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GCN Home > 07/05/04 issue

One move at a time

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

E-Rulemaking team makes small steps

When the Environmental Protection Agency took over the Online Rulemaking project in October 2002 from the Transportation Department, it wasn’t in uncharted territory.

Program managers could glean lessons from other projects, such as Grants.gov, about what types of communication, governance and funding models work.

But even with this experience to work from, bringing together 12 agencies to develop an electronic rulemaking system was no game of tiddlywinks. In fact, Rick Otis, EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for environmental information, thinks it was more like a chess match.

“Part of the process is to be smart enough to recognize in advance the potential problems and deal with them,” he said. “You also have to recognize that not everyone is going to play fair and that there will be a little Machiavellian behavior, and you must be prepared to deal with that too.”

Otis, project manager Oscar Morales and the entire interagency team dealt with the Machiavellian behavior and the other issues to launch Regulations.gov in January 2003. The project team used a Government Printing Office and National Archives and Records Administration front end, which lets users find proposed and final rules. EPA and the Food and Drug Administration put together the back end, which lets users send comments about proposed rules to the correct agency.

The project team now is preparing module two of the initiative, a governmentwide centralized docket management system that will let citizens access and search regulatory material and public comments.

“The process we’ve gone through is similar to how a rule is written,” Morales said. “We brought together a diverse group of people and, through a lot of compromises and discussions, we became one.”

Morales, Otis and other agency partners said there is no magic bullet to making cross-agency projects work, just communication, making agencies take ownership of the initiative—and a feeling that they weren’t allowed to fail.

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