public-inspection-midnight-rules

On June 22, 2022, the DC Circuit Court decided Humane Society of the United States v. Department of Agriculture (USDA), finding that the agency could not withdraw a final rule that was made available for public inspection, but not published, without first going through the notice-and-comment process. More information on the background of the court decision and the midnight period can be found in this article.

This project seeks to make sense of the consequences of the court's decision in Humane Society v. USDA, using Federal Register data to quantify the scope of the public inspection documents affected.

The Federal Register is the daily journal of the federal government that publishes official documents such as proposed rules, final rules, agency notices, and executive orders. Before a document is published in a Federal Register issue, it is filed by the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) for “public inspection.” A public inspection document is essentially a preview of the document’s contents and its estimated effective or comment dates, which are typically available the day before it will be published officially.

Contents

• code/

  A directory containing a set of scripts and modules that implement the data retrieval, processing, and analysis for the project.

• data/for_sharing/

  A directory and sub-directory containing the output data collected and processed for the project.

• .gitattributes

• .gitignore

• environment.yml

• LICENSE

• README.md

Coding Sequence

This section of the README describes the sequence in which the Python scripts should be run.

1. retrieve_documents.py : Retrieve public inspection documents from Federal Register API and save as JSON. Calls modules: federal_register_api.

2. process_documents.py : Process the retrieved JSON, convert to DataFrame, identify withdrawn documents, and save as CSV. Calls modules: columns_to_date, federal_agencies, search_columns.

3. analyze_documents.py : Analyze processed data, calculate aggregations, and create figures. Calls modules: plots.

4. retrieve_web_archives.py : Retrieves closest available archived webpage to each public inspection edition; adds archived links to withdrawn documents CSV. Calls modules: memento_api. Note: Memento Client's Time Travel tool seems to be having issues as of at least October 4, 2022 (502 Bad Gateway), so this script may not function properly.

5. merge_analyzed_data.py : Integrate analyzed data with manually collected NPRM data. Calls modules: n/a.

6. analyze_midnight_rules.py : Retreives, processes, and analyzes data on midnight rules for comparison with public inspection withdrawals. Calls modules: columns_to_date, federal_agencies, federal_register_api, presidents, search_columns.

7. share_data.py : Copy data files into "data/for_sharing" directory. Calls modules: n/a.

Publications

Mark Febrizio, "Quantifying the Effects of Humane Society v. Department of Agriculture," GW Regulatory Studies Center Insight, October 05, 2022. Cross-posted to Yale JREG's Notice & Comment blog on October 08, 2022.