EPA Guidance Portal – 2-29-20

The EPA Guidance Portal that I discussed briefly yesterday is now up. The web site provided yesterday by the EPA is actually just a landing site for Guidance Document pages for each of the following EPA offices:

• Office of Air and Radiation (OAR)

• Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP)

• Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA)

• Office of General Counsel (OGC)

• Office of International and Tribal Affairs (OITA)

• Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM)

• Office of Mission Support (OMS)

• Office of Research and Development (ORD)

• Office of Water (OW)

• All EPA Regional offices

Each page uses a common format with a little descriptive blurb and then a table of guidance documents. There is an interesting little disclaimer in that descriptive blurb: “The agency may not cite, use, or rely on any guidance that is not posted on this website, except to establish historical facts.” That certainly means that keeping up with changes on these pages could be important.

There are some interesting apparent start-up glitches on some of these pages. The page for the Office of Air and Radiation, for instance, had some problems listing the ‘Original Issue Date’ information for their documents; all of them are in 2020 (“2020-12-05” for the first document; hmmm, and that link does not go anywhere). In another instance, on the page for Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, the first document listed is apparently a new guidance document issued yesterday: “Manufacturer Requests for Risk Evaluation, Information for Submitters”. Unfortunately the link just takes you to the “Assessing and Managing Chemicals under TSCA” page with no mention of the guidance document.

Hopefully the EPA will get the bugs worked out in their system fairly quickly.

EPA Guidance Portal – 2-28-20

Today the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a notice in the Federal Register (85 FR 11986-11987) announcing the establishment of the EPA Guidance Portal (Not yet in service as of 8:45 EST 2-28-20). The Portal was established in accordance with EO 13891, Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency Guidance Documents. The announcement states that the Portal should be available today, but as of this writing it is no online.

The Portal will have the following information available about each active guidance document:

• A concise name for the guidance document;

• The date on which the guidance document was issued;

• The date on which the guidance document was posted to the web portal

• An agency unique identifier;

• A hyperlink to the guidance document;

• The general topic addressed by the guidance document; and

• A summary of the guidance document's content.

The notice states the EPA’s intent to keep this Portal current, but it does not explain how changes to the information will be made public.

Other agencies are also supposed to be establishing similar public access to guidance documents.