A Brief Introduction to Laws and Regulations in the United States

Before we continue with the Clean Air Act and the air pollution control strategies, it is important to understand the process by which environmental laws and regulations are created in the United States. To create a law, a member of Congress has to propose a bill. If both houses of Congress approve a bill, it goes to the President who has the option to either approve it or veto it. If approved, the new law is called an act, and the text of the act is known as a public statute. Some of the better-known laws related to the environment are the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. Once an act is passed, the House of Representatives standardizes the text of the law and publishes it in the United States Code. The U.S. Code is the official record of all federal laws.

Laws often do not include all the details. In order to make the laws work on a day-to-day level, Congress authorizes certain government agencies -- including EPA -- to create regulations. Regulations set specific rules about what is legal and what isn't. For example, a regulation issued by EPA to implement the Clean Air Act might state what levels of a pollutant -- such as sulfur dioxide -- are safe. It would tell industries how much sulfur dioxide they can legally emit into the air, and what the penalty will be if they emit too much. Once the regulation is in effect, EPA then works to help people comply with the law and to enforce it.

The first step for EPA to create an environmental regulation is to decide if a regulation may be needed. The agency researches it and, if necessary, proposes a regulation. The proposal is listed in the Federal Register so that members of the public can consider it and send their comments to the agency. The agency considers all the comments, revises the regulation accordingly, and issues a final rule. At each stage in the process, the agency publishes a notice in the Federal Register. These notices include the original proposal, requests for public comment, notices about meetings where the proposal will be discussed (open to the public), and the text of the final regulation.

Once a regulation is completed and has been printed in the Federal Register as a final rule, it is "codified" by being published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The CFR is the official record of all regulations created by the federal government. It is divided into 50 volumes, called titles, each of which focuses on a particular area. Almost all environmental regulations appear in Title 40.

More information about major environmental laws can be found at: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/laws.htm.

Full text of all Federal Register documents issued by EPA can be found at: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/rules.html#proposed