Clean Air Rulemaking

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 established ambitious milestones for protecting the nation's air quality. To translate the act's statutory mandates into workable rules and regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has had to develop and issue rules at an unprecedented pace. At the time of the act's passage, EPA's rulemaking process averaged more than three years and some rules took as many as nine years to complete. In response to congressional concerns that EPA has continued to miss statutory deadlines, this report (1) describes EPA's progress in streamlining the process for developing and issuing clean air rules and identifies ways to improve EPA's streamlining effort and (2) describes the Office of Management and Budget's corresponding efforts to reduce the time it takes to review EPA's rules.

GAO found that: (1) in an effort to expedite clean air rulemakings, EPA eliminated a duplicative step in the internal review process; (2) in June 1994, EPA grouped rules into three categories and varied the amount of review needed in each category, allowing over half of EPA clean air rules to be assigned to a "fast track" category; (3) despite its efforts to reform the rulemaking process, EPA acknowledges having missed over 60 percent of the statutory deadlines imposed under the Clean Air Act; (4) EPA has been unable to demonstrate the effectiveness of its streamlining efforts because it does not have a system for identifying problem areas in the rulemaking process; and (5) OMB has concentrated its review efforts on significant clean air rules only, but it is still unknown if this change has enhanced EPA ability to expedite clean air rules.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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