reference materials - the Federal Register

At the Federal Register, Tending to the Details of Democracy
     Published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), 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.
     The Federal Register is published every federal workday. Not even snowstorms, hurricanes, or the events of September 11, 2001, have prevented its publication. In 2003, more than eighty thousand pages were published in the Federal Register. It is updated daily by 6 a.m. and is published Monday through Friday, except Federal holidays. GPO Access contains Federal Register volumes from 59 (1994) to the present.
     The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) provides access to the official text of:

* Federal Laws
* Presidential Documents
* Administrative Regulations and Notices
* Descriptions of Federal Organizations, Programs and Activities

The Office of the Federal Register also administers the Electoral College and the Constitutional Amendment Process.
     The Office of the Federal Register publishes regulations that affect the daily lives of all American citizens, including the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the cars they drive, and the airplanes they fly as well as consumer protection, terrorism protection, and much more. Those regulations are published in the daily Federal Register and the annual Code of Federal Regulations.
     The Federal Register, sometimes described as the legal newspaper of the executive branch of the federal government, was created by the Federal Register Act in 1935 to provide for the custody of presidential proclamations and executive orders and administrative rules, regulations, notices, and other documents of general applicability and legal effect and for the prompt and uniform printing and distribution of them.
     Before the 1935 act, there were no facilities within the executive branch of the federal government for the central filing and publication of those documents. In order for rules to become legally effective, the Federal Register Act and the Administrative Procedure Act require agencies to publish those rules in the Federal Register. The Administrative Procedure Act also requires agencies to publish their proposed rules in the Federal Register for public comment.
     To keep track of the amendments to the regulations, in 1938 Congress amended the Federal Register Act to create the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The Code of Federal Regulations is an annually revised codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register, divided into fifty titles that represent broad areas subject to federal regulation. There are 214 volumes of the CFR comprising over 150,000 pages.
     In 2003, the Office of the Federal Register developed the electronic Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR), which updates the CFR online every business day. The eCFR is available to the public at www.gpoaccess.gov/ecfr/.
     The Federal Register is actively engaged in e-Government initiatives, which are aimed at making it simpler for citizens to receive services from government while reducing the costs of those services.
     All of the Federal Register publications are available online through GPO Access (www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/index.html), and last year there were almost 191 million retrievals of documents from those publications.