Analysis of the Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations

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The Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions (Agenda) is the document where agencies outline their priorities. It normally appears in the Federal Register each fall and, minus the regulatory plan component, each spring. However, the publication of the Unified Agenda had become erratic in recent years, as its publication has suffered delays in its traditional April and October schedule.455 This has been largely corrected under Trump, but the annual report to Congress on regulatory costs and benefits remains chronically late. Election campaign considerations can cause agencies to abstain from rulemaking or to report fewer rules.456 And reporting priorities by administrations can change the Agenda’s content.

The Trump administration released the fall 2019 edition of the twice-yearly Agenda in November 2019. Usually the Agenda appears with little fanfare and the 2019 edition was no exception. However, 2017 and 2018 saw the beginning of the one-in, two-out directive for federal agency rulemaking, by way of Trump’s Executive Order 13771 “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs.” The normally unremarkable Agenda release was accompanied by White House statements touting progress on meeting goals for regulatory streamlining and media events complete with red tape props457 and, in 2017, with a Wall Street Journal column by then-Office of Management and Budget Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Neomi Rao.458

Along with those affecting the private sector, many rules in the Unified Agenda concern the operations of state and local governments and the federal government itself. In normal circumstances, the Agenda gives regulated entities and researchers a sense of the flow in the regulatory pipeline. It details rules recently completed, plus those anticipated or prioritized in the upcoming 12 months by federal departments, agencies, and commissions (68 in the newest edition). As a compilation of agency-reported federal regulatory actions at several stages, one might regard the Agenda as a cross-sectional snapshot of the following actions moving through the regulatory pipeline:

• Prerule actions;

• Proposed and final rules;

• Actions completed during the previous six months; and

• Anticipated longer-term rulemakings beyond 12 months.

The rules contained in the Unified Agenda often carry over at the same stage from one year to the next, or they may reappear in subsequent editions at different stages.

Observers have long recognized the fluid, inconsistent nature of the Agenda’s contents. For example, upon release of the fall 2013 Agenda, regulatory expert Leland E. Beck remarked: “The [A]genda provides only a semi-filtered view of each agency’s intentions and must be considered within its limitations.” Furthermore, it “reflect[s] what the agency wants to make public, not necessarily all that they are actually considering, and some highly controversial issues may be withheld.”459 Rules and content fluctuate given administration priorities. During the Obama administration, for example, spring and fall guidelines in 2012 from the OMB’s then-director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, altered reporting directives to agencies:

In recent years, a large number of Unified Agenda entries have been for regulatory actions for which no real activity is expected within the coming year. Many of these entries are listed as “Long-Term.” Please consider terminating the listing of such entries until some action is likely to occur.460

When subsequent OIRA Administrator Howard Shelanski issued a similar memorandum on August 7, 2013, “please consider terminating” became the more direct “please remove.”461 The drop at that time is apparent in Figure 18. Susan E. Dudley of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center noted that such changes might be beneficial, but advised “to the extent that reclassifying actions reduces the public’s ability to understand upcoming regulatory activity, the revisions could reduce transparency and accountability.”462

Policy reversed again in the Trump administration. In 2017, both then-acting OIRA Director Dominic Mancini and former administrator Rao instructed agency heads:

In recent years, a large number of Unified Agenda entries have reflected regulatory actions for which no substantial activity was expected within the coming year. Many of these entries are listed as “LongTerm.” We have retained the ability to list these items in the Agenda, and see merit in their continued inclusion, particularly in some instances of notable rulemakings for which no action is planned in the coming year. Please, however, consider whether the listing of such entries still benefits readers.463

There are many respects in which rule reporting can be short-circuited and costs obscured. The Agenda is no different. Agencies are not required to limit their regulatory activity to what they publish in the Unified Agenda. The Federal Register has noted:

The Regulatory Plan and the Unified Agenda do not create a legal obligation on agencies to adhere to schedules in this publication or to confine their regulatory activities to those regulations that appear within it.464

However, this has changed under the Trump administration. As former OIRA Administrator Rao noted:

Agencies must make every effort to include actions they plan to pursue, because if an item is not on the Agenda, under Executive Order 13771, an agency cannot move forward unless it obtains a waiver or the action is required by law. A clear and accurate Agenda helps avoid unfair surprise and achieves greater predictability of upcoming actions.465

Healthy skepticism is justified regarding the counts in the Unified Agenda, given the lack of clarity regarding its content and strategic rule timing by administrations. But like the Federal Register, the Agenda is one of the few limited and imperfect tools we have, and so we need to use it; one of the goals of reform should be improving its relevance and the disclosure it provides.

3,752 Rules in the Fall 2019 Unified Agenda Pipeline; 689 Deemed Deregulatory, 324 Regulatory

The fall 2019 Regulatory Plan and the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions finds 68 federal agencies, departments, and commissions recognizing 3,752 regulations in the active (prerule, proposed, and final), just-completed, and long-term stages, many of which have been in the pipeline for some time.466 This is a 6 percent increase from 3,534 in 2018. There had been 3,209 in 2017, a time when 1,579 Obamaera planned regulatory actions and rules had been withdrawn or delayed during the first year of the Trump administration.

Trump’s overall count of rules in the Unified Agenda pipeline is the highest since 2012, under Obama. However, note that 689 of 2019’s rules in the pipeline are deemed “deregulatory” for purposes of Executive Order 13771.

Figure 18 illustrates how, apart from 2007, the overall Unified Agenda pipeline (active, completed, long-term) exceeded 4,000 rules each fall through 2012. Counts had been even higher in the 1990s, when an alltime-high count of 5,119 rules occurred in the fall 1994 Agenda. The sharp 19 percent drop under Obama from 4,062 rules in 2012 to 3,305 in 2013 in part reflects election year and management directive factors noted earlier. (For a partially complete history of the numbers of rules in the Unified Agenda since 1983, see Appendix: Historical Tables, Part E.)

Rule counts remain in the thousands, but many of those are routine safety directives from agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration and Coast Guard rather than new initiatives. Such procedures might deserve a rethinking, but they are not generally what people most distress over when it comes to the federal bureaucracy. The total pipeline count of 3,752 rules depicted in Figure 18 is broken out in Table 6 by issuing agency, commission, or department. It shows numbers of rules at the active, completed, and long-term stages.467

Perhaps most important for assessing Trump’s one-in, two-out regulatory campaign is the question of which agencies are responsible for the 689 of 3,752 rules that are deemed “deregulatory” (see Table 5). For the total numbers of rules by department and agency from previous year-end editions of the Unified Agenda since 2001, see Appendix: Historical Tables, Part F.

 

	Total Rules	Unified Agenda			Deregulatory Actions
		Active	Completed	Long Term	Active	Completed	Long Term
Federal Reserve System	48	21	12	15
Federal Trade Commission	19	16	3
General Services Administration	27	21	6		1
Institute of Museum and Library Services	4	2	2
National Aeronautics and Space Administration	8	6	2			1
National Archives and Records Administration	7	7
National Credit Union Administration	20	18	1	1
National Endowment for the Arts	6	5		1
National Endowment for the Humanities	7	6	1
National Indian Gaming Commission	6	3		3
National Labor Relations Board	6	6
National Mediation Board	2		1	1
National Transportation Safety Board	6	5		1
Nuclear Regulatory Commission	56	29	6	21
Office of Government Ethics	11	10	1
Office of Management and Budget	9	7	2		2
Office of Personnel Management	37	33	3	1	1	1
Peace Corps	5	5
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation	14	13	1
Postal Regulatory Commission	5		4	1
Presidio Trust	2	2
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board	4	1	3
Railroad Retirement Board	7		1	6
Securities and Exchange Commission	101	48	16	37
Small Business Administration	40	38		2	13
Social Security Administration	15	13	2
Surface Transportation Board	9	3	3	3
U.S Agency for Global Media	3	3
U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board	1	1
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights	1	1
U.S. International Development Finance Corporation	1		1
TOTAL	3,752	2,602	546	604	522	106	61

Active rules. Since 2005, active rule counts in the Agenda consistently remained well above 2,000, until they fell to 1,977 under Trump in 2017, even with 448 at that time deemed deregulatory. Actives rules rose to 2,399 in 2018 (with 514 deemed deregulatory) and to 2,602 in 2019 (522 deregulatory) (see Figure 18). The proportion of active rulemaking that is explicitly deregulatory appears to be on the decline in these raw numbers.

Completed rules. Completed rules are “actions or reviews the agency has completed or withdrawn since publishing its last Agenda.”

Note that although the number of rules in the completed category in fall Agendas (spring Agendas are not shown in Figure 18) rose steadily and rapidly under Obama— from 669 in 2009 to 1,172 in 2012, a 75.2 percent increase—they, like the overall count, dropped precipitously in 2013. This category stood at 470 and 480 in Trump’s fall 2017 and 2018 Agendas, respectively, before rising to 546 in 2019. These completed rules were well below Obama’s past three years’ counts, especially given that of Trump’s completed rules, a few dozen each year have been deregulatory (62 in 2017, 94 in 2018, and 106 in 2019).

Long-term rules. Announced long-term rules in the pipeline dropped markedly from 807 to 442 between 2010 and 2011 (see Figure 18). In the 2017 Agenda, these rules stood at 762, a jump from 558 in 2016, which may have reflected in part the directives by Mancini and Rao to include these rules. Thirty of them were deregulatory. In 2018, long-term rules dropped to 655, with 63 of them deemed deregulatory. In 2019 these dropped yet again, to 604, with 61 deemed deregulatory. After covering economically significant rules in the Agenda, we will revisit the deregulatory component of the fall Agenda and its implications for future regulatory reductions.

Top Five Rulemaking Departments and Agencies

A relative handful of executive branch agencies each year account for a large number of the rules in the pipeline. Without distinguishing between regulatory and deregulatory, the seven departments and agencies listed in Table 7—the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Health and Human Services, the Interior, Transportation, and the Treasury along with the Environmental Protection Agency—were the most active rulemakers. These top seven, with 2,002 rules among them, account for 53 percent of the 3,752 rules in the Unified Agenda pipeline.

Table 7 also depicts the top seven independent agencies in the Unified Agenda pipeline by rule count. These are the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Communications Commission, the multi-agency Federal Acquisition Regulation system, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Federal Reserve System, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Small Business Administration (the latter two tied for seventh).468 Their total 358 rules account for 10 percent of the 3,752 rules in the Agenda. Combined, the top executive and independent agency components make up 63 percent of the total. However, the difference between this year and prior years is that some entries are now explicitly deemed deregulatory. Therefore, it is worth noting the percentage of actions at these bodies that are deregulatory for Executive Order 13771 purposes, which Table 6 isolates.

192 “Economically Significant” Rules in the Unified Agenda; 33 of them Deemed Deregulatory; 67 Regulatory

A subset of the Unified Agenda’s 3,752 rules is classified as economically significant, which broadly means that agencies estimate yearly economic effects of at least $100 million. Those effects generally reflect increased costs, although it is certainly the case that sometimes an economically significant rule is intended to reduce costs, particularly so in the wake of Executive Order 13771. As Table 8 shows, 192 economically significant rules from 21 departments and agencies appear at the active (prerule, proposed rule, and final rule), completed, and long-term stages of the pipeline. This count is up from 140 in 2017 and 174 in 2018 (as seen in Figure 19).469

Table 7. Top Rule-Producing Executive and Independent Agencies

(From Fall 2019 Unified Agenda, total of active, completed, and long-term rules)

 

Executive Agency	Number of Rules
1. Department of the Treasury	402
2. Department of the Interior	296
3. Department of Transportation	295
4. Department of Commerce	294
5. Department of Defense	253
6. Department of Health and Human Services	241
7. Environmental Protection Agency	221
TOTAL	2002
% of Total Agenda Pipeline of 3,752	53

 

 

Independent Agency	Number of Rules
1. Securities and Exchange Commission	101
2. Federal Communications Commission	93
3. Federal Acquisition Regulation	60
4. Nuclear Regulatory Commission	56
5. Federal Reserve System	48
6. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation	42
7. Commodity Futures Trading Commission	40
7. Small Business Administration	40
TOTAL	358
% of Total Agenda Pipeline of 3,752	10

 

Top 7 Executives plus Independents	2,360
% of Total Agenda Pipeline	63

Figure 19 depicts 2019’s 192 economically significant rules alongside those of the previous decade and a half and shows how the of number of economically significant rules in the annual fall pipeline became considerably higher under President Barack Obama. President George W. Bush started an uptick. Obama continued it, increasing the flow of economically significant rules at the completed and active stages and finishing 2016 with 193. Trump brought the count down by 27 percent in his first fall Agenda, the effect of which was magnified given that 30 of the 140 then were deregulatory. Among the 192 in the fall 2019 Agenda, 33 were classified deregulatory, and 67 regulatory. How this ratio does or does not square with the two-for-one program is covered in the section “Warning Signs” and is illustrated in Table 9. (The full list of the 192 economically significant rules in the 2018 Agenda pipeline is available in Appendix: Historical Tables, Part G, which flags the 33 regulatory and 67 deregulatory entries.)

Table 8. 192 Economically Significant Rules in the Fall Unified Agenda Pipeline Expected to Have $100 Million Annual Economic Impact, 33 Deemed Deregulatory, Fall 2019

 

	Rules	Unified Agenda                              Deregulatory Actions*
		Active	Completed	Long Term	Active	Completed	Long Term
Dept. of Agriculture	21	12	8	1	1
Dept. of Commerce	1	1
Dept. of Education	7	3	4			2
Dept. of Energy	8	4		4
Dept. of Health and Human Services	55	36	14	5	2	3	1
Dept. of Homeland Security	15	9	2	4	1
Dept. of Housing and Urban Development	2	2
Dept. of the Interior	4	2	2			1
Dept. of Labor	14	6	4	4	4	3
Dept. of Transportation	11	6	1	4	3	1
Dept. of the Treasury	24	19	4	1	4
Dept. of Veterans Affairs	6	3	2	1
Commodity Futures Trading Commission	1	1
Consumer Product Safety Commission	2	2
Environmental Protection Agency	10	6	2	2	4	1	1
Federal Acquisition Regulation	1	1			1
Federal Communications Commission	2			2
General Services Administration	1	1
National Indian Gaming Commission	3	3
Nuclear Regulatory Commission	3	1	1	1
Social Security Administration	1	1
TOTAL	192	119	44	29	20	11	2

Figure 19 also breaks down economically significant rules into completed, active, and long-term categories. Among the 192 economically significant rules in the fall 2019 edition, 119 of them stand at the active phase, about even with 2018 but an increase from 71 in the fall 2017 edition. While these levels are back on par with the final Obama Agenda, 20 in the active category were deemed deregulatory in both 2019 and 2018. Barack Obama’s eight-year average of active rules across the fall Agendas was 133; George W. Bush’s eight-year average was 87. Trump’s average is 64, but that includes deregulatory measures.

As for economically significant rules at the completed stage in the fall Agendas, President Obama’s count was consistently higher than President George W. Bush’s, even accounting for an Obama midterm election drop between 2011 and 2012. Completed rules in the fall Agenda peaked at 57 in 2012, stood at 47 in 2016, and dropped by more than half, to 21, under Trump in 2017. In the fall of 2018, the Trump administration reported 25 completed economically significant rules, and that jumped to 44 in 2019. However, 11 of those are deemed deregulatory.

For a fuller picture of completed rules in any given year, one must incorporate the completed rules from the spring Agendas. Figure 20 isolates the totals of completed economically significant rules since 1996 from both the spring and the fall Agendas for closer analysis of yearly trends in this category.470

As Figure 20 shows, completed economically significant rules totaled 35 in the combined fall and spring 2018 Agendas under Trump, and rose to 70 in 2019. In 2017, Trump issued more completed economically significant rules than either Bush or Obama in any year. This may have been partly due to the fact that the Administrative Procedure Act requires writing a new rule to get rid of an old one. So when agencies are directed to eliminate two for one, that can make it appear as if more “rules” are being issued.

In 2018, 16 of the 35 completed rules were explicitly deemed deregulatory for Executive Order 13771 purposes. In 2019, 18 of 70 are designated deregulatory. If one were to remove the deregulatory rules from Trump’s tallies, a substantial rollback in economically significant rulemaking is evident compared to predecessors’ output. Of course, other presidents have issued deregulatory measures; but they did not make the reduction agenda so explicit or ease the tracking of the relevant metrics as the Trump administration did with the new Executive Order 13771 designations in the OIRA database.

Apart from 2001, the level of completed economically significant rules from 1996 forward was notably lower during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Bush’s total number of completed economically significant rules was 390, for an average of 49 per year. Obama’s total was 551, an average of 69 per year. Some agency “midnight regulations” from the prior administration may be reflected in the totals for a first-year president, but this report is primarily concerned with calendar year comparisons. Trump’s average at the moment is 64 (on a total of 193), but again, some rules are more explicitly deregulatory.

As noted, each of the 192 economically significant rules scattered among the 3,752 rules in the Agenda is estimated to have annual impacts of at least $100 million.

Had this been any other year, those rules might be expected to eventually impose annual costs of at least $19 billion (loosely, 192 rules multiplied by the $100 million economically significant threshold). Some rules may decrease costs, which would offset this total. Whatever the elusive actual total cost, these costs are cumulative, recurring annual costs to be added to previous years’ costs. And, as noted, agencies are not limited in their activities to what they list in the Agenda.

Heightened attention to economically significant rules should not tempt policy makers and analysts to ignore the remaining bulk of rules in the annual pipeline. In the fall 2019 pipeline, 3,560 federal rules were not designated as economically significant (3,752 total rules minus the 192 economically significant ones). However, a rule estimated to cost below the $100 million economically significant threshold can still impose substantial costs on the regulated entities. To this we must add the phenomenon of guidance documents with regulatory impact, which avoid congressional oversight and the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-andcomment requirement.

Notable Regulations by Agency

While many of the things that regulations purport to do are worthy and needed pursuits, that does not mean the federal administrative bureaucracy offers the best ways to achieve them, compared to state and local oversight along with insurance, liability, and other private sector options. In recent Unified Agenda editions and in other venues, federal agencies have noted the regulatory initiatives listed below, among others pending or recently completed. As noted, the full list of the 192 economically significant rules in the fall 2019 Agenda pipeline appears in Appendix: Historical Tables, Part G.

Department of Agriculture

• National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard
• Revision of nutrition facts panels for meat and poultry products and updating certain reference amounts customarily consumed
• Mandatory country-of-origin labeling of beef, fish, lamb, peanuts, and pork
• National school lunch and school breakfast programs: nutrition standards for all foods sold in schools and certification of compliance with meal requirements for the national school lunch program (as required by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010)471
• Standards for grades of canned baked beans472
• Rural Energy for America Program
• Rural broadband access loans and loan guarantees
• Mandatory inspection of catfish and catfish products
• Multifamily housing reinvention

• Inspection regulations for eggs and egg products
• Performance standards for ready-to-eat processed meat and poultry products
• Nutrition labeling of single-ingredient and ground or chopped meat and poultry products
• Modernization of poultry slaughter inspection
• Regulations concerning importation of unmanufactured wood articles (solidwood packing material)

Department of Commerce

• Taking of marine mammals incidental to conducting geological and geophysical exploration of mineral and energy resources on the outer continental shelf
• Right-whale ship strike reduction

Department of Education

• Gainful Employment rule to prepare students for employment in a recognized occupation
• Proposed Priorities, Requirements, Definitions, and Selection Criteria: Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program
• Income-driven “pay as you earn” program
• Race to the Top

Department of Energy

• Energy efficiency and conservation standards for the following: ceiling fans; manufactured housing; automatic commercial ice makers; wine chillers; battery chargers and power supplies; televisions; residential dehumidifiers; computer servers and computers; walk-in coolers and freezers; residential furnace fans, boilers, central air conditioners, heat pumps, dishwashers, conventional cooking products, non-weatherized gas furnaces; mobile home furnaces and gas furnaces; electric distribution transformers; commercial refrigeration units, heat 

  pumps, and water heating equipment; clothes washers and dryers; room air conditioners; portable air conditioners; pool heaters and direct heating equipment; fluorescent and incandescent lamps; metal halide lamp fixtures; small electric motors; and refrigerated bottled or canned beverage vending machines

• Incentive program for manufacturing advanced technology vehicles
• Fossil fuel–generated energy consumption reduction for new federal buildings and major renovations of federal buildings

•  

  Department of Health and Human Services

   

• Tobacco product standard for characterizing flavors in cigars
• Sunscreen drug products for over-thecounter human use guidance
• Nutrient content claims, definition of the term “healthy”
• General and plastic surgery devices: sunlamp products
• Rules deeming electronic cigarettes and components subject to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as amended by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, and being subjected to warning labels and sale restrictions473
• Requirements for Tobacco Product Manufacturing Practice
• Required warnings for cigarette packages and advertisements
• Food labeling: serving sizes of foods that can reasonably be consumed at one eating occasion; dual-column labeling; modification of certain reference amounts customarily consumed
• Nutrition labeling for food sold in vending machines and for restaurant menu items
• Food labeling: trans fatty acids in nutrition labeling, nutrient content claims, and health claims

• Rule on safety and effectiveness of consumer antibacterial soaps (“Topical Antimicrobial Drug Products for Over-the-Counter Human Use”);474 consumer antisepti

• Good manufacturing practice regulations for finished pharmaceuticals
• Prior authorization process for certain durable medical equipment, prosthetic, orthotics, and supplies
• Bar code label requirements for human drug products and blood

Department of Homeland Security

• Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, providing government access to passenger reservation information
• Passenger screening using advanced body imaging technology
• Importer security filing and additional carrier requirements

Department of Housing and Urban Development

• Revision of manufactured home construction and safety standards regarding location of smoke alarms
• Instituting smoke-free public housing476
• Regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on housing goals
• Regulations within the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act pertaining to mortgages and closing costs

• Establishing a more effective Fair Market Rent system; using Small Area Fair Market Rents in Housing Choice Voucher Program (modification of income and rent determinations in

• Air cargo screening and inspection of towing vessels
• Minimum standards for driver’s licenses and ID cards acceptable to federal agencies
• United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, which is authorized to collect biometric data from travelers and to expand to the 50 most highly trafficked land border ports public and assisted housing)

Department of the Interior

 

• Revised requirements for well plugging and platform decommissioning
• Increased safety measures for oil and gas operations and exploratory drilling on the Arctic outer continental shelf477
• Blowout prevention for offshore oil and gas operations

Department of Justice

• Nondiscrimination on the basis of disability: accessibility of Web information and services of state and local governments
• National standards to prevent, detect, and respond to prison rape
• Retail sales of scheduled listed chemical products

Department of Labor

• Conflict of interest rule in financial investment advice
• Overtime rule: “Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales, and Computer Employees”478
• Establishing a minimum wage for contractors (Executive Order 13658)
• Establishing paid sick leave for businesses that contract with the federal government (in response to Executive Order 13706)479
• Walking working surfaces and personal fall protection systems (slips, trips, and fall prevention)480
• Hearing conservation program for construction workers
• Rules regarding confined spaces in construction: preventing suffocation and explosions
• Reinforced concrete in construction
• Preventing back-over injuries and fatalities
• Cranes and derricks 
• Protective equipment in electric power transmission and distribution

 

• Refuge alternatives for underground coal mines
• Combustible dust
• Injury and illness prevention program
• Application of the Fair Labor Standards Act to domestic service
• Improved fee disclosure for pension plans
• Occupational exposure to styrene crystalline silica,481 tuberculosis, and beryllium
• Implementation of the health care access, portability, and renewability provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
• Group health plans and health insurance issuers relating to coverage of preventive services under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
• Health care standards for mothers and newborns
• Process Safety Management and Prevention of Major Chemical Accidents

 

Department of Transportation

 

• Quiet car rule; Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles482
• Federal Aviation Administration rule on operation and certification of drones (must stay in line of sight, for

example) and near critical infrastructure facilities483

• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposal on vehicle-tovehicle communications standardization484
• Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and NHTSA rule on speed limiters and electronic stability control systems for heavy vehicles485
• Federal Railroad Administration Train Crew Staffing rule seeking

a two-engineers-on-a-train mandate486

• NHTSA rule on lighting and marking on agricultural equipment487

Minimum training requirements for entrylevel commercial motor vehicle operators and for operators and training 

• instructors of multiple trailer combination trucks488
• Passenger car and light truck Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (newer model years)

• Assessment of fees for large bank holding companies and other financial entities supervised by the Federal Reserve to fund the Financial Research Fund (which includes the Financial Stability Oversight Council)
• Registration and regulation of securitybased swap dealers and major securitybased swap participants
• Troubled Asset Relief Program standards for compensation and corporate governance
• Cross-border electronic transmittals of funds
• Anti-money laundering program and suspicious activity report filing requirements for investment advisers

Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board

• Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility guidelines for passenger vessels
• Information and communication technology standards and guidelines

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

• Proposed rule regulating business practices on payday and vehicle title loans489

Consumer Product Safety Commission

• Regulatory options for table saws
• Flammability standards for upholstered furniture and bedclothes
• Testing, certification, and labeling of certain consumer products
• Banning of certain backyard playsets
• Product registration cards for products intended for children

Environmental Protection Agency

• Control of air pollution from motor vehicles: Tier 3 motor vehicle emission and fuel standards

• Greenhouse gas emissions and fuel efficiency standards for mediumand heavy-duty engines and vehicles
• Performance standards for new residential wood heaters
• Oil and natural gas: emission standards for new and modified sources
• Model trading rules for greenhouse gas emissions from electric utility generating plants constructed before January 7, 2014
• Financial Responsibility Requirements under Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act Section 108(b) for classes of facilities in the hard-rock mining industry
• Clean air visibility, mercury, and ozone implementation rules
• Effluent limitations guidelines and standards for the steam electric power generating point source category
• Revision of stormwater regulations to address discharges from developed sites
• Formaldehyde emissions standards for composite wood products
• National emission standards for hazardous air pollutants from certain reciprocating internal combustion engines and auto paints
• Review of National Ambient Air Quality Standards for lead, ozone, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and nitrogen dioxide
• Revision of underground storage tank regulations: revisions to existing requirements and new requirements for secondary containment and operator training
• Petroleum refineries—new source performance standards
• National primary drinking water regulations for lead, copper, and radon
• Modernization of the accidental release prevention regulations under the Clean Air Act
• Trichloroethylene; rulemaking under Toxic Substances Control Act Section 6(a); vapor degreasing
• Reassessment of use authorizations for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in small capacitors in fluorescent light ballasts in schools and day care centers
• Rulemakings regarding lead-based paint and the Lead Renovation, Repair, and Painting Program for public and commercial buildings