Welcome to the eRulemaking Initiative

In October 2002, the eRulemaking Program was established as a cross-agency E-Gov initiative under Section 206 of the 2002 E-Government Act (H.R. 2458/S. 803) and is based within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The eRulemaking Management Office (PMO) leads the eRulemaking Program and is responsible for the development and implementation of the Federal Docket Management System. Agency users access the system at www.FDMS.gov, while Regulations.gov is the publicly facing website of FDMS and is accessed by the public at www.regulations.gov.

The vision of the eRulemaking Program is to enable the public ease of access to participate in a high quality, efficient and open rulemaking process. The primary goals of the Program are:

• Increase public access to federal regulatory materials
• Increase public participation and their understanding of the federal rulemaking process
• Improve federal agencies efficiency and effectiveness in rulemaking development

The Federal Docket Management System (FDMS) is a federal-wide document management system structured by dockets (i.e., file folders) offering the federal agencies an adaptable solution to service a wide array of routinely performed regulatory activities: searching, viewing, downloading, and reviewing comments on proposed federal rules. In addition, FDMS offers agencies extensive functionality to facilitate their regulatory business activities, including the ability to:

• Run Quick and Advanced searches on Dockets, Documents, Attachments
• Mark Dockets and Documents to My Favorites and Flagged Documents
• Create and manage Dockets electronically
• Ability to manage and post attachments individually
• Run the Deduplication Engine to detect near duplicate public comment submissions (e.g., mass mail campaigns
• Run Auto Categorization to categorize public comment submissions for easier distribution and review
• Batch processing capabilities for documents
• Full text searches include document metadata and the text of the first attachment file for Federal Register and Supporting and Related Materials Document Type
• FDMS enables agencies to customize the system features to meet their needs

Regulations.gov

The first milestone of the eRulemaking Initiative was the official launch of Regulations.gov in January 2003. Regulations.gov is an innovative website providing the public users ease of access to federal regulatory content and a way to submit comments on agencies regulatory documents published in the Federal Register (FR). On Regulations.gov, the public can:

• Search all publicly available regulatory materials, e.g., posted public comments, supporting analyses, FR notices and rules
• Submit a comment on a regulation or on another comment
• Download agencies regulatory materials as a .csv file
• Access Regulations.gov API Terms of Service and link to api.data.gov/docs/regulations
• Submit an application or adjudication document
• Sign up for email alerts about a specific regulation
• Quickly access regulations that are popular, newly posted or closing soon - directly from the home page
• Subscribe to agencies' RSS feeds of newly posted FR notices

Governance

Since 2002, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has served as the managing partner of the eRulemaking Program. EPA established a Program Management Office (PMO) to oversee the system development, maintenance and collaboration of agency partners. The PMO is governed by dozens of Federal organizations participating in a tiered governance structure. In addition to the leadership provided by the PMO, many of the participating Federal departments and agencies are involved in the program's governance. There is an Executive Committee comprised of Chief Information Officers (CIO), Regulatory Policy Officers, and/or Deputy Secretaries from 39 Federal Departments and Agency partners. The program's Advisory Board is made up of senior representatives from partner agencies. Additionally, the various workgroups extend the program's technical and business process expertise in a range of areas, e.g., usability, budget and legal issues.