Sponsors (13)
Official title: 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 Elizabeth Warren · Last progress November 19, 2025
The bill increases transparency, public participation, equity considerations, and procedural predictability for rulemaking, but it also imposes significant new compliance costs, tight deadlines, reduced judicial safeguards, potential politicization of equity rules, and privacy or litigation risks that could burden agencies, businesses, researchers, and vulnerable stakeholders.
Members of the public—including underrepresented communities, nonprofits, and small businesses—will get earlier, clearer, and broader access to rulemaking (timely notices, participation logs, online dockets, published studies, conflict disclosures, and withdrawal explanations), making it easier to monitor and take part in federal regulations.
Disadvantaged communities and the public at large will see social equity and nonquantifiable public benefits more explicitly considered in rulemaking, which can lead to stronger health, safety, environmental protections and fairer distribution of regulatory impacts.
Businesses, agencies, and the public will face clearer timelines and procedural deadlines (for rulemaking, OIRA review, petition responses, and litigation), reducing prolonged regulatory uncertainty and speeding the implementation or finality of agency actions.
Federal agencies, researchers, businesses (especially small firms), and taxpayers will face substantial new administrative and compliance costs to implement outreach, notices, disclosures, logs, social-equity assessments, and public docketing obligations.
Many plaintiffs, petitioners, and public challengers will see reduced access to judicial review and procedural protections (e.g., a uniform six‑year limitation, removed judicial review in some petition paths, reinstatements without prompt notice-and-comment, and greater judicial deference to agencies), limiting court checks on agency action.
Tighter deadlines and shorter review windows (for agencies, OIRA, and petition responses) increase the risk that rulemakings will be rushed, lowering rule quality, missing important evidence or interagency input, and making rules more vulnerable to legal challenge.
Based on analysis of 19 sections of legislative text.
Rewrites administrative rulemaking: creates an OMB Public Advocate, tightens OIRA timelines, expands agency deference, mandates disclosure for submitted studies, adds penalties for false company submissions, and sets a 6‑year review limit.
Changes federal rulemaking and judicial review by strengthening agency authority and central oversight, adding new transparency and disclosure duties, creating a National Public Advocate in OMB to boost public participation and social-equity assessments, and tightening timelines for both agencies and OIRA review. It increases disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules for studies submitted in rulemakings, creates civil penalties and exclusion rules for companies that knowingly submit materially false information, expands judicial deference to agency interpretations, and establishes a six-year statute of limitations for APA review actions.