Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education & Labor Committee, has issued letters to the Department of Health & Human Services and a number of federal agencies, requesting information about their procedures for issuing so-called “guidance documents.”
Alexander’s concern is that agencies are issuing guidance documents as substitutes for administrative regulations. There are clear rules for issuing regulations. They’re set out in the Administrative Procedure Act, and they include such safeguards as notice-and-comment periods. Guidance documents, on the other hand, are not governed by procedural requirements and provide no opportunity for public comment.
That’s Alexander’s complaint. He told Bloomberg BNA that often a guidance document is merely the “whim of a bureaucrat . . . to write a letter” and force an entire industry to conform to it, as though it had the force of law.
So Alexander wrote his own letters—to the agencies.
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