Federal agencies are often required to hold periods of public comment before crafting policy proposals and before adopting new regulations. Opening agency business to public comment is an important way for the government to gather insight from citizens, and be open to oversight by citizens. However, in this day and age such invitations for public comment are extremely obscure, allowing paid special interests to dominate the feedback the government gets. If each agency is required to maintain a database and corresponding RSS feed of all items currently open to public comment along with the means to submit those comments, and to prominently feature that database on its website in a standard way, ordinary citizens can at least have the option of keeping track of them.



