Almost a year after the Office of Management and Budget launched a government-wide Web site called Regulations.gov, there has been extremely light use of the portal to comment on the thousands of proposed rules that federal agencies issue each year, according to an audit by the General Accounting Office. In addition, some federal agencies that should be leaders in electronic rulemaking did not list rules that they had open for comment on their own Web sites. A few took no electronic comments at all.
The idea behind creating a central place for the public to find and comment on rulemakings was to increase civic participation in policymaking through the click of a mouse. The site was designed to encourage the regulatory neophyte to become involved in the rulemaking process, which traditionally has been limited largely to lawyers, lobbyists and public interest groups.
"There is greater electronic functionality for rulemaking, but no one knows it's there," said Curtis Copeland, assistant director of the GAO's Strategic Issues Team, which examined how Regulations.gov was progressing at the request of Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Lieberman was a primary sponsor of the E-Government Act of 2002, which encouraged electronic rulemaking. Collins is chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
The GAO focused on the period from Feb 1, 2003, to April 30, 2003, the first three months of the site's existence. The auditors found that Regulations.gov was the best place -- and sometimes the only place -- to find out about rules that were open for comment. Federal agencies proposed 411 rules during that period. Almost all of them were available for comment on the site.
But finding those rules was tougher: Only two of the rules issued by the agencies gave members of the public any direction in their announcement in the Federal Register or on their own Web site that they could comment on them through Regulations.gov. And once a user found her way to the site, there was no way to find all the rules open for comment within a Cabinet department.
GAO said that lack of direction resulted in only about 200 comments coming to agencies via Regulations.gov since the site opened in late January 2003. The OMB, which is responsible for about two dozen government-wide electronic initiatives, said it counted about 500 comments since the inception of the site.
OMB officials, who asked not to be named, said they were pleased with the progress of the site because it allowed the public to comment on more than 90 percent of proposed rules, a 38 percent increase over individual agency Web sites. There have been close to 1.5 million hits on the site and 15,000 page downloads a month, they said.
But the GAO responded that hits aren't comments. And the number of comments that did come in through the site was particularly low when compared with response to some agency rulemakings. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency took in more than 300,000 comments through its own e-rulemaking Web site and other traditional methods on a new pollution control program rulemaking; during that same period, it got eight public comments through Regulations.gov.
Similarly, the Department of Transportation got 16,000 electronic comments through its own site over the three months examined by GAO, while 21 came through Regulations.gov.
"The progress has been somewhat disappointing. No one seems to know it exists," said Collins in an interview. "Agencies need to have a link on their Web sites to Regulations.gov."
EPA, in particular, was singled out for criticism by GAO because it was chosen to oversee Regulations.gov. Its online rulemaking system also was chosen as the template for the future development of the government-wide site.
What troubled GAO was that when it took a "snapshot" on May 1, 2003, it could find only six of the 33 rules EPA had open for comment on its own Web site. (All 33 were listed on Regulations.gov.) GAO also came across an EPA proposal that told commenters that they could ask a question via e-mail, but could not file a comment. And 61 of 78 EPA rules published in the three-month period had no electronic comment option.
"The Regulations.gov site, although functional, is barely used. And the Environmental Protection Agency was found to have made the least progress of the major regulatory agencies, which raises questions about why the EPA was designated the lead agency for the administration's e-rulemaking initiative," Lieberman said in a statement.
Officials at EPA said the timing of the audit was unfair and premature.
"We're dealing with a major cultural issue. Millions of people have to get used to doing business differently. This is a learning process. Regulations.gov was only announced in January," said Kimberly Nelson, chief information officer for the EPA. "I've never seen an audit of a system in the first three months. It's irritating to be criticized for the things we had planned for the next version [of the site] anyway."
Oscar Morales, director of the government-wide e-rulemaking initiative, said there are plans to market the second phase of the project, which will call for eliminating individual agency dockets and folding them into one central government-wide electronic docket by 2005.
EPA officials defended the agency's own e-rulemaking initiative by pointing out that the rules that didn't show up on its site were regional, not national ones. They also pointed out that the department was in the throes of converting eight paper dockets into one electronic docket when the audit took place.
Out for Comment: Instead of the Office of Information Regulatory Affairs getting a budget increase as the Bush administration requested, House appropriators suggested a $2.5 million trim in the regulatory review office's $7 million annual budget. The Senate left the OIRA budget intact, so this will have to be worked out in conference. Robert Hahn, who heads the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and opposes the cut, said appropriators should do a cost-benefit analysis of their own.
Quelle: Washington Post, 28.10.2003
