Legislative Resources

ACUS offers resources that members of Congress and congressional staff may find helpful when conducting oversight or developing legislation that affects the administrative process. ACUS can also assist Congress by providing technical comments on draft legislation and connecting staff with administrative law experts.

ACUS's Office of the Chair also curates resources intended to keep ACUS members, our agency partners, and the administrative law community abreast of the latest from Capitol Hill. One such resource, the Legislative Updates series, compiles and summarizes congressional actions that implicate regulatory and adjudicative procedure and other selected topics in the field of administrative law.

For assistance or to request more information, please contact Conrad Dryland (cdryland@acus.gov). 

Publications

  • Assembly Recommendations and Reports. ACUS issues about a dozen recommendations each year to agencies, Congress, the President, and the Judicial Conference to enhance efficiency and fairness in the administrative state. Each adopted recommendation is supported by a report authored by an administrative law expert or ACUS staff.
  • Equal Access to Justice ReportingACUS collects and reports information to Congress about awards of attorney's and other fees against the United States under EAJA each fiscal year. ACUS maintains an online database of all EAJA awards and an extensive archive of related materials.
  • Information Interchange Bulletins. These one-page documents offer agency attorneys a starting point to begin research on specific administrative procedure topics. They identify the black letter law and provide additional resources for further research, including relevant ACUS recommendations and reports.
  • Legislative Updates. This weekly resource from the Office of the Chair offers an at-a-glance summary of the preceding week on Capitol Hill, capturing relevant congressional actions (e.g., introduction & consideration of legislation, committee hearings & markups, etc.) that implicate adjudicative and regulatory procedure and other selected topics in the field of administrative law.
  • Reference Guides. ACUS produces references guides including Handbooks, SourcebooksStatements of Principles, and reports on administrative law topics, such as the Sourcebook of United States Executive Agenciesand the online Federal Administrative Procedure Sourcebook.
  • Statutory Review Program. ACUS transmits to Congress judicial and agency adjudicative decisions that identify technical problems of consequence in statutes dealing with administrative procedure.
  • Additional Materials. ACUS maintains other materials of interest to congressional staff, including a Compilation of Recent Regulatory Reform Bills introduced in Congress.

Meetings and Events

  • Forums. ACUS sponsors public forums to discuss important issues of administrative procedure. Past forums have focused on Nationwide Injunctions and Federal Regulatory Programs, Mass and Fraudulent Comments, Federal Administrative Adjudication, and Regulatory Capture.
  • Trainings. ACUS can conduct or facilitate training sessions for congressional staff on a variety of administrative procedure topics, including the best practices recommended by the ACUS Assembly.