Who Gets Heeded? An Obligation-Level Audit of Responsiveness in EPA Rulemaking
Jianing Fan, Yue Yao
Notice-and-comment rulemaking gives any affected party the same formal right to influence federal regulation, but formal access is not substantive capacity to shape rule text. Existing measurement strategies operate at the rule or aggregate-corpus level, too coarse to capture the discrete regulatory obligations where commenters seek change. We introduce obligation-level responsiveness auditing, an auditable, AI-assisted framework for measuring whether public-comment engagement co-occurs with changes to specific regulatory obligations. The framework extracts proposed and final-rule obligations, matches comments to the obligations they address, and classifies proposed-to-final outcomes; we test each of these AI-assisted components against blind human judgment. We apply the framework to 70,075 comments across 36 EPA anchor rulemakings, drawn from a corpus of 786,197 comments across 6,145 dockets from 2010-2022. Three descriptive findings emerge. First, engagement is associated with revision across rulemakings, but not clearly within the same rulemaking. Second, support-versus-opposition direction does not clearly differentiate outcomes, an informative null inconsistent with simple preference aggregation. Third, under a permissive reconstruction of commenter type, organizational-majority engagement concentrates in editorial-refinement rather than substantive-modification outcomes across rulemakings. A blind human audit of the outcome labels behind this finding preserves it under corrected labels and reveals that text-similarity methods are insufficient for distinguishing editorial from substantive regulatory change. Together, these findings locate the equity asymmetry upstream of agency response: in which rulemakings and obligations different commenter populations have the capacity to identify, interpret, and contest. Obligation-level auditing makes this upstream inequity visible.
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