The Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and legal notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents. It includes proposed and final federal regulations having general applicability and legal effect; executive orders and presidential proclamations; documents required to be published by an act of Congress; and other federal documents of public interest. Daily and monthly indexes and an accompanying publication, “List of CFR Sections Affected,†aid in its use.
The Federal Register also publishes the “Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions†twice yearly (usually in April and October). This document provides advance notice of proposed rulemaking by listing all rules and proposed rules that more than 60 federal departments, agencies, and commissions expect to issue during the next six months. Regulations that concern the military or foreign affairs, or that deal only with agency personnel, organization, or management matters, are excluded. The agenda is available online from 1994 through the present.
The first issue of the Federal Register came off GPO presses on March 16, 1936. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the first document, an executive order, to be published. GPO and the National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register (OFR) started the digital release of historic issues of the Federal Register on January 11, 2017 with issues now from 1970 to present available digitally on GPO’s govinfo. This project will digitize a total of 14,587 individual issues, dating back to the first Federal Register on March 16, 1936. Nearly two million pages are being digitized.