Despite internal FAA reforms in 1998 designed to speed rulemaking, the median times that the agency took to complete both the proposed rule phase and the final rule phase increased in the three-year period after the reforms were instituted, even though it published fewer rules then it did during the three years before the reforms.
In a hearing before the House aviation subcommittee, the General Accounting Office (GAO) said the FAA generally takes about 2.5 years to complete a rulemaking, but six rules took 10 years or longer finish. The GAO said it looked at the history of 76 “significant” rules that constituted the majority of the FAA’s workload of significant rules from FY 1995 through 2000.
The GAO said that in that six-year period, the time the FAA took to formally “initiate” a rule in response to a congressional mandate or an NTSB recommendation “varied widely.” The FAA initiated most rules within two years, but some were begun many years later.
