How we did this guns series, and how you can follow the money too using Sunlight's tools.
Continue readingRule behind the ‘Hobby Lobby’ case was the most commented
Today, the Supreme Court announced that it agreed to hear two cases around the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The SCOTUSblog writes:
The Court granted review of a government case (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, 13-354) and a private business case (Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, 13-356). Taking the Conestoga plea brought before the Court the claim that both religious owners of a business and the business itself have religious freedom rights. The Hobby Lobby case was keyed to rights under RFRA.Continue reading
Announcing the Docket Wrench API
Presenting the new Docket Wrench API! This API allows developers to utilize the same analytics that power Docket Wrench to build innovative new services and tools. Sign up for a free key and check it out!
Continue readingBakers group happy to win exemption from food safety law
The American Bakers Association is congratulating the Food and Drug Administration for granting its members an exemption to new food safety rules -- an exemption the trade association has lobbied long and hard to get. It's a case study of how powerful interests lay the groundwork for regulatory wins.
Continue readingSmall farmers lodge complaints about food safety law
With the November 15 deadline looming for comments on two key food safety regulations, organizations representing organic and small farmers are urging members to write in and criticize them. Some interests didn't wait until the last minute: the proposed rules have already received a slew of comments, according to analysis of proposed rules using Sunlight's Docket Wrench tool.
At issue for the sustainable agriculture crowd is how and whether the new rules apply to small farming and processing operations. The Food Safety Modernization Act, which authorized the regulations, included an exemption for the small operators thanks to an ...
Continue readingMortgages, health care and animals: What won’t get governed during shutdown
With the federal government in shutdown mode, so is one of its main products: rule writing. Federal bureacrats who develop the regulations to implement major laws--from the Dodd Frank financial reform law to food safety standards to the Affordable Care Act itself--are out on furlough. This prospect may not bother many on the Republican side of the aisle, where regulations are not particularly popular anyway and efforts to roll them back are common. But many of these rules affect the very fabric of daily life.
This list illustrates some of the issues that are important to many Americans and that will be on hold until the budget impasse is resolved. It's by no means exhaustive, and the devil is often in the details when it comes to regulation writing. Dig in to the list and click around to read agency proposals and comments submitted about these proposals, or do your own searches on Docket Wrench.
Continue readingThere’s no summer vacation for education lobbying
Though the fall doesn't officially start for another couple of weeks, for most Americans summer ends when school buses begin running their routes and college football broadcasts return to Saturdays. While educational institutions from kindergartens to law schools are welcoming students back, there was no summer vacation in Washington, where their lobbyists have reported spending more than $43 million lobbying Congress and the executive branch so far this year.
It's easy to understand why. Altogether, the federal government spent $47.5 billion on elementary and secondary education in 2012, the last full year for which statistics are available ...
Continue readingNew EPA gasoline standards draw heated comments
As Americans gas up for the long holiday weekend, the Environmental Protection Agency is sifting through tens of thousands of comments on a proposed new rule that would set tough new standards for vehicle emissions and fuel quality.
Continue readingFractious fracking debate continues
Environmental groups have inundated federal officials with comments about proposed fracking regulations but they say industry is still getting its way.
Continue readingRegulations.gov Continues to Improve, but Still Has Potential for Growth
Recently, the EPA eRulemaking team released a new version of Regulations.gov, a website that tracks the various stages of the rulemaking processes of hundreds of federal agencies, and collects and publishes comments from the public about this rulemaking. We’ve written about Regulations.gov before, and continue to be impressed with the site’s progress in making the sometimes-daunting intricacies of federal regulations more approachable to members of the general public.
This release brings several new features that further this goal. Styling on many document pages has been significantly improved, making it much easier to read both rule and comment text. The presentation of metadata has also been made cleaner, so researchers can more easily find identifiers that help them connect a particular rule to related documents on other websites, such as FederalRegister.gov or RegInfo.gov. New panes have also been added to help users understand the public participation that has occurred so far in a given rulemaking, and to more easily recognize opportunities for further participation.
Of course, since last year’s release of the Regulations.gov API, Regulations.gov is more than just an informational website; it has also become a data provider that now facilitates a variety of third-party participation and analysis tools, as their Developers page now highlights. One such tool is Sunlight’s recently-released Docket Wrench, which uses Regulations.gov data to explore questions of corporate and public influence in the federal regulatory process. Docket Wrench evolved from two years’ worth of effort exploring the possibilities of analysis on federal regulatory comment data, and we believe the time we’ve spent building it has given us a unique perspective on the avenues of research this data makes available, as well as the opportunities for further growth and improvement in regulatory comment data going forward.
The team behind Regulations.gov deserves enormous credit for the progress they’ve made, but there remains much work to be done to give the public a complete, accessible and useful path into the federal regulatory process.
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