Sponsors (77)
Official title: To amend title 5, United States Code, to require disclosure of conflicts of interest with respect to rulemaking, and for other purposes.
Introduced November 19, 2025 by Pramila Jayapal · Last progress November 19, 2025
The bill increases transparency, equity consideration, and procedural predictability in federal rulemaking—potentially improving public protections and oversight—but shifts power toward agencies, raises administrative and compliance costs, risks reduced or chilled public participation and privacy harms, and may produce rushed or less-reviewable rules.
Millions of Americans—taxpayers, nonprofits, local/state governments, and everyday commenters—gain substantially more transparent and trackable rulemaking (notification logs, petition dockets, public posting of studies, disclosure of changes/withdrawals), making it easier to see who influenced rules and to follow agency action.
Businesses, regulated parties, and the public get clearer procedural timelines and faster ability to restore or publish rules (statutory deadlines, 6-year limitation on stale suits, one-year republishing window, OIRA review limits), increasing predictability about when rules will take effect.
Disadvantaged communities and the general public may see rules that better account for public health, safety, and distributional impacts because agencies are required/encouraged to consider nonquantifiable benefits, social equity impacts, and to provide social-equity assessments for significant rules.
Federal agencies, public companies, researchers, and taxpayers will face material new administrative and compliance costs (new Office, staffing, notification systems, participation logs, disclosures, equity assessments and posting requirements), diverting resources from other programs or services.
Courts may defer more to agencies and statutory/administrative changes limit review (heightened deference, discouraging invalidation, fixed suit windows), making it harder for individuals and states to challenge potentially unlawful or overbroad agency actions.
Some forms of public input will be curtailed: agencies can exclude or limit submissions, bypass notice-and-comment for up to a year when republishing rules, and statutory narrowing of negotiated rulemaking reduces frontline stakeholder access, diminishing direct participation by parents, teachers, patients, small organizations, and residents.
Based on analysis of 19 sections of legislative text.
Rewrites administrative rulemaking procedures: new OMB Public Advocate, tighter OIRA deadlines, disclosure rules for commenters and companies, expanded agency transparency, narrowed negotiated rulemaking, and a six‑year statute of limitations for challenges.
Changes how federal rulemaking works by adding new disclosure and transparency requirements, creating an Office of the Public Advocate in OMB, changing judicial review timelines and deference rules, and imposing disclosure/penalties for certain regulated companies that submit misleading materials. It also tightens OMB (OIRA) review deadlines, requires agencies to publish differences between drafts and final rules, expands public-notice and petition-response obligations, narrows who may participate in negotiated rulemaking, and allows agencies a limited window to reinstate rules previously nullified by Congress. The bill affects agencies, regulated companies, outside commenters and researchers, and the administrative litigation landscape by creating deadlines, reporting obligations, public-access mandates, new assessment and social-equity processes, and a six-year statute of limitations for judicial challenges to agency actions.