the Unified Agenda. However, it appears that the Trump Administration may be placing a new emphasis on the importance of preceding a regulatory action by an entry in the Agenda. One criticism that has been raised in the past about the Unified Agenda is that many rulemaking actions that agencies took had not been preceded by an entry in the Agenda. EO 13771, which President Trump signed on January 30, 2017, contained the following provisions pertaining to publication of rules in the Unified Agenda: Each regulation approved by the Director during the Presidential budget process shall be included in the Unified Regulatory Agenda required under Executive Order 12866, as amended, or any successor order. Unless otherwise required by law, no regulation shall be issued by an agency if it was not included on the most recent version or update of the published Unified Regulatory Agenda as required under Executive Order 12866, as amended, or any successor order, unless the issuance of such regulation was approved in advance in writing by the Director [of OMB]. On April 5, 2017, OIRA issued guidance on implementation of EO 13771, which further emphasized the requirement for publishing regulatory and deregulatory actions in the Unified Agenda. Specifically, the guidance stated that "the agency's Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions should reflect compliance with the [one-in, two-out] requirements of EO 13771, and should include, to the extent practicable, EO 13771 deregulatory actions that ... are sufficient to offset those actions appearing in the Agenda that are or are expected to result in EO 13771 regulatory actions." In other words, OMB is requiring agencies to include in their submissions for the Unified Agenda the cost offsets of any new regulations they expect to issue. This was also stated in OMB's call for data for the 2017 Update to the Unified Agenda, which stated that "in order to facilitate the fiscal year 2018 regulatory budget planning process we are requesting that your spring 2017 submissions include a preliminary estimate of the total costs or savings associated with each of your planned fiscal year 2018 significant regulatory actions and offsetting deregulatory actions." Independent regulatory agencies, which are listed statutorily in the Paperwork Reduction Act and historically have not been covered by rulemaking requirements imposed by the President and OMB, are not required to follow Executive Order 13771. OMB's guidance on the order encourages those agencies, however, to voluntarily "identify existing regulations that, if repealed or revised, would achieve cost savings that would fully offset the costs of significant regulatory actions while continuing to meet the agency's statutory obligations."