Who Gets Heeded? An Obligation-Level Audit of Responsiveness in EPA Rulemaking

A new AI-assisted framework has been developed for auditing responsiveness in regulatory rulemaking processes, specifically focusing on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This framework measures whether public-comment engagement leads to changes in specific regulatory obligations. It addresses limitations of existing methods by operating at an 'obligation-level,' extracting proposed and final-rule obligations, matching comments to these obligations, and classifying outcomes. Each component of the framework is evaluated against blind human judgment.

Why it matters

This research is strategically important because it introduces a novel, granular method for assessing the impact of public engagement on regulatory development. Understanding who influences rule text at the obligation level can inform strategies for stakeholder engagement, regulatory design, and compliance, ultimately affecting the legitimacy and effectiveness of governance.

Key insights

• Formal rights to influence federal regulation do not equate to substantive capacity to shape rule text.
• Existing strategies for analyzing regulatory influence are too coarse, operating at the rule or aggregate-corpus level.
• The new framework introduces 'obligation-level responsiveness auditing,' which is auditable and AI-assisted.
• The framework identifies and tracks specific regulatory duties that commenters seek to change.
• It extracts obligations from proposed and final rules, matches comments to relevant obligations, and classifies outcomes.
• Key components of the framework are evaluated against human judgment to ensure accuracy.

Source

arXiv — Computers and Society — https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10329