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Regulatory Development 57
President, who may sign the measure into law, veto it and return it to Congress, let it become law
without signature, or, at the end of a session, pocket-veto it.

3.5.2 REGULATIONS
The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, passed by Congress, includes a mandate that directs
the U.S. EPA to develop regulations. Regulations, or rulemakings, are issued by an agency such as
the EPA, DOT, or OSHA, which translate the general mandate of a law into a set of requirements
for the agency and the regulated community.
Environmental regulations are formulated by the U.S. EPA with the support of public partic-
ipation. When a regulation is proposed, it is published in the Federal Register, a government doc-
ument, to notify the public of the EPA’s intent to create new regulations or modify existing ones
(Figure 3.1). EPA provides the public, which includes the potentially regulated community, with
an opportunity to submit comments. Following a comment period, the EPA may revise the pro-
posed rule based on both an internal review process and public comments. The final regulation is
published, or promulgated, in the Federal Register. Included with the regulation is a discussion
of the agency’s rationale for the regulatory program. The final regulations are compiled annually
and incorporated in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) (Figure 3.2). This process is called
codification and each CFR title corresponds to a different regulatory authority. For example, the

FIGURE 3.2 Code of Federal Regulations.