Under the Executive Office of the President is the Office of Management and Budget, and one of their agencies is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Their Reginfo site describes the regulatory process and the place of the Unified Agenda.
The chart below summarizes and simplified the regulatory process.
Another way to look at things is here:
Another way to understand these complex processes is via the Reg Map, published on RegInfo.gov.
Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions is published twice per year (spring and fall) and provides information about regulations under development by federal agencies.
The Federal Register, begun in 1936, is the publication where notices of proposed rules are published. Twice per year executive branch agencies publish their proposed rules in the Unified Agenda. The Federal Register is the daily journal of the U.S. government (the executive branch), and the chart below shows the differences between the various places to get Federal Register content.
Easiest way to access current and recent past issues of the Federal Register.
Access to the Federal Register from 1936 onward. Note: issues before 1995 take a long time to load and do not contain detailed metadata, as the later issues do.
The Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.
Easiest way to comment on proposed rules (and to see the comments of others!).
Full-text, image-based access to the Federal Register from 1936-present and the Code of Federal Regulations.
Final rules are codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). CFR is published annually, and FR is published daily. The bridge between FR and CFR is LSA (List of CFR Sections Affected), as shown in the chart below.
From 1996 to present
From 1997 onward
No need for LSA when you use eCFR. You can roll back CFR to 2000 and see changes just days after they appear in FR.
The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) annual edition is the codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register by the departments and agencies of the Federal Government.
In the box above I showed the traditional way of keeping track of current regulations. This involves many laborious steps: checking the daily Federal Register, then checking the index at the back of the current FR issue to see any other updates for that month. Then checking the CFR List of Sections Affected (LSA) to see any changes to the CFR sections since the last annual edition of CFR -- a lot of time-consuming steps.
But, by using eCFR, you can get updates nearly in real time. Although the eCFR is not yet an official representation of regulations, the Government Publishing Office is currently working to make it official.
Not only can you view current changes, you can also view historical changes back to 2017. This means that you can see the exact regulations that were in effect on any date from 2017 onward.
You can find eCFR here: https://www.ecfr.gov/.
