What makes a comment count

What makes a comment count

Comment periods are not votes. An agency is not obliged to follow the majority view, and a hundred identical form letters carry roughly the weight of one. What an agency must do is respond to significant comments — those raising a material point the rule did not address.

A comment that changes a rule usually does one of three things: identifies data the agency did not have, shows an assumption in the analysis to be wrong, or demonstrates a consequence the agency did not anticipate. Specificity is everything. "This rule is burdensome" is not actionable; "this rule requires quarterly reporting that duplicates the filing already made under §X, at an estimated cost of Y per facility" is.