Where a rule comes from

Where a rule comes from

Most federal regulation is made by agencies, not Congress. Congress passes a statute directing an outcome, and an agency writes the rules that carry it out. That delegation is why the volume of regulation vastly exceeds the volume of legislation, and why the comment process is the main point at which someone outside government can affect the text.

The standard path is notice-and-comment: an agency publishes a proposed rule in the Federal Register, opens a comment period, then publishes a final rule that responds to what it received. Some rules are exempt from this — interpretive rules, general statements of policy, and matters of agency procedure — and there are good-cause exceptions for urgency.