Guest Post: Jerry Brito Tells How to Fix Regulations.gov
BY Jerry Brito | Thursday, June 4 2009
Jerry Brito is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the creator of OpenRegs.com, an easy-to-use alternative interface to the official Regulations.gov site.
Regulations.gov is the federal government's central clearing house for information about the hundreds of rules that agencies promulgate each year. It's also supposed to be the main gateway for citizen participation in the regulatory process. Since its inception six years ago, however, the site has been the subject of much criticism. Now the site has announced that it is redesigning, and it is seeking suggestions from users at Regulations.gov/exchange.
Certain proposed improvements to the site's layout include streamlined search results and a search wizard, as well as listings of the most popular and recently posted regulatory dockets. These are welcome additions. So are RSS feeds for each agency and educational material about the regulatory process. However, the fundamental problems identified last year in an in-depth study by a distinguished panel of the ABA's Administrative Law Section will likely remain.
For example, the lack of a systemwide metadata standard means that any agency can add to the system as many data fields and document types as it likes. One agency's "Meeting Notice" may be another agency's "Meeting/Listening Session Notice" and a user would have no way to know that if he searched for one type of document, he might be missing the other. (In fact, in addition to a "Meeting Notice" document type on Regulations.gov, there is a "Meeting notice" document type with a lowercase "n." Each produce different search results.)
Addressing these fundamental problems, however, will require a major overhaul of the federal docketing database that is likely beyond the Regulations.gov team's available options at this time for both budgetary and political reasons. Within the realm of the possible, however, commenters on the "Regulations.gov Exchange" site have made some great suggestions that will hopefully be implemented in short order. These include:
- RSS feeds not just for agency notices, but for individual dockets. That is, subscribe to a docket (say, the EPA's proceeding on greenhouse gas emissions) and be notified of any new comments or other documents filed in that docket by the agency or third parties.
- Similarly, the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of a search query would be invaluable. For example, subscribe to a search of the term "triclosan" only within FDA dockets and be notified any time a new document matches.
- Allowing average citizens to find proposed regulations by browsing through topics, not simply by searching or by sifting through unfamiliar agency names.
- The ability to search within a particular docket, some of which can grow to include hundreds of documents.
Regulations.gov is taking suggestions from the public until July 21.