Watchdog group makes Regulations.gov comments more searchable

Federal public comments on proposed regulations now are more easily searchable thanks to a new website created by Sunlight Labs, which is part of the Sunlight Foundation transparency watchdog group.

Sunlight Labs’ new InfluenceExplorer website allows for searches by name of person, company or lawmaker.

It displays nearly a million regulation-related comments culled from the federal e-rulemaking website Regulations.gov, said Tom Lee, director of the labs.

“We have nearly 1.5 terabytes of data from Regulations.gov, representing every current and historic docket,” Lee said in an interview.

The goal of Sunlight Labs’ project was to make the regulatory comments more easily accessible to the public so that special interest influence over regulations can be researched more readily, he said.

Researchers trying to determine the extent of industry and special interest influence on dockets within Regulations.gov tend to have a difficult time searching for that information, he said.

“Regulations.gov is not ideal, and it is very difficult to extract the information,” Lee said. One of the complications for search is that comments are submitted in multiple formats, such as Adobe PDFs and Microsoft Word files.

To make searches and data extractions easier, Sunlight created its own searchable dataset using the Regulations.gov comment data.

The Sunlight project also involved downloading comments on regulation from Regulations.gov, the Environmental Protection Agency and from Federal Advisory Committees to a transparency website, where the data is available for bulk download.

“This data addition also allows, for the first time, a bulk download of the complete text of a docket or even entire agency from Regulations.gov via our TransparencyData site to the public for the first time,” Sunlight officials said in a news release on Oct. 5.