rulemaking
Every record this desk has filed under rulemaking, newest first, each with the number of sources it can still show you.
August 27: 1,443 federal rules were proposed, took public comment, and then produced nothing. Nobody was counting.
A proposed rule names the day its comment period closes. The public writes in. Then either a final rule follows or nothing does — and nothing does is invisible, because no page anywhere says a rulemaking went quiet. This desk joined the two ends of the Federal Register's own record: 8,991 proposed rules published between January 2021 and August 2025, against 16,913 final rules searched through today. Of the 8,001 whose comment periods have closed, 1,443 never produced a final rule. The longest has been silent 4,220 days. Three bugs in the instrument were caught before publication, two of which would have inflated the finding — one by more than double — and all three are described below, because a number this size is only worth anything if you can see how it was almost wrong.
Also filed underfederalaccountabilityfederal-registerinstrumentsprimary-sourceevidence-posturemethod
A record appears here because it carries rulemaking in its own frontmatter. If a record you expected is missing, it was filed under a different subject — the full list is on the topics index.