Regulatory Reform: Agencies' Efforts to Eliminate and Revise Rules Yield
Mixed Results (Letter Report, 10/02/97, GAO/GGD-98-3).
Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO updated and expanded its
previous review of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) page
elimination and revision initiative, focusing on whether: (1) agencies'
reported page elimination totals took into account any pages added to
the CFR during the same period; (2) agencies' CFR revision efforts would
reduce regulatory burden; and (3) the administration has any mechanism
in place for measuring burden reductions as a result of its CFR page
elimination and revision initiatives. GAO limited the scope of its work
on the first two objectives to four agencies: the Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) and Transportation (DOT), the Department of
Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
GAO noted that: (1) officials in each of the four agencies GAO reviewed
said that the page elimination totals that their agencies reported to
the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) did not take
into account the pages that their agencies had added to the CFR while
the eliminations were taking place; (2) EPA and DOT estimated that they
added more pages to the CFR than they removed during their page
elimination initiatives; (3) HUD and OSHA, on the other hand, estimated
that they deleted more pages than they added; (4) overall, when
estimated page additions were counted, the 4 agencies' CFR sections
decreased in size by about 926 pages--about 3 percent of the CFR pages
at the start of the initiative, or about 17 percent of the amount
reported to OIRA; (5) the agencies pointed out that pages are often
added to the CFR because of statutory requirements or to clarify
requirements placed on regulated entities and that pages are sometimes
not eliminated at the request of those entities; (6) GAO's review
indicated that about 40 percent of the 422 CFR revision actions in the 4
agencies would substantively reduce the burden felt by regulated
entities as a result of such actions as eliminating paperwork
requirements and providing compliance flexibility; (7) another 15
percent of the actions appeared to be minor burden reductions in that
they seemed to make the regulations easier to find or to understand but
would not change the underlying regulatory requirements or scope of
applicability; (8) GAO concluded that about 27 percent of the CFR
revision actions would have no effect on the burden felt by regulated
entities and that about 8 percent could increase regulatory burden; (9)
GAO could not determine what effect about 9 percent of the CFR revision
actions would have on the regulated entities, either because the actions
had multiple parts that potentially could offset each other or because
the information available was unclear; (10) OIRA officials said that the
administration has no mechanisms in place for measuring burden
reductions as a result of the CFR page elimination and revision effort;
and (11) however, they believe that the initiative is having a
beneficial effect and also pointed out that the CFR page elimination and
revision efforts are only part of a larger set of actions the
administration is taking to reform the nation's regulatory system.
--------------------------- Indexing Terms -----------------------------
REPORTNUM: GGD-98-3
TITLE: Regulatory Reform: Agencies' Efforts to Eliminate and
Revise Rules Yield Mixed Results
DATE: 10/02/97
SUBJECT: Federal regulations
Regulatory agencies
Reporting requirements
Executive orders
******************************************************************
** This file contains an ASCII representation of the text of a **
** GAO report. Delineations within the text indicating chapter **
** titles, headings, and bullets are preserved. Major **
** divisions and subdivisions of the text, such as Chapters, **
** Sections, and Appendixes, are identified by double and **
** single lines. The numbers on the right end of these lines **
** indicate the position of each of the subsections in the **
** document outline. These numbers do NOT correspond with the **
** page numbers of the printed product. **
** **
** No attempt has been made to display graphic images, although **
** figure captions are reproduced. Tables are included, but **
** may not resemble those in the printed version. **
** **
** Please see the PDF (Portable Document Format) file, when **
** available, for a complete electronic file of the printed **
** document's contents. **
** **
** A printed copy of this report may be obtained from the GAO **
** Document Distribution Center. For further details, please **
** send an e-mail message to: **
** **
** **
** **
** with the message 'info' in the body. **
******************************************************************
Cover
================================================================ COVER
Report to the Chairman, Committee on Governmental Affairs, U.S.
Senate
October 1997
REGULATORY REFORM - AGENCIES'
EFFORTS TO ELIMINATE AND REVISE
RULES YIELD MIXED RESULTS
GAO/GGD-98-3
Regulatory Reform
(410120)
Abbreviations
=============================================================== ABBREV
CFR - Code of Federal Regulations
DOT - Department of Transportation
EPA - Environmental Protection Agency
FAA - Federal Aviation Administration
GSE - Government Sponsored Enterprises
HUD - Department of Housing and Urban Development
NHTSA - National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
OIRA - Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
OMB - Office of Management and Budget
OSHA - Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Letter
=============================================================== LETTER
B-276797
October 2, 1997
The Honorable Fred Thompson
Chairman, Committee on Governmental Affairs
United States Senate
Dear Mr. Chairman:
The federal regulatory system has long been the subject of
controversy, with both the legislative and executive branches making
numerous attempts to reform regulatory processes during the past 20
years. In June 1995, President Clinton said that, as part of his
administration's regulatory reform initiative, federal agencies would
eliminate 16,000 pages of regulations from the 140,000-page Code of
Federal Regulations (CFR), and that another 31,000 pages would be
revised.\1 Since that time, agencies have periodically reported to
the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on their progress in eliminating and
revising rules. OIRA, in turn, has reported on this progress to the
President and to the public.\2
Last year we testified that, as of June 30, 1996, federal agencies
said they had eliminated 11,569 pages of the CFR and revised another
13,216 pages.\3 However, we concluded that most of the agencies' CFR
page elimination efforts did not appear to reduce regulatory burden.
As for the effort to revise the regulations, we said we could not
determine whether burden was likely to be reduced as a result of most
of the revisions. At the same hearing, the Administrator of OIRA
testified that she had not expected that the page elimination effort
would reduce burden. However, she said that "the real savings, the
reduction of burden," would come from the CFR pages that were being
revised.
This report responds to your request that we update and expand our
previous review of the CFR page elimination and revision initiative.
Our objectives were to determine whether (1) agencies' reported page
elimination totals took into account any pages added to the CFR
during the same period, (2) agencies' CFR revision efforts would
reduce regulatory burden, and (3) the administration has any
mechanism in place for measuring burden reductions as a result of its
CFR page elimination and revision initiatives. As you requested, we
limited the scope of our work on the first two objectives to four
agencies: the Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and
Transportation (DOT), the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety
and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA).
--------------------
\1 The CFR is a compilation of the current general and permanent
regulations of federal agencies.
\2 More Benefits Fewer Burdens: Creating A Regulatory System that
Works for the American People, Office of Management and Budget and
the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Washington, D.C.:
Dec. 1996).
\3 Regulatory Reform: Implementation of the Regulatory Review
Executive Order (GAO/T-GGD-96-185, Sept. 25, 1996).
RESULTS IN BRIEF
------------------------------------------------------------ Letter :1
Officials in each of the four agencies we reviewed said that the page
elimination totals that their agencies reported to OIRA did not take
into account the pages that their agencies had added to the CFR while
the eliminations were taking place. EPA and DOT estimated that they
added more pages to the CFR than they removed during their page
elimination initiatives. HUD and OSHA, on the other hand, estimated
that they deleted more pages than they added. Overall, when
estimated page additions were counted, the 4 agencies' CFR sections
decreased in size by about 926 pages--about 3 percent of the CFR
pages at the start of the initiative, or about 17 percent of the
amount reported to OIRA. The agencies pointed out that pages are
often added to the CFR because of statutory requirements or to
clarify requirements placed on regulated entities and that pages are
sometimes not eliminated at the request of those entities.
Our review indicated that about 40 percent of the 422 CFR revision
actions in the 4 agencies would substantively reduce the burden felt
by regulated entities as a result of such actions as eliminating
paperwork requirements and providing compliance flexibility. Another
15 percent of the actions appeared to be minor burden reductions in
that they seemed to make the regulations easier to find or to
understand but would not change the underlying regulatory
requirements or scope of applicability. We concluded that about 27
percent of the CFR revision actions would have no effect on the
burden felt by regulated entities and that about 8 percent could
increase regulatory burden. We could not determine what effect about
9 percent of the CFR revision actions would have on the regulated
entities, either because the actions had multiple parts that
potentially could offset each other or because the information
available was unclear.
OIRA officials said that the administration has no mechanisms in
place for measuring burden reductions as a result of the CFR page
elimination and revision effort. However, they believe that the
initiative is having a beneficial effect and also pointed out that
the CFR page elimination and revision efforts are only part of a
larger set of actions the administration is taking to reform the
nation's regulatory system.
BACKGROUND
------------------------------------------------------------ Letter :2
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."\4 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."\5
In an October 1993 memorandum to the heads of federal departments and
agencies, the Administrator of OIRA noted these previous efforts but
said that some of them had been "so broad in scope that necessary
analytic focus has been diffused, or needed followup has not
occurred." In its report on the first year's implementation of
Executive Order 12866, OIRA further clarified the intent of the
Clinton administration's rule review initiative:
"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.\6 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.
--------------------
\4 In Regulatory Flexibility Act: Status of Agencies' Compliance
(GAO/GGD-94-105, Apr. 27, 1994), we reported, among other things, on
the results of a study by the Small Business Administration that
indicated many agencies had not planned for or conducted a review of
their rules.
\5 This moratorium was ultimately extended for a full year.
\6 More Benefits Fewer Burdens, December 1996.
SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY
------------------------------------------------------------ Letter :3
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.\7 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.\8 We
initially reviewed descriptive abstracts for these actions that were
included in the Unified Agenda.\9 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.\10
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.
--------------------
\7 The dates the agencies used to track page eliminations varied.
DOT started tracking page eliminations from the beginning of the
Clinton administration in January 1993. HUD began tracking its
eliminations from March 1994. OSHA and EPA began tracking their
eliminations from the date of the administration's March 1995 call to
eliminate and revise pages in the CFR.
\8 This document, which is issued twice a year since 1983 by the
Regulatory Information Service Center, is a compendium of each
executive and independent agency's regulatory activities that are
being developed, planned for the future, or completed. It provides
such information as the status of the regulation, a timetable for
further action, any statutory or judicial deadlines, and the name and
telephone number of an agency contact. We used the October 1995
Unified Agenda as the starting point of our review because it was the
first edition published after the President's June 1995 announcement
of page revisions.
\9 Thirty-one of these entries had no abstract describing the
initiative in the Unified Agenda, so we obtained abstracts or
proposed or final rule preambles directly from the agencies for each
of these actions.
\10 However, we did analyze EPA's and DOT's page elimination totals
as part of last year's testimony on this issue (GAO/T-GGD-96-185,
Sept. 25, 1996). We concluded that the agencies' page elimination
claims were generally valid.
CFR PAGE ELIMINATION REPORTS DO
NOT REFLECT PAGE ADDITIONS
------------------------------------------------------------ Letter :4
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.\11 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. As
a result, the size of their CFR sections increased by an estimated
966 and 283 pages, respectively. HUD and OSHA, on the other hand,
estimated they deleted more pages than they added during their
initiatives, so the size of their CFR sections decreased.
Table 1
Agencies' CFR Page Totals, Targets,
Eliminations, Additions, and Net Change
Pages eliminated/added as
of April 30, 1997
--------------------------
Total CFR
pages Pages
at start of targeted Net page
agency for Gross pages Pages added change
Agency initiative elimination eliminated (estimated) (estimated)
-------- -------------- ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------
HUD 4,023 2,802 -1,992 +651 -1,341
DOT 10,663 1,221 -1,282 +1,565 +283
OSHA 3,495 1,049 -920 +86 -834
EPA 14,312 1,457 -1,338 +2,304 +966
================================================================================
Total 32,493 6,529 -5,532 +4,606 -926
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sources: OIRA, HUD, DOT, OSHA, and EPA.
Note: The agencies' page elimination initiatives began at different
points in time.
Figure 1 depicts the result of the CFR page elimination effort in
each agency both before (gross) and after (net) accounting for
estimated CFR page additions.
Figure 1: EPA's and DOT's CFR
Pages Increased During Their
Page Elimination Initiative
(See figure in printed
edition.)
Note 1: Gross page eliminations are the totals reported by the
agencies to OMB.
Note 2: Net page changes equal the difference between gross pages
eliminated and total estimated pages added to the CFR between the
beginning of the agencies' initiatives and April 30, 1997.
Note 3: The agencies began the page elimination initiatives at
different points in time.
Sources: OMB, HUD, OSHA, DOT, and EPA.
--------------------
\11 The 15 agencies were the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce,
Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, the Interior, Justice,
Labor, State, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, HUD, and DOT, as
well as EPA and the Small Business Administration.
AGENCIES SAID CFR PAGES ARE
ADDED OR RETAINED FOR MANY
REASONS
---------------------------------------------------------- Letter :4.1
Agency officials said there are a number of reasons why pages are
added to or kept in the CFR, many of which are beyond the agencies'
control or are beneficial to regulated entities. The officials
frequently said that statutory requirements imposed by Congress often
drive CFR page additions. For example, an EPA official said that the
growth in the number of their CFR pages was primarily driven by
statutory requirements to develop new Clean Air Act regulations. A
HUD official estimated that the agency added about 18 pages to the
CFR in 1996 with the regulations implementing the Community
Development Block Grants for Indian Tribes and Alaska Native
Villages. According to HUD, the "principal impetus for this
rulemaking process was the need to implement various statutory
mandates included in Section 105 of the Department of Housing and
Urban Development Reform Act (P.L. 101-235) as amended by the
National Affordable Housing Act of 1990." The official also said HUD
added more than eight pages to the CFR in 1995 as a result of a rule
implementing the Base Closure Community Redevelopment and Homeless
Assistance Act of 1994 (P.L. 103-421). DOT officials said that all
of the CFR page increases in the Federal Highway Administration and
the Federal Transit Administration and the bulk of the increases in
other parts of DOT were statutorily mandated. For example, they said
that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) added
68 pages in response to congressional mandates contained in the
Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act and the American
Automobile Labeling Act. They said that DOT's Office of the
Secretary added 18 pages of rules to set out procedures for
statutorily mandated alcohol testing of "safety-sensitive" employees.
Agency officials also said that pages are sometimes added to the CFR
in order to clarify regulatory requirements. For example, DOT
officials said that they have added charts and examples to clearly
illustrate how regulated entities can comply with their rules. Also,
they said that in future regulations, they plan to incorporate
question-and-answer formats and checklists to assist regulated
entities. Therefore, they said the additional pages actually
decrease the burden imposed on those entities.
EPA officials pointed out that pages are often added to the CFR that
permit, not restrict, actions by other entities. For example, they
said that pages are added to allow farmers to use new pesticides and
expand the use of existing pesticides on food crops. Without those
regulations, which establish the allowable levels of pesticide
residues in food crops, use of the pesticides would be prohibited.
Finally, agency officials said that pages are sometimes not
eliminated from the CFR as a result of requests from regulated
entities. For example, DOT officials said they had proposed
streamlining the procedures regarding marine industry manufacturers'
use of independent laboratories instead of the Coast Guard to inspect
lights and fog signal emitters. However, according to the officials,
the "project was withdrawn due to substantial issues raised by public
comments. . . ."
Overall, DOT officials said that CFR page counts are not always an
accurate proxy for regulatory burden. For example, they noted that
the size of CFR typeface or the format used periodically changes,
each of which can have a big impact on the number of CFR pages. They
also said that after a rule is published there is usually a period
before it goes into effect in which both the old and the new rules
are published. Finally, they said that editorial notes are added by
the Office of the Federal Register when publishing the CFR, which
increases the number of pages.
SOME CFR REVISION EFFORTS WILL
NOT REDUCE REGULATORY BURDEN
------------------------------------------------------------ Letter :5
As figure 2 shows, about 40 percent of the 422 CFR revision actions
in the 4 agencies appeared to substantively reduce the burden felt by
regulated entities through such actions as eliminating paperwork
requirements and providing compliance flexibility. Another 15
percent were minor burden reductions in that they made regulatory
requirements easier to find or to understand but did not change the
rules' underlying requirements or scope of applicability. Therefore,
taking these two categories together, about 55 percent of the CFR
revision actions appeared to reduce the level of regulatory burden to
at least some extent. However, about 8 percent of the actions seemed
to increase regulatory burden, and another 27 percent did not appear
to affect regulated entities' burden. We were unable to determine
what, if any, impact about 9 percent of the actions would have on
regulatory burden. (The numbers do not add to 100 percent due to
rounding.)
Figure 2: CFR Revision Actions
Appear to Have Varying Effect
on Regulatory Burden
(See figure in printed
edition.)
Note: The numbers do not add to 100 percent due to rounding.
Source: GAO analysis of effect of CFR revision actions on regulatory
burden.
As table 2 shows, there were some differences across the agencies in
the degree to which their CFR revision actions appeared to affect
regulatory burden. For example, our analysis indicated that about 11
percent of the OSHA actions could be substantive reductions in
regulatory burden but that more than 50 percent of the EPA actions
appeared to be so. Conversely, nearly 37 percent of the DOT actions
did not appear to change regulated entities' burden compared with
about 11 percent at OSHA.
Table 2
Effect of Revision Actions on Burden
Varied by Agency
Percent of actions that resulted in:
-----------------------------------------
Number Minor
of Substanti burden No Burden
action ve burden reduct burden increa Cannot
Agency s reduction ion change se tell
------------------- ------ --------- ------ ------ ------ ------
HUD 107 37% 30% 25% 5% 3%
DOT 183 38 7 37 9 9
OSHA 19 11 21 11 16 42
EPA 113 52 14 15 9 10
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: Some of the numbers do not add to 100 percent due to rounding.
Source: GAO analysis of agencies' CFR revision actions on regulatory
burden.
SUBSTANTIVE BURDEN REDUCTION
ACTIONS INCLUDED LESS
PAPERWORK AND MORE
FLEXIBILITY
---------------------------------------------------------- Letter :5.1
The 170 CFR revision actions that appeared to substantively reduce
regulatory burden took a number of different forms, including
reducing paperwork or other requirements, giving the regulated
entities flexibility in how to comply with or implement the
regulations, lowering compliance costs, and/or allowing the regulated
entities to file or transmit reports electronically.\12 About half
(90) of these actions appeared to reduce burden by eliminating
paperwork and/or other requirements. For example, one EPA action
proposed changing the frequency with which states must submit
information related to state water quality standards under section
303(d) of the Clean Water Act from every 2 years to every 5 years.
Lessening the frequency with which this information must be submitted
should reduce the paperwork burden imposed on the states. One HUD
action proposed to reorganize six separate grant programs into a
single formula-based program, eliminating the need for both annual
notices of funding availability and annual submission of
applications. Also, by consolidating these programs into one
program, HUD expected that the reporting and recordkeeping
requirements would be dramatically reduced as grantees would only be
required to maintain records on one program. Another HUD action
would allow the use of classes of innovative products without having
each manufacturer apply for a material release for a specific
product. HUD said these changes would save suppliers and
manufacturers thousands of dollars in application fees and materials
preparation.
About half (86) of the 170 CFR actions appeared to reduce regulated
entities' burden by giving them more flexibility in how they comply
with or implement the regulations. For example, the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) proposed revising "the Federal Aviation
Regulations to provide for the granting of relief from the literal
compliance with certain rules," provided the applicant justified this
relief and FAA concluded that the provisions not complied with had no
adverse impact on safety or were compensated for by other factors.
FAA also revised its regulations governing portable protective
breathing equipment that is required for crew members' use in
combatting in-flight fires, eliminating the requirement that airlines
have portable equipment in each compartment and giving the airlines
flexibility in the number and placement of this equipment in the
aircraft. In another example, EPA said it revised its regulations
for municipal solid waste landfills to allow local governments
greater flexibility to demonstrate compliance with financial
assurance requirements.
Other examples of agencies' actions that appeared to result in
substantive burden reduction for the regulated entities included the
following:
-- OSHA proposed revising the shipyard employment safety standards
regarding safety systems and work practices for entering and
exiting the workplace, eliminating many provisions that limit
employer innovation. According to the notice of proposed
rulemaking, OSHA expected that regulated entities' costs would
decrease if employers could use alternative safety systems and
work practices that were not allowed by the existing
requirements.
-- HUD revised its rules concerning the Board of Contract Appeals
to make the Board's actions less costly and time-consuming to
appellants, including allowing appellants to use expedited small
claims procedures, raising the threshold for using accelerated
procedures in claims from $10,000 to $50,000, and advising
claimants of the availability of alternative dispute resolution
techniques. This action made revisions required by the Federal
Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which amended the Contract
Disputes Act of 1978.
-- DOT proposed allowing airlines to electronically file tariff
rules governing the availability of passenger fares and their
conditions, which they said would save the airline industry over
a million dollars in tariff submissions, printing, and
distribution costs.
-- EPA said it would propose modifying its pesticide experimental
use permit regulations to permit expanded testing without a
permit, reducing burden on pesticide producers.
According to agency officials, some of these actions to reduce
regulatory burden were statutorily mandated. For example, DOT said
two of its actions giving states additional flexibility implements "a
statutory requirement that directs the Secretary of Transportation to
issue regulations. . . ." HUD said that it revised certain
regulations in part "to incorporate the statutory amendments in the
Housing and Community Development Act of 1992."
--------------------
\12 A single regulatory action could contain more than one of these
elements. For example, one action could both eliminate certain
recordkeeping requirements and give regulated entities greater
flexibility in how they comply with regulatory requirements.
MINOR BURDEN REDUCTIONS MADE
RULES EASIER TO FIND OR TO
UNDERSTAND
---------------------------------------------------------- Letter :5.2
Our analysis indicated that about 15 percent of the 4 agencies' CFR
revision actions (65 of the 422 actions) would result in minor
reductions in regulated entities' burden. These minor burden
reductions included actions that made rules easier to understand
(e.g., writing rules with less technical jargon) or easier to find
(e.g., consolidating related sections of the CFR into one section)
but did not change the regulations' underlying requirements. CFR
revision actions that we considered minor burden reduction actions
included the following:
-- HUD consolidated its fair housing and equal opportunity
requirements for its programs. In addition to eliminating
redundancy from title 24 of the CFR, HUD said that this action
makes its nondiscrimination regulations more concise and simpler
to understand.
-- OSHA proposed consolidating its general industry standards (29
C.F.R. 1910) with its shipyard employment standards (29 C.F.R.
1915) into one comprehensive CFR part that would apply to all
activities and areas in shipyards. The implementation of this
action should make it easier for regulated entities to find and
comply with all relevant OSHA standards for shipyards. In
another action, OSHA proposed to "eliminate the complexity,
duplicative nature, and obsolescence" of certain standards and
"write them in plain language." OSHA said that this change would
improve comprehension and compliance with those standards.
-- EPA proposed reorganizing and reformatting its national primary
drinking water regulations to make them easier for public water
system officials to understand and comply with and easier for
state, local, and tribal governments to implement.
-- DOT's Office of the Secretary proposed reorganizing the
regulations governing the conduct of all aviation economic
proceedings, streamlining the regulations to remove
redundancies, grouping procedures relating only to oral
evidentiary hearings together and separating them from
procedures pertaining to only nonhearing cases, and updating
terminology in the regulations.
SOME CFR REVISION ACTIONS
APPEARED TO INCREASE
REGULATORY BURDEN
---------------------------------------------------------- Letter :5.3
Our review also identified 34 CFR revision actions (about 8 percent
of the 422 actions) that appeared to increase regulatory burden by
expanding the scope of existing regulations, establishing new
programs and/or new requirements, creating more paperwork, or
increasing costs for regulated entities.\13 Actions that our analysis
indicated would increase regulatory burden included the following:
-- NHTSA proposed updating its lists of passenger motor vehicle
insurers that are required to annually file reports on their
motor vehicle theft loss experiences. As a result of this rule,
NHTSA indicated that the number of insurers who must file these
annual reports would increase, resulting in a cost increase to
insurers of "less than $100,000." In another action, DOT's
Research and Special Programs Administration proposed extending
the application of its interstate hazardous materials
regulations to intrastate transportation of those materials in
commerce.
-- OSHA proposed revising its general industry safety standard for
training powered industrial truck operators and to add
equivalent training requirements for the maritime industries.
The new standards require periodic evaluation of each operator's
performance and periodic refresher or remedial training. OSHA
estimated that the annualized cost would be $19.4 million.
-- EPA proposed establishing "new source performance standards and
emission guidelines for new and existing solid waste
incineration units." The new standards were to "specify
numerical emission limitations" for 11 substances and were to
include "requirements for emissions and parameter monitoring and
provisions for operator training and certification."
-- HUD proposed to extend the applicability of its standards for
approval of sites based on avoidance of minority/racial
concentration for HUD-assisted rental housing to the Community
Development Block Grant Program and to broaden the standards to
include reviews of poverty concentration.
For many of the actions that appeared to increase regulatory burden,
we found that the burden increase was the result of agencies'
implementation of legislative requirements. For example, EPA
officials noted that although the previously cited new source
requirements may increase regulatory burden, the new rules were
required by section 129 of the Clean Air Act, as amended in 1990.
One HUD action proposed establishing new regulations implementing the
Secretary of HUD's authority to regulate Government Sponsored
Enterprises (GSE) (e.g., the Federal National Mortgage Association
and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) under the Federal
Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992.
According to the final rule in the December 1, 1995, Federal
Register, this act "substantially overhauled the regulatory
authorities and structure for GSE regulation and required the
issuance of this rule."
--------------------
\13 In some cases, the rules indicated that the actions would
increase costs for regulated entities (e.g., companies) but provide
more than offsetting benefits to other entities (e.g., workers).
However, we coded these actions as burden increases unless the
offsetting benefits were provided to the same entity that bore the
costs.
MANY CFR REVISION ACTIONS
DID NOT APPEAR TO AFFECT
REGULATORY BURDEN
---------------------------------------------------------- Letter :5.4
Our analysis indicated that about 27 percent of the 4 agencies' CFR
revision actions (114 of 422) would have little or no effect on the
amount of burden felt by regulated entities. More than half of these
actions involved the elimination of CFR "deadwood," such as
regulations that the agencies said were obsolete or were duplicative
of other text. Other such actions were minor technical corrections,
such as changes to agency organization charts, telephone listings, or
addresses. The following examples illustrate agencies' actions that
appeared to have little to no effect on regulated entities' burden:
-- DOT proposed amending the Transportation Acquisition Regulations
to change organizational names (e.g., "OST--Office of the
Secretary" was replaced by "TASC-Transportation Administrative
Service Center") and renumber or rename certain sections of the
CFR.
-- HUD proposed removing the detail in its program regulations
regarding the application and grant award processes, noting that
a full description of the application and grant award process
would instead be published in the Federal Register in a notice
of funding availability.
In several instances, the agencies' actions appeared more likely to
affect the promulgating agencies than the amount of burden felt by
the regulated entities. For example, HUD proposed amending its rule
on rules to make possible the "more timely implementation of new and
changed policies of the Department in circumstances where notice and
comment rulemaking is not required by law." According to HUD, one of
the purposes of this action was to provide greater flexibility to the
Department in implementing statutory and other changes to its program
authorities. In another such action, HUD issued revised ethics
standards for its employees in accordance with the revised standards
issued by the Office of Government Ethics.
Several of the actions did not appear to affect the level of burden
felt by regulated entities because the agency was only proposing to
study an issue, and no specific proposal had been put forward at the
time the action was described. For example, one HUD action was a
joint proposal with the Federal Reserve Board "to initiate
fact-finding to assist the agencies in revising disclosures to
consumers under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and the
Truth in Lending Act." According to HUD, the agencies were soliciting
comments on what regulatory and legislative changes might be made to
achieve consumer protection goals and minimally affect compliance
burdens. OSHA said in one of its CFR revision abstracts that it
intended to issue a proposal to prevent accidents during equipment
repair and maintenance for the construction industry. However, an
OSHA official told us that no specific proposal would be issued until
1999. EPA said in one action that it was initiating a technical
review of the possible risks associated with management of
silver-bearing wastes. However, no specific proposal was presented.
A few of the actions that the agencies characterized as CFR revisions
will have no effect on the burden felt by regulated entities because
the agencies withdrew the proposal after receiving public comments.
For example, in one action, FAA said it withdrew a proposal to
clarify or change the number of flight attendants required when
passengers are on an airplane "in view of the opposition and
alternative proposals presented by a number of commenters."
EFFECT OF SOME CFR REVISION
ACTIONS WAS DIFFICULT TO
DETERMINE
---------------------------------------------------------- Letter :5.5
As noted previously, we attempted to obtain additional information
from the Federal Register and/or the agencies about each of the 422
CFR revision abstracts that seemed unclear. Although we were able to
resolve many of the cases with this additional information, we were
still unable to determine the effect that 39 of the 422 actions
(about 9 percent) would have on regulated entities.
In 23 of the 39 cases, the abstract and/or any supplementary
information indicated that the CFR revision action had some elements
that would increase burden and other elements that would reduce
burden, making it difficult to determine the net effect. Those
potentially offsetting cases included the following:
-- One OSHA abstract stated that the agency was writing the final
rule on standards for walking and working surfaces and personal
fall protection systems "in plain language" and making it
"flexible in the means of compliance permitted." These elements
appeared likely to reduce regulatory burden. However, in
another part of the same abstract, OSHA indicated that criteria
for personal fall protection systems would be added to the
regulations because the existing standards did not contain those
criteria--an action that could increase burden.
-- In one DOT abstract, DOT proposed revising and updating the
aviation insurance requirements "to recapture administrative
expenses incurred," which could represent a burden increase on
the regulated entities. However, the abstract also said that
the action "will clarify the language and make it conform with
the current legislative language and intent," which could reduce
regulatory burden.
For 17 of the 39 actions, we were unable to obtain enough information
to make a determination.\14 Examples of those actions include the
following:
-- One abstract stated that EPA would "make over 50 modifications,
additions, and deletions to the existing PCB [Polychlorinated
Biphenyls] management program under the Toxic Substances Control
Act. . . ." However, no details on those changes were
available from either the Federal Register or EPA.
-- One OSHA abstract indicated that a negotiated rulemaking process
led to a draft revision of its regulation that contained
"innovative provisions" that would help "minimize the major
causes of steel erection injuries and fatalities ." However,
OSHA could provide no additional information about the draft
revisions.
-- One DOT abstract proposed amending the "procedural regulations
for the certification of changes to type certificated products."
The abstract stated that the "amendments are needed to
accommodate the trend toward fewer products that are of
completely new design and more products with repeated changes of
previously approved designs." Although this action appeared to
propose reducing the regulatory requirements for manufacturing
products of previously approved designs, it was unclear from
this abstract exactly what the new procedures would be or their
impact on the regulated entities, and DOT did not provide
additional clarification.
--------------------
\14 The 17 include 2 of the 23 actions mentioned earlier that also
had multiple and potentially offsetting parts.
NO MECHANISM IN PLACE TO
MEASURE BURDEN CHANGES
------------------------------------------------------------ Letter :6
Section 5 of Executive Order 12866 required agencies to submit to
OIRA a program to review their existing regulations. The first
listed purpose for this review in the executive order is "to reduce
the regulatory burden on the American people." However, OIRA
officials told us that the administration does not have any mechanism
in place to measure changes in regulatory burden as a result of
agencies' CFR page elimination and CFR revision initiatives. They
said that the agencies' accomplishments in these areas "result from a
wide variety of actions" and that there is "no single common measure
that can be used to summarize the beneficial impact of this
initiative given the breadth of activities it has encompassed."
OIRA officials went on to note that some of the actions in the
initiative were significant rulemakings for which agencies conducted
benefit-cost analyses; some were actions to make current regulations
more user-friendly, and others were described as modest
"housekeeping" actions designed to consolidate or eliminate certain
provisions. Overall, they said that these efforts "have contributed
to a more efficient and effective regulatory system." They also noted
that the elimination and revision actions are part of a larger set of
initiatives designed to reform the nation's regulatory system.
Measuring regulatory burden and changes in that burden are extremely
difficult. Some commenters (including the President) have used
relatively simple indicators, such as the number of pages in the CFR
or the total weight of the rules. Other observers have characterized
federal regulatory burden in terms of federal spending on regulatory
programs or the number of federal employees assigned to regulatory
activities. Others have used the number of hours required to fill
out federal paperwork. Still others have tried to measure the cost
borne by entities responsible for complying with federal regulations.
All of these measures have certain advantages and disadvantages, and
all require careful interpretation.\15
In a previous report, we concluded that it was extremely difficult to
determine direct, incremental regulatory costs, even for an
individual business.\16 Indirect effects of regulation, such as their
effect on productivity or competitiveness, and effects on all
regulated entities are even more difficult to measure. Trying to
gauge other types of regulatory burden (e.g., complexity,
reasonableness) and then merge them with the other burden measures
further complicates the task. Therefore, in some ways it is not
surprising that the administration does not have a mechanism in place
to measure burden reductions as a result of its CFR page elimination
and revision initiative. However, in the absence of an agreed upon
and demonstrably valid measure of regulatory burden, disagreements
are likely to continue regarding the effectiveness of the page
elimination and revision effort as well as other initiatives designed
to lessen the impact of federal regulations.
--------------------
\15 For example, in Paperwork Reduction: Governmentwide Goals
Unlikely To Be Met (GAO/T-GGD-97-114, June 4, 1997), we noted that
agencies have found it difficult to measure paperwork burden.
\16 Regulatory Burden: Measurement Challenges and Concerns Raised by
Selected Companies (GAO/GGD-97-2, Nov. 18, 1996).
AGENCY COMMENTS
------------------------------------------------------------ Letter :7
We sent a draft of this report to the Director of OMB; the
Secretaries of HUD, Labor, and DOT; and the Administrator of EPA.
Officials from OMB said they had no comments on the report.
Officials from the other four agencies said that they generally
agreed with our characterization of their page elimination efforts.
Officials from DOT, HUD, and EPA also said that they generally agreed
with the information presented about their CFR page revision efforts.
However, for a few of the actions, they provided additional
information regarding the effect of the actions on regulatory burden.
Using this information, we reevaluated our conclusions regarding
these actions and in some cases changed our burden determinations.
On September 12, 1997, we received written comments on the draft
report from the Department of Labor's Acting Assistant Secretary for
Occupational Safety and Health. (See app. II for a copy of those
comments.) He said that he had serious concerns about the methodology
we used to determine whether OSHA's page revisions had resulted in
reductions in regulatory burden. First, he said that simply counting
the number of actions in each burden category does not accurately
reflect OSHA's efforts because the agency combined many separate
deregulatory actions into several large packages. Because each
package affected many different regulations, he said it was not
appropriate to treat them as a single action. The Acting Assistant
Secretary also said that the methodology used in the report does not
take into account the complex interrelationships between factors
within a single action that will both increase and decrease
regulatory burden. Finally, he said that by describing their efforts
to remove CFR pages and make rules easier to understand as "minor
burden reductions," the report does not give OSHA adequate credit and
understates both the degree of improvement and their importance in
the overall regulatory program.
The Acting Assistant Secretary's observations regarding aggregated
deregulatory actions are grounded in a different view from ours about
how to conduct this study. We gave each of the agencies' proposals
equal weight because we believed it was the most objective method to
quantify our results. Any other method would have required us to
make subjective judgments concerning both the identification of
discrete proposals and the weight each proposal should be given.
Criteria for such judgments are not readily available. Also, it is
important to recognize that OSHA determined how its CFR revision
actions would be presented in the Unified Agenda. OSHA sometimes
chose to consolidate multiple proposals into several large packages.
In other cases OSHA appeared to present a single initiative in
several different packages. We used whatever groupings OSHA and the
other agencies used to present their revision efforts as our unit of
analysis.
As the Acting Assistant Secretary noted, some of the agencies'
actions with multiple proposals appeared to both increase and
decrease the burden felt by regulated entities. In a few cases, the
bulk of the proposals appeared to be either a burden increase or a
burden reduction, so we could make a burden change determination for
the actions as a whole. However, in 23 of the actions we could not
reach an overall conclusion about the net effect of multiple and
potentially offsetting proposals on regulatory burden, so we coded
each of the actions as "cannot tell." Therefore, we believe that the
report does recognize the complex interrelationships between factors
within a single action.
Finally, the Acting Assistant Secretary is incorrect in saying that
we described OSHA's efforts to eliminate pages from the CFR as "minor
burden reductions." We used that description for agencies' CFR
revision efforts that clarified the language in the CFR to make it
easier to read or understand, or that combined sections in the CFR to
make the requirements easier to find but did not change the
underlying requirements placed on regulated entities. Although such
clarifications and consolidations are clearly desirable, we coded
them as "minor burden reductions" because we wanted to differentiate
them from other agency actions that appeared to change underlying
regulatory requirements and result in substantive reductions in
burden.
---------------------------------------------------------- Letter :7.1
We are sending copies of this report to the Ranking Minority Member
of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee; the Director of OMB;
the Secretaries of HUD, Labor, and DOT; and the Administrator of EPA.
We will also make copies available to others on request.
Major contributors to this report are listed in appendix III. Please
contact me on (202) 512-8676 if you or your staff have any questions
concerning this report.
Sincerely yours,
L. Nye Stevens
Director, Federal Management
and Workforce Issues
OBJECTIVES, SCOPE, AND METHODOLOGY
=========================================================== Appendix I
The objectives of this review were to determine whether (1) agencies'
reported Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) page elimination totals
take into account the pages added to the CFR during the same period,
(2) agencies' CFR revision efforts will reduce regulatory burden, and
(3) the administration has any mechanism in place for measuring
burden reductions as a result of its CFR page elimination and
revision initiatives. As the requester specified, we limited the
scope of our work on the first two objectives to four major
regulatory agencies: the Departments of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) and Transportation (DOT), the Department of Labor's
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
To address the first objective, we interviewed agency officials
responsible for the administration's CFR page elimination initiative
at HUD, DOT, OSHA, and EPA. All of these officials said that their
agencies did not track CFR page additions during the initiative.
They also said that it would be extremely difficult and
time-consuming to count the number of pages that had been added in
the years since their initiatives had begun.
Working with the agencies and with the requester, we developed a
methodology that each agency could use to estimate the number of
pages that had been added to the CFR while pages were being
eliminated. We obtained the agencies' page elimination totals as of
April 30, 1997, from the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB)
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Then we asked
the four agencies to identify their major regulatory actions (those
that had added five pages or more to the CFR) and to estimate the
number of pages that each of those actions had added to their parts
of the CFR between the start of their page elimination initiatives
and April 30, 1997.\17 In three of the four agencies, the number of
pages added was also calculated by comparing the agencies' CFR page
totals near the beginning and end of their page elimination
initiatives, calculating the net difference in pages, and using the
number of pages deleted to solve for pages added. For example, if an
agency had 5,000 pages in the CFR as of July 1, 1995, and 5,100 pages
as of July 1, 1996, the net change during that 1-year period was an
increase of 100 CFR pages. If the agency said that it had eliminated
200 pages from the CFR during that 1-year period, the number of pages
added during the period was 300 pages. Similarly, using both the
agencies' estimates of their page additions and their elimination
figures as reported to OIRA for the entire period of the initiative,
we calculated the net increase or decrease in each agency's CFR page
totals.
To address the second objective, we reviewed descriptions of the four
agencies' actions as part of the administration's CFR revision
initiative and determined whether the actions would reduce the burden
imposed on regulated entities. Specifically, we reviewed the actions
that were described in the October 1995, April 1996, October 1996,
and April 1997 editions of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory
and Deregulatory Actions\18 as part of the administration's
"reinventing government" initiative and that involved "revision of
text in the CFR to reduce burden or duplication or to streamline
requirements." We obtained a computerized data file of each of these
actions in the Unified Agenda from the Regulatory Information Service
Center and combined the information into one database, eliminating
duplicate actions and retaining the most recent abstract available
for each action. We identified 422 such entries in the 4 agencies
included in this review--107 for HUD, 183 for DOT, 19 for OSHA, and
113 for EPA.\19 Thirty-one of these entries had no abstract
describing the initiative in the Unified Agenda, so we obtained
abstracts or proposed or final rule preambles directly from the
agencies for each of these actions.
We defined "regulated entities" as the organizations that must comply
with the regulations' provisions, including individuals, businesses,
state or local governments, or federal agencies (other than the
agency that enforced or promulgated the regulation). We defined
"regulatory burden" as the impact of a rule on regulated entities,
including the direct and indirect cost of compliance; paperwork
requirements; negative effects on competitiveness or productivity;
penalties for noncompliance; and confusion as a result of
unreasonable, inconsistent, hard-to-find, or hard-to-understand
regulations.
We initially reviewed the abstracts or rule preambles for each action
to determine what effect the action would have on the burden felt by
regulated entities. However, many of the abstracts did not contain
enough information to allow us to assess the effect of the action on
regulated entities' burden. For each such action, we obtained
additional information from the agencies and/or related proposed or
final rules published in the Federal Register. We matched the
Unified Agenda entries with the proposed or final rules by regulation
identification number to ensure that only relevant information was
included.
After reading all of the available information, we coded each of the
actions into one of the following five categories:
(1) substantive burden reduction--actions that appeared to decrease
the burden on regulated entities, such as eliminating paperwork
requirements, allowing flexibility in how entities can comply with or
implement the rule, lowering compliance costs, or exempting certain
organizations from the regulations;
(2) minor burden reduction--actions that seemed to make regulatory
requirements easier to read or understand or to make them easier to
find (e.g., combining similar or related sections of the CFR into one
section);
(3) burden increase--actions that appeared to increase the burden on
regulated entities, such as adding reporting requirements, requiring
additional training, requiring certain testing procedures, or
expanding the scope of a regulation to new entities;
(4) no burden change--actions that did not seem to change the burden
on the regulated entity or that primarily affected the promulgating
agency, such as eliminating obsolete or duplicative regulations,
establishing a committee to study an issue (with no specific proposal
identified), updating agency organizational charts and/or telephone
numbers, and establishing ethics regulations for employees of the
promulgating agency; and
(5) cannot tell--actions that had multiple parts which potentially
could offset each other or were unclear as to their effect on the
regulated entities.
To help ensure validity and consistency in our assessments of the
potential impact of the 422 actions on regulatory entities, we
reviewed each of the actions at least 3 times. First, the abstracts
were simultaneously and independently reviewed and coded by two of
our staff members who were familiar with crosscutting regulatory
issues. The staff members then discussed their independent codes for
each of the actions, obtained additional information about the
actions if necessary, and ultimately agreed on a single code for each
action. These codes and their associated abstracts were then
reviewed by members of our staff with expertise in the relevant
subject areas: transportation, housing, environmental programs, and
occupational safety. Their input was considered in reaching a
preliminary conclusion about each action.
We gave agency officials an opportunity to review and comment on our
assessment of the CFR revision actions. In many cases, the agencies
provided additional information in support of a different assessment
than the one we had made. When we took this additional information
into account, we changed our assessments of several actions.
However, the majority of our assessments were not affected by the
agencies' review.
To determine whether the administration had any mechanisms in place
to measure burden reductions as a result of its regulatory reform
initiative, we interviewed OIRA officials.
We did not verify the agencies' CFR page elimination totals or their
page addition estimates. However, last year we evaluated EPA's and
DOT's page elimination claims and concluded that they were generally
valid.\20 The agencies' estimates of the pages added to the CFR do
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. 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 available a draft of this report for comment to the Director of
OMB; the Secretaries of HUD, Labor, and DOT; and the Administrator of
EPA. Designees of these agency heads provided comments on the report
as a whole and, in some cases, provided additional information.
Their comments were incorporated into the report accordingly.
(See figure in printed edition.)Appendix II
--------------------
\17 The dates the agencies started tracking their page eliminations
varied. DOT started tracking page eliminations from the beginning of
the Clinton administration in January 1993. HUD began tracking its
eliminations from March 1994. OSHA and EPA began tracking their
eliminations from the date of the administration's March 1995 call to
eliminate and revise pages in the CFR.
\18 This document, issued twice a year since 1983, is a compendium of
each agency's regulatory activities, describing regulations that
executive and independent agencies are currently developing, planning
for in the future, or have completed. It provides such information
as the status of the regulation, a timetable for further action, any
statutory or judicial deadlines, and the name and telephone number of
an agency contact. We used the October 1995 Unified Agenda as the
starting point of our review because it was the first edition
published after the President's June 1995 announcement of page
revisions.
\19 In addition to the 422 actions reviewed, there were 13 actions
for these agencies that were not included in the review. Three
actions (one for HUD and two for EPA) were excluded because agency
officials told us the actions were listed in the Unified Agenda in
error. The remaining actions were related to DOT's Surface
Transportation Board and the former Interstate Commerce Commission.
Although the Board is listed in the Unified Agenda as part of DOT, a
DOT official told us DOT does not include this organization in its
CFR revision initiative because the Board acts as an organization
independent of DOT and should not be included in our review as DOT
actions. Similarly, this official said the former Interstate
Commerce Commission actions are not included in DOT's counts and
should not be included in our review.
\20 Regulatory Reform: Implementation of the Regulatory Review
Executive Order (GAO/T-GGD-96-185, Sept. 25, 1996).
COMMENTS FROM OSHA
=========================================================== Appendix I
(See figure in printed edition.)
MAJOR CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS REPORT
========================================================= Appendix III
GENERAL GOVERNMENT DIVISION,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
------------------------------------------------------- Appendix III:1
Curtis Copeland, Assistant Director, Federal Management
and Workforce Issues
Ellen Wineholt, Evaluator-in-Charge
Thomas Beall, Technical Analyst
Kevin Dooley, Technical Analyst
Kiki Theodoropoulos, Communications Analyst
*** End of document. ***