Nearly 70% of the specific stuff the government wants to do in a new law gets "lost" or deleted before the rules take effect.
SSRN · March 18, 2026 · 6331218
The Takeaway
A computational analysis of over 500,000 documents found that only 32% of proposed regulatory obligations survive unchanged into the final rules. This reveals that the public 'notice-and-comment' period acts as a massive shredder of government power, with agencies shedding thousands of mandates under pressure before they can become law.
From the abstract
<p><span>When a proposed rule becomes final, what happens to the discrete obligations it contains” This paper introduces a computational method for tracking how individual regulatory obligations survive, transform, and drift between proposal and finalization. Applying a sentence-first extraction pipeline to 520,244 Federal Register documents across all federal agencies and comparing obligation sets across 954 paired proposed</span><span></span><span>final rules, we find that only 32% of propose