Hearings of the
Subcommittee on Legislative and Budget Process
The Impact of Executive Orders on the Legislative Process: Executive Lawmaking?
Raymond A. Mosley
Director of the Federal Register
1. Could you briefly elaborate on the manner in which modern communications technology - specifically the Internet – has extended the public’s access to Executive orders.
The Office of the Federal Register (OFR), in partnership with the Government Printing Office (GPO), has extended public access to Executive orders in several different ways. Since 1994, we have published the full text of all Executive orders in the daily on-line Federal Register on the GPO Access service (http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara). Depending on the time of day that we receive them from the White House, Executive orders appear in the on-line Federal Register at 6 a.m. (ET) on the next business day, or at 6 a.m. on the following business day. In the past, people who had subscriptions to the printed edition of the Federal Register could expect to wait a week or more for the daily issue to arrive by second class mail.
Before the on-line era began, most people depended on clipping services, traveled to a library, or waited for a copy to filter down to them through a distribution chain to gain access to Executive orders. Most general circulation newspapers have not carried the full text of Executive orders, not even those with significant impact. A handful of Washington news services and trade associations generally come to the Federal Register to obtain copies of documents from our public inspection desk to include in their reports. But by and large, the general public did not have ready access to Executive orders prior to the advent of our on-line services on GPO Access. Now, large and small businesses, State and local governments, and any interested person can have free, on-demand access to Executive orders through a desktop computer.
Expanding access to information also involves making Internet services easy to use, especially for non-experts. In response to comments from customers and our own design criteria, we developed a separate “field” for Presidential documents which makes it much easier for users to find Executive orders. In addition, beginning in January 1998 we added hypertext tables of contents to the daily on-line Federal Register, which allows users to simply browse the contents for “Presidential Documents,” click on the link and retrieve a listed Executive order. The OFR also worked with GPO to improve the means of navigating the 200 volume on-line Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which includes a compilation of Executive orders for each year. We now offer CFR tables of contents with hypertext links, which identify Executive orders by their number designation and decriptive title. Users can browse the table of contents of title 3 for the 1997 through 1999 compilations, click on a link and retrieve any Executive order published during the prior year.
OFR and GPO have recently developed an on-line edition of the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, an official serial record of Presidential statements, memoranda, messages to Congress and federal agencies, and other documents released by the White House. This publication also contains the text of Executive orders originally published in the Federal Register. Some of the documents published in the Weekly Compilation are related to the implementation of Executive orders. Historically, there have been relatively few subscribers to the paper edition of the Weekly Compilation, but a growing number of customers are discovering the on-line edition.
Comparisons between usage of paper and on-line publications are imprecise, but I believe that we are reaching far more citizens via the Internet than we ever have in the past through our paper and microfiche editions. We do not have a specific breakdown on the number of Executive orders retrieved from the on-line Federal Register and CFR, but overall, the public has been using on-line Federal Register publications in large and increasing numbers. When free online service began, we had about 17,000 annual paid subscriptions to the Federal Register, and annual sales of about 1.3 million CFR volumes. During fiscal year 1999, the public retrieved 48 million individual documents from the on-line Federal Register and 88 million from the on-line CFR. Our customers retrieved 138,000 documents from the on-line Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents during fiscal year 1999 as compared with 402 paid subscriptions to the paper edition.
In the Internet environment, the reliability of information providers can be problematic. Executive orders may be posted on-line by any number of organizations, but the material may not be current and accurate. It is particularly important that Executive orders be available from a reliable source to remove any doubt as to their content and effectiveness. The OFR adheres to the highest standards of accuracy and integrity for our on-line publications to fulfill our mandate as the official source for Presidential documents and administrative rules and notices. When we developed our Internet services with GPO, we specified that the on-line editions must be just as true to the original documents as the printed editions. OFR and GPO generate the on-line Federal Register, CFR and the Weekly Compilation from the same databases used to create the printed editions to ensure that we meet those standards. In our regulations, we assure the public that the on-line edition of the Federal Register has the same official legal status as the printed edition. This month, the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register passed a resolution to grant official status to the on-line editions of the CFR and Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents. To guarantee future access to Executive orders and other Federal Register documents, GPO is committed to maintaining the on-line Federal Register, CFR, and Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents on GPO Access as part of the permanent collection known as the “Core Documents of U.S. Democracy” series.
The task of sorting through the large volume of material available on web sites can also limit access to information. We use our National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) web site (http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/index.html) as a gateway to guide customers to the text of Executive orders available in various publications and to related ancillary information services. The ancillary services on the NARA web site include a historical Codification of Proclamations and Executive Orders (1945-1989) and our on-line index of Executive orders. The Codification directs users to the text of Executive orders by subject matter, series number and Presidential administration. The on-line index of Executive orders is possibly the only authoritative source of information on the current amendment status Executive orders. It has information on dates of issuance, amendments, revocations and dates of publication in the Federal Register. The staff in our Presidential documents unit converted the index from a card catalog that we used to respond to reference requests received by letter and telephone. Now the index is available on-demand to any member of the public, in a hypertext format for easy navigation among the various entries. During the first nine months of calendar year 1999, our customers retrieved a total of 557,657 individual items from these ancillary services.
2. The NARA web site offers the public a wealth of primary source information about Presidential documents, specifically Executive orders. Is there also an objective source of analytical information available to the public concerning the impact that such orders have on the public?
I do not know of an objective source of analytical information relating to the impact that Executive orders have on the public. Analytical reporting would go beyond the scope of the OFR’s statutory mission. In the past, we have been provided with reports prepared by the Congressional Research Service, which contained some analytical content. But I don’t know whether CRS has done recent work on this subject, or whether the information would be made available to the public.
