Require federal agencies to seek Office of Advocacy input

Partially done

Printed page 752 25. Small Business Administration

“In addition, the next Administration should require other agencies to seek Advocacy’s input.”

What has happened

Jan 7, 2026 Partially done
No new requirement was issued, but the thing the requirement was meant to produce is happening. Testifying to House Small Business, the Chief Counsel for Advocacy reported that "during my first five months as Chief Counsel, more than sixty agencies have sought Advocacy input on their regulatory agendas" under the RFA's agenda-sharing duty at 5 U.S.C. 602(b), against "one or two exceptions" of compliance in the prior administration, and that "agencies and White House offices have increasingly come to Advocacy for input on regulatory policy". The standing requirement is the pre-existing one: EO 13272 (2002) already directs agencies to notify the Chief Counsel of draft rules affecting small entities, and it is unrevoked — 48 Federal Register documents cite it in the window.
- Testimony of Chief Counsel for Advocacy Casey B. Mulligan before the House Committee on Small Business, 2026-01-07 ("more than sixty agencies have sought Advocacy input on their regulatory agendas")
  Primary Executive branch Jan 7, 2026

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Boundary call, raised for the ticket-26 pass. The Quote’s verb is require: the administration issued no order, memorandum or rule requiring agencies to consult Advocacy, which would support not started. It is leveled partial because the ask is measured on the object — federal agency consultation with Advocacy — and that has moved from near-nil to sixty-plus agencies on the Chief Counsel’s sworn account. §3b’s “achieved by other means” reading.
A counter-datum, recorded honestly: a Federal Register full-text count of the phrase “Office of Advocacy” does not show a jump — 127 documents in the year to 2024-01-19, 185 to 2025-01-19, 81 to 2026-01-19 and 98 in the 2026 part-year. That count tracks total rulemaking volume and the routine RFA certification language, not consultation, which is why the testimony rather than the count is the Evidence.
EO 13272, “Proper Consideration of Small Entities in Agency Rulemaking”, appears in neither EO 14148’s nor the 2025-03-14 rescission list and is cited in 48 in-window Federal Register documents, so the pre-existing requirement stands.