GOOD Act

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1515) to increase access to agency guidance documents.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on this measure.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1515, the Guidance Out of Darkness Act, or the GOOD Act.

Regulatory guidance includes agency statements that, while not intended to have the force and effect of law, establish agency policies of statutory, regulatory, or technical issues. Because such guidance communicates how an agency will administer their law and its programs, it has a significant effect on regulated entities.

Regulated entities in the public should know what agency guidance says about the laws and programs that affect them. However, guidance documents are not easy to find. They are not consistently posted on agency websites.

This inconsistency burdens regulated entities, and it especially burdens small businesses who often lack the resources to hire compliance experts. The problem is so bad that agency guidance documents are known as regulatory dark matter.

For a brief time, the first Trump administration was able to bring helpful and needed sunshine to the situation. Following the GOOD Act's passage by the House during the 115th Congress, the first Trump administration voluntarily adopted the bill's reforms through an October 2019 executive order after the Senate failed to act.

Under the executive order, guidance was required to become fully transparent online. Across the government, each agency was directed to make available on its website a single, searchable indexed database with links to all guidance documents in effect. As a result, for the first time, Members of the public could easily find whatever agency guidance they needed online in a central location.

The order was in effect during 2019 and 2020 but was regrettably rescinded by the Biden administration. As a result, agencies pulled down their guidance web pages, and guidance, once again, fell into darkness, increasing the potential for agency abuse. This is why we need to, once again, pass the GOOD Act in the House and require agencies to publish their regulatory guidance in a single, easily accessible location.

The American public deserves nothing less from their government.

I thank my committee colleague, Representative Ro Khanna from California, for cosponsoring my legislation, and I especially thank the ranking member for working with my staff to help us advance a bipartisan bill here today.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this simple and necessary transparency bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley).

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the Guidance Out Of Darkness Act, or GOOD Act, and to pass this legislation once again, like the House did in the last term. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the basic premise of this bill, which I am happy to cosponsor, is that we should not have secret laws in the United States.

A major opportunity that we have right now is to modernize our government and to rein in the inexorable growth of the administrative state, restoring power to our elected representatives, States, local communities, and the American people themselves.

When we think about the administrative state, we think about all the regulations that are churned out, one after another, and compiled in the ever-growing Federal Register. The reality is, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Layered on top of all of that are these so-called guidance documents. These are memos, Dear Colleague letters, bulletins, all manner of what is referred to as ``regulatory dark matter.''

With respect to the ranking member, this is not a melodramatic term. It is actually quite appropriate. In physics, ``dark matter'' refers to the mysterious substance that makes up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe, but no one really knows what it is. Similarly, all of these guidance documents make up a great deal of the regulatory activity in our country, yet the agencies themselves can't even manage to track them down. How is an individual or a small business supposed to find out what this particular interpretation of the law is and how it will affect them, let alone how Congress is supposed to figure out how the laws that we have passed are ultimately being enforced and administered?

This is a commonsense measure that says that all of these guidance documents, which have real teeth when it comes to the enforcement of regulations, need to be compiled in one place that is searchable and accessible to every American citizen. It is a positive step for transparency and toward restoring government by the people.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 1515, the Guidance Out Of Darkness Act, sponsored by our chairman, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Comer).

Mr. Speaker, my Republican colleagues like to say that this bill would cast a light on what they love to call regulatory dark matter. This melodramatic term refers to the guidance documents Federal agencies issue to help the public better understand actions and policies.

Guidance documents come in the form of interpretive rules, which describe an agency's interpretation of a statute or regulation, and general statements of agency policy. For example, an agency might issue a guidance document to clarify a regulation and its technical details or to offer more information on compliance.

Guidance documents don't have the force of law and are already publicly available. The bill simply requires the agencies to publish guidance documents on a dedicated website for ease

of access. It also requires the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to designate a single website for accessing all agency guidance documents, except for those exempt from disclosure under the

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers. I urge passage of H.R. 1515, and I yield back the balance of my time.