The White House is getting ready in the next few days to release guidance that will promote electronic dockets for rulemaking, said Cass Sunstein, administrator of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It will be a living document open to public comment, Sunstein said during a Nov. 30 event hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

The document will aim to achieve three strategic goals:

• First, improved e-rulemaking and better public access to federal, regulatory content. This means, using one docket, to manage a single regulatory action, using social media tools to engage the public early and using plain-language writing, in regulatory content.
• The second goal, as outlined by Sunstein, is to use a common taxonomy and protocols for managing documents and dockets. The document will establish naming conventions for documents, making them easier to access later.
• Lastly, OIRA plans to increase agency efficiency, by compiling electronic dockets that are more comprehensive.

"E-rulemaking and associated steps, should be evaluated largely--it would probably be too strong got say exclusively, but largely--by asking a single, empirical question: Are we taking steps that are actually improving regulations?" said Sunstein.

Improvement is already underway, he added. Belief that comment rulemaking has a Kabuki theater quality, is incorrect, said Sunstein. "In the last year and a half, at least, and I bet it's true before, this cliché just turns out to be wrong. Proposed rules are a way of obtaining comments on rules and the comments are taken exceedingly seriously. I read lots of them personally. People in the agencies and OIRA pay enormous attention to the comments that come in from stakeholders."

For more:
- listen to the presentations from the Brookings event

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