In the final days of the Trump Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a contentious rule that makes the data underlying EPA regulations more transparent. In a new analysis, AAF’s Senior Regulatory Policy Analyst Dan Goldbeck reviews this rule’s path to finalization and considers its potential implementation.

His central points:

• The EPA has finalized a rule that has drawn both praise for attempting to make the data underlying EPA regulations more transparent and derision as some believe it will unduly constrain the EPA in making regulatory decisions;
• The rulemaking has had one of the more complicated paths to finalization, but the changes made to it along the way present an interesting case study in how public input can significantly refine a rule from its earlier stages to its final form; and
• Since it is a procedural rule that governs how EPA conducts its regulatory development, it occupies a unique space that has some unusual ramifications for its implementation going forward.

Read the analysis.