An interesting question heard both inside and outside FCC is “when are comments due to NPRM x?” When NPRMs and similar documents that result in comments are released they usually are written as shown above with a date relative to Federal Register (FR) publication. (The Net Neutrality NPRM was a notable exception and had a clear due date on the version released by FCC.) The reason for this relative date is due to uncertainty in FR publication date which can be large compared to the comment period in many proceedings. Your blogger believes that much of variable delays in FR publication is due to back office problems at FCC in work groups of career civil servants that have low visibility and low pay grades but perform key ministerial functions in the final release of FCC documents, oddly called the “BARF process”, and in the final formatting of the text for transmission to the folks at the FR. (When documents contain tables and other unusual formatting there are usually problems getting them in the specific forma acceptable to the FR. Incorporating nonfederal standard by reference, e.g. as in §15.31(a)(3), also adds uncertainty to the final approval process due to its complexity although it is generally desirable.)

So how do you find out when things are actually due? Large law firms have paralegals that scan the FR every day for FCC items and update internal data basis for their lawyers who then inform their clients. Important items make the news in expensive trade publications such as TR Daily. But what about the rest of us?

The bureaucratic answer is to search for the published items in either the FR site or the newer Regulations.gov, “Your Voice in Federal Decision-Making”.

(Regulations,gov is part the eRulemaking Program, established in October 200as a cross-agency E-Gov initiative under Section 206 of the 2002 E-Government Act (H.R. 2458/S. 803) and is based within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The eRulemaking Management Office (PMO) leads the eRulemaking Program and is responsible for the development and implementation of the public facing website, Regulations.gov. FCC is not a “partner agency” in the eRulemaking Program because it required shared funding. FCC is classified as a “Nonparticipating Agencies” in the program and its is not fully integrated - again a nod to FCC’s perpetual budget problems. The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) jointly administer the FederalRegister.gov website.)

While working at FCC, your blogger tried and experiment to address this issue. The attempt is shown below and actually still lingers with old data on the FCC’s vast disorganized website:

Circa 2006 Experiment in Making Docket Information More User Friendly (Click to expand size)

This table with its links to both EDOCS and ECFS as well as comment date data is one simple, user friendly way to present data. Note the “title” of each proceeding is not the official title on the caption of the coverage of the FCC document. The official caption is often a cumbersome name or one assigned early in the drafting process before the scope of the proceeding was firmly established. The tile is a plain English description of what the docket is actually about, like “net neutrality”.

So why can’t FCC give us a simple way to find to when comments are actually due in its proceedings?

Tags: FCC Reform, FCC website