Regulatory Transactions

From:  Natural Gas Intelligence

Carolyn Davis

The Interior Department on Friday officially launched an interagency review process that may impose the first minimum standards for oil and natural gas activity in U.S. Arctic waters.

A draft of the Arctic regulations was sent to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Friday. Currently there are no specific mandates governing Arctic energy development. Federal agencies regulate drilling in the Arctic as they would for other offshore areas, but the 2010 Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico led to more stringent reviews of offshore drilling.

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From: CSPnet.com

Proposed regulations won’t go into effect for at least a year

By  Thomas A. Briant, Executive Director

MINNEAPOLIS — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed the public to submit comments in response to the agency’s proposed tobacco deeming regulations until August 8^th. The FDA issued the deeming regulations on April 24, 2014.  When the comment period closed earlier this month, almost 82,000 individual comments had been submitted on-line in response to the deeming regulations.  So, what happens next?

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From: Multichannel News

Cable Ops had Argued FCC Low-balled Estimated Additional Time and Money

By: John Eggerton

The Office of Management and Budget has given the FCC the green light to collect data from ISPs and others on the state of the special access (business broadband services) market. 

OMB had to sign off on the additional paperwork per the Paperwork Reduction Act. 

With that go-ahead, the FCC said Monday (Aug. 18) it was ready to proceed with the data collection. 

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association argued that the FCC had majorly lowballed the amount of work and money it will take by thousands of hours and millions of dollars.

Editor’s Note: Regulatory agencies are legally bound to adhere to OMB’s peer review requirements. See here for more information.

From: The National Law Review

From: Roll Call

By Brad Call

Anyone with older siblings or cousins remembers the joys of “hand-me-down” clothes. They were a common-sense approach for Mom, of course. But somehow those outfits never fit right, felt right, or looked right — they sagged here and bunched up there, and certainly weren’t your favorite color or style.

Why? Because they were really meant for someone else — and not for you.

From: Convenience Store Decisions

The c-store industry continues to monitor the FDA’s deeming rules regarding cigars and what it means going forward.

By Howard Riell, Associate Editor

The federal government’s recent decisions concerning tobacco products, specifically cigars, underscore the need for vigilance and involvement on the part of convenience store operators, not just to maintain category sales, but to avoid regulatory issues.

In April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its proposed regulation deeming, among other tobacco products (OTP), cigars as subject to the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. In July, the FDA extended the comment period until Aug. 8.

From: TechAmerica Policy Blog

by Michael Spierto, Director of Cybersecurity Policy, TechAmerica

In a letter dated July 14 2014, US Senators John McCain and Ron Wyden, and Congresswoman Anna Eschoo wrote to the Secretary of Commerce asking for an update on the implementation of the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce (E-SIGN) Act. The law was enacted in 2000, but fourteen years later it appears that all government agencies have still not fully implemented this law. The question is: why?

From: Chemical Facility Security News

by Patrick Coyle

It is more than a little odd that the three Administration agencies; PHMSA, OIRA, and Federal Register; are acting in such an uncoordinated manner. I suspect that someone at DOT decided that the two rules (the HHFT NPRM and the Oil Spill ANPRM) just had to be published together and damn the niceties of the regulatory approval process.