Chapter 6: A note on rule reviews at OMB
OMB’s Biden-era shift to regulatory advocacy, particularly since the Circular A-4 rewrite, diminishes what can be gleaned from EO 12866 rule reviews.
Nonetheless, like pages and rule counts, rule review is one of the few variables available to examine. Figure 17 depicts 554 rule reviews conducted by OMB during calendar year 2024 (compared with 575 and 483 in 2023 and 2022). These are broken down by stage and by economic significance. There were 503 total reviews in Biden’s first year and 669 in Trump’s final year.
Under Biden, economically significant rules have yielded to the higher-threshold Section 3(f)(1) Significant rules (or S3F1 rules for short). There were 172 S3F1 rule reviews, compared with 2023’s 114 S3F1 reviews and with 2022’s 161 economically significant rules reviewed. Figure 17 also presents the number of days OMB took to review significant and nonsignificant rules and regulations, a process that tends to take roughly two and a half months. During the pre–EO 12866 years of 1991–1993, rule review times were shorter than today, despite considerably higher rule counts then. Of thousands of notices, OMB reviewed 119 during calendar year 2024. A history of the number of rules and notices reviewed annually by type and by average days for review from 1991 through 2024 appears in Appendix H.
review, 2024