Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The recent scandal about the submission of potentially fraudulent comments to the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to repeal net neutrality rules, sheds light on lobbying efforts of organized interests targeting the executive branch of the United States. The incident raises public concern about the influence of organized interests on the rulemaking process of the federal bureaucracy. This concern, however, has been growing among scholars of political science for some time. Yet, even scholarly attention to the issue is limited at best.

The federal bureaucracy is one of the most important law-making institutions in the country. While federal agencies do not pass laws, they issue administrative rules that have the force of law and are based on statutes written by Congress. Therefore, the bureaucracy is as important as Congress and arguably, due to the quantity of rules issued by federal agencies, perhaps even more important. The rulemaking process of agencies can broadly be divided into two stages: the rule development (or pre-proposal) stage, and the notice-and-comment period. During the first stage, a mainly internal process, agencies draft regulatory proposals (formally called “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking”). In the second stage, agencies solicit public comments on the proposed rules and consider those when drafting the final regulations (formally called “Final Rules”). These actions are mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 which requires federal agencies to solicit public comments to proposed rules. They are required to consider relevant information submitted, however, what constitutes as relevant is left to the discretion of the agencies. The notice-and-comment stage also includes reviews of regulation proposals by the President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on all rules considered ‘significant’. Since the Executive Order 12866 issued by President Clinton in 1993, all lobbying activities directed at the OMB during review must publicly logged, similarly to the public comments submitted.

This research project attempts to expand our knowledge about the influence of lobbying efforts by organized interests on the rulemaking process by making use of these public records and analyzing how influential agency and OMB lobbying is in changing regulations.