On President Bush’s first day in office, January 20, 2001, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card issued a memo directing all federal agencies to halt publication of new rules, completed at the very end of the Clinton administration, in the Federal Register. GAO determined that potentially 371 rules were subject to the memo, but only 90 were blocked on this basis.
Of these 90 rules, more than half were from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency, and 65 of the 90 were determined by those agencies to be "significant or substantive" in nature. Yet according to GAO, "The agencies generally did not provide the public with a prior opportunity to comment on the delays in effective dates or rule changes, frequently indicating that notice and comment procedures were either not applicable, impracticable, or were contrary to the public interest."
By January 20, 2002 (one year after the memo), GAO determined that 75 of the 90 delayed rules had gone into effect. Of these, GAO identified three rules that had been withdrawn and replaced with new rules -- including an HHS rule on "protection of human research subjects" -- and nine rules that had been altered in some way but not withdrawn. The remaining 15 rules that have not taken effect include some potentially significant actions, such as:
A number of these rules were also identified as a "high priority" for review in a report from the Office of Management and Budget. Read more about that report.
In a number of cases, GAO points out that agencies have indicated they intend to change or withdraw a rule that has been allowed to take effect. This includes, for instance, a rule from the Department of the Interior placing restrictions on snowmobiling in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, as well as a rule from the Bureau of Land Management on "onshore oil and gas operations."