Bureaucratic Unrest Surrounds New Regulations.gov Site

In his “In the Loop” column [1]in today’s Washington Post, Al Kamen reports that Department of Transportation officials are unhappy with the new version of Regulations.gov, the federally run website that allows users to comment on proposed regulations. (I blogged about the redesign here [2].)

Kamen obtained an email from Esta Rosenberg, chief of the U.S. Air Carrier Licensing Division in the Office of International Aviation, sent to frequent commenters on aviation issues. Rosenberg says Regulations.gov "has been redesigned and is even more difficult to use." She advised commenters to duplicate their online comments by sending DOT a paper version. That’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the new site.

I’m not sure what would lead DOT to believe that comments won’t be getting through. There are certainly some functional problems with the site. Some of those problems have existed for years, and some are new. (For example, search result pages no longer display the date a document was posted – an unfortunate omission of a crucial bit of information.) But why would a largely aesthetic design change alter the ability of the website, and the underlying Federal Docket Management System, to receive and store comments?

Either way, the site has lots of room for improvement. This most recent redesign includes both steps forward and steps backwards.

In 2008, the American Bar Association released a report [3] recommending an overhaul of Regulations.gov and e-rulemaking – the term used for online participation in agency regulatory decisions. The report calls for the government to establish both an interagency working group and an advisory committee made up of citizens and experts that could recommend reforms from a user’s perspective and test changes to Regulations.gov. Considering the largely negative reaction to the revised site, this design change could have benefited from the input of those panels.