White House Releases Guidance on Use of Science in Rulemaking

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has released new guidance on the quality of information to be used in rulemaking by federal agencies. In an April 24 memo to the heads of federal agencies and departments, Acting OMB Director Russell Vought provided updated standards for agencies to use to comply with the Information Quality Act. The guidance updates implementation of the current information quality guidelines established by a 2002 OMB memo, Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing the Quality, Objectivity, Utility, and Integrity of Information Disseminated by Federal Agencies. These updates “reflect recent innovations in information generation, access, management, and use, and to help agencies address common problems with maintaining information quality.” OMB has asked agencies to modify their definition of “influential information,” thereby changing what information qualifies to be considered when drafting rules. The new guidance intends to put in place a more rigorous review process to determine the “fitness of scientific information for policy purposes.” OMB is also directing agencies to make more data and methods, including the computer code used in data analyses, publicly accessible, so that third parties can reproduce the findings underlying rulemaking. The “reproducibility standard” for influential information is intended to “increase the credibility of federal decisions.” The updates ...
Source: Public Policy Reports - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: news