Chapter 5: Over 19,000 agency public notices annually
Presidents issue a few dozen memoranda and other proclamations each year. Departments and agencies, however, issue thousands of public notices in the Federal Register every year in addition to annual final and proposed rules. These typically consist of non-rulemaking documents, such as meeting and hearing announcements and agency organizational material. But they can also include memoranda, bulletins, guidance documents, alerts, letters, bulletins, action plans, policy statements, and other proclamations that may be more consequential to the public.
Agencies can use these to signal expectations for, specify parameters for, and influence policy for the likes of health care, retirement, education, energy production, finance, manufacturing, land and resource management, science, and research.
Figure 16 depicts notices published annually between 2016 and 2025. Standing at 19,280 in 2025, notices dropped 24 percent from 2024. Notices peaked at over 26,000 in 2010 and 2011). Historical tallies of notices and other non-rule documents dating back further appear in Appendices E and M. Although many notices are trivial, there have been 752,200 of them since 1994 and well over a million since the 1970s.
Isolating the substantive guidance amid this haystack remains a challenge. Much consequential agency guidance never appears in the Federal Register. A 2018 House Oversight Committee report, Shining Light on Regulatory Dark Matter found that agencies had issued at least 13,000 guidance documents since 2008, of which at least 536 were significant. Trump’s 2019’s EO 13891, “Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency Guidance Documents” attempts to address these concerns.
Under Biden, most of the 32 departments and agencies that adopted formal guidance document procedures for public-fairness and transparency as instructed by EO 13891 wrote new rules to affirmatively disavow and eliminate the nascent disclosures, as shown in Table 5.
Surveying the remnants of the EO 13891 portals, this author’s 2025 compilation of guidance documents stood at a conservative 70,410 across departments, agencies, subagencies, and commissions, down from 108,000 in 2024. These revelations are possible only because of EO 13891, which points to the power of shining more sunlight across the administrative state.
