Title: A Simple Overview Of What A Federal Regulation Is And How It Affects You
Headings: A Simple Overview Of What A Federal Regulation Is And How It Affects You
A Simple Overview Of What A Federal Regulation Is And How It Affects You
Content: Regulations are essential rules created by agencies, commissions, and departments in the federal government’s executive branch based off of authority granted to it by Congress. This is because Congress understands that in many cases its ability to develop the subject matter expertise, objectivity from politics, and sheer incapacity to handle the workload leads it to create a federal administrative state that regulates sectors as varied as from fishing to derivatives, from communications infrastructure to highway standards. The precise number of administrative agencies is uncertain due to the overlapping nature of many of them, as many agencies exist similar to a Russian matryoshka doll set where one distinct agency technically exists inside another. The number by some views may be as few as a couple of dozen or as much as over 400, with the federal government itself even uncertain over the exact tally. Yet these agencies have enormous impact on our day-to-day lives while Congress often sticks to the larger policy moves and structures. A company seeking to know if its stock-offering plan is sufficient does not work with Congress but rather with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has the power to set certain safety standards and regulations for vehicles and associated businesses that affect both our national economy and the daily lives of drivers of all sorts. The rest of these agencies seem like a big serving of alphabet soup, whereby a hapless researcher is flooded with acronyms such as the CFPB, CPSC, EEOC, FAA, FCC, FDIC, FTC, EPA, NLRB, NRC, OCC, OSHA, and many more. The precise details of federal regulation creation are extremely complex and are a craft left to the understanding of very highly paid lawyers who specialize in the specific processes within a few agencies or even just one. However essentially the general procedure is called “informal rulemaking,” whereby an agency publicly announces it’s beginning to gather information to create a new regulation, allows the public, businesses, and associations to comment and submit their views on the issue and then enact the rule with the force of law.