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Agency rules

An executive order announces what the government will do. A rule is how an agency does it: printed in the Federal Register, effective on a stated day, and binding. Every rule here names an executive order indexed on this site, in its own summary or its own preamble, and carries its own text, under the headings the Federal Register prints on it.

In plain English

An order tells the government what to do. A rule is how an agency does it. A rule is printed, takes effect on a set day, and binds.

Each rule here names an order this site holds. Naming one is not the same as doing what it asked. So the site records the claim, not a verdict.

207
final rules
74
orders named
61
significant
78
agencies
6,238,023
words of rule text

What Naming an Order Does and Does Not Mean

A rule is here because it names an order, which the rule says itself. It is not here because this site judged that it carries the order out. A rule can go further than the order it names, fall short of it, or name it for one paragraph of an otherwise unrelated action, and which of those it is would be a reading. No reading is recorded.

Proposed rules are left out: a proposal has not taken effect and binds nobody.

Every Rule Carries Its Own Text

A summary is written to be short, and a rule's operative sentence is often hundreds of pages inside it. So each rule's page holds the whole of what the Federal Register printed, split at the headings the rule prints itself, with a list of those headings to go by. The longest of these runs to 686,799 words, and where a rule is too long for one page its text is set out over several, split at its own headings.

Five Orders Left Out of This Count

A few of the orders are instructions about how to make rules at all rather than about any subject, so an agency names them in a preamble the way it names the Paperwork Reduction Act. Counting those would have put 935 rules under one order and said nothing true about any of them.

Executive Order 14192, Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation. Set aside because it requires an agency to repeal rules when it issues one, so every deregulatory rule names it.

Executive Order 14215, Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies. Set aside because it puts agency rulemaking under White House review as a general matter.

Executive Order 14219, Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President's Department of Government Efficiency Regulatory Initiative. Set aside because it directs agencies to review their existing rules, so a rule produced by that review names it.

Executive Order 14270, Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting To Unleash American Energy. Set aside because it sets expiry dates across a whole body of rules at once.

Executive Order 14294, Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations. Set aside because it governs how criminal penalties are written into any rule.