Online rule-making to debut Dec. 18

The Office of Management and Budget and the Environmental Protection Agency plan to launch the first iteration of the Online Rulemaking e-government project on Dec. 18. The portal, at , will let citizens and businesses find and comment on proposed federal regulations.An OMB official said the portal will be fully functional by then, but OMB will launch it formally at a ceremony early next month.Although OMB hoped to get the system up in September, load testing and software compatibility problems moved the date back to October and then to Dec. 18, the official said [see story at ]. Despite the delays, the project still is ahead of its Dec. 31 deadline.The official said OMB moved the project to EPA from the Transportation Department in October after an independent evaluation of agency online rule-making systems found that EPA’s system is best suited to go governmentwide. The project’s business case calls for agencies to migrate to the EPA system, the official said, so it made sense for EPA to manage the project.