When Will They Listen? Public Comment and Highly Salient Regulations

Abstract

In this paper, I examine whether federal regulatory agencies are more likely to respond to comments on highly salient regulations. Literature looking at less-salient regulations has found mixed and limited responsiveness to public comments. I find that agencies make changes in response to comments on highly salient rules (as defined by the regulation's economic impact) on 42 percent of the issues raised by commenters. However, there are some revealing patterns in the type of comments that agencies respond to. Comments merely requesting clarifications in language, without requesting policy changes, lead to agency changes more than half the time, whereas substantive comments lead to changes at a significantly lower rate. Moreover, while agencies produce much more detailed responses to comments on the legal foundation for the rule than to other comments, agencies rarely make policy changes in response to these comments.