How federal rulemaking works
The answer
Federal agencies write far more binding rules than Congress writes laws, and most of that rulemaking happens through a specific three-step process set by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946: notice, comment, final rule. The step that breaks the public's folk model is that agencies are legally required to respond to substantive comments, and courts can strike a rule down if they don't. In 2024 the Supreme Court did exactly that.
How it actually works
An agency first publishes a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register, laying out the proposed rule and its legal basis. This opens a public comment period, typically 60 days, sometimes 30 or 90, during which anyone can submit written comments through regulations.gov or directly to the agency. The agency must then review the comment record and, before issuing a final rule, respond to significant comments that raise a substantive problem with reasonable specificity, not to every comment, but to the ones that identify a real flaw. The final rule is published in the Federal Register with a preamble explaining the agency's reasoning and its responses to major comments, and, with most rules, does not take effect for another 30 days.
Example: EPA's 2015 Good Neighbor ozone-transport rule was challenged years later in Ohio v. EPA. In June 2024 the Supreme Court stayed part of the rule, ruling EPA had not adequately responded to a comment questioning its cost-effectiveness methodology, and confirmed the agency ran the numbers differently than it told commenters it would.1 That is binding proof a single well-specified comment can carry real legal weight, regardless of how many other comments were filed.
Volume alone rarely moves an agency. The GW Regulatory Studies Center's analysis of EPA dockets from 2012-2016 found 17 of 23 rules that drew mass identical-form comment campaigns acknowledged the campaign but did not change the rule based on volume. EPA's own stated view is that one well-supported comment is often more informative to the agency than a thousand form letters.2
Who holds the power
The agency writes and finalizes the rule, and agency staff and political appointees exercise substantial discretion within the statute Congress gave them. Courts review final rules under the APA's arbitrary-and-capricious standard and can vacate or stay rules that ignore the record. Congress can override a rule via the Congressional Review Act, and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs reviews significant rules before they publish.
Where you come in
See the guide on how to write a regulatory comment for how to submit a comment that carries legal weight rather than one that gets logged and ignored.
Related
Glossary: notice and comment, arbitrary and capricious, congressional review act
See also the evidence page on do regulatory comments change rules.