The Volume Machine: What 2026’s Comment Dockets Reveal About Public Participation

The federal comment period is one of the few places where an ordinary American can speak directly into the rulemaking record. In 2026, that channel worked. It also strained under its own success.

Agency dockets swelled with submissions on health insurance, labor classification, and environmental standards. Some of that was genuine civic engagement. Some was organized campaigning. Some was both. The problem is that agencies and the public often could not tell the difference—at least not from the official comment counts.

This analysis and opinion piece examines three 2026 rulemakings with unusually heavy dockets. It separates what agencies disclosed about unique comments from what they did with the input. The argument is straightforward: without better comment analysis and disclosure, public participation becomes a volume game that favors well-funded repeat players and leaves ordinary citizens less visible in the record.

Three dockets under stress

Environmental Protection Agency: municipal waste combustion standards

The EPA’s proposed update to municipal waste combustion standards drew roughly 1.3 million comments, according to the agency’s docket summary. The agency later reported that about 78 percent were identical or near-identical form letters tied to three national campaigns. Roughly 12,000 comments came from residents near regulated facilities or local officials. The final rule changed the compliance timeline for small facilities and added a technical clarification. The preamble cited 42 “significant issues,” but the agency did not publish a comment-by-comment response matrix.

Department of Health and Human Services: short-term limited-duration insurance

HHS received about 480,000 comments on its proposed rule for short-term limited-duration insurance. The agency said 61 percent arrived through organized campaigns. Patient groups, insurers, and state regulators submitted more detailed comments. In the final rule, HHS expanded the disclosure requirements and delayed one provision by six months. The response to comments ran 14 pages and grouped thousands of submissions under broad headings such as “consumer protection” and “market stability.” That is not necessarily bad faith, but it is thin public reasoning for a rule with a large docket.

Department of Labor: independent contractor classification

The Labor Department’s independent contractor rule drew about 210,000 comments. The agency estimated that 52 percent were form letters and about 9,000 were unique. The final rule adjusted one factor in the economic-reality test and added examples for gig workers. DOL published a comment analysis summary, but it was not searchable by topic or campaign. A reader could learn the totals; a reader could not easily learn which arguments changed the rule.

What agencies actually did with the input

In each case, agencies made real changes. The EPA extended a timeline. HHS added disclosures. DOL clarified an example. Those changes matter, and they show that comments are not merely decorative.

But the public record is uneven. Agencies have different capacities, different contracting arrangements, and different levels of political attention. Some dockets include detailed response matrices. Others include a paragraph saying the agency “considered all significant issues.” The result is that two rules with similar comment volumes can produce very different public explanations.

The rise of automated comment analysis has made the problem more urgent. In 2026, several agencies began using clustering tools and contractors to sort mass comments. Those tools can be useful. They can also obscure judgment. If an agency uses a contractor to classify one million comments, the public should know how the classification was built, what error rates were reported, and whether campaign submissions were counted as unique public sentiment.

The participation gap

Mass comments are not automatically illegitimate. A form letter can be a meaningful act of civic participation, and campaigns can help people engage with rules they would otherwise never see. But volume is not the same as representation. When repeat players can generate hundreds of thousands of identical submissions, raw counts become a misleading measure of public concern.

The asymmetry is familiar. Well-funded groups have lawyers, compliance staff, and email lists. Individual citizens have a comment box. Without better disclosure, the well-funded group’s campaign looks like a grassroots surge, while a thoughtful comment from a single resident disappears into a category labeled “other.”

What 2027 should do

Congress and agencies can fix this without weakening public participation. Five steps would help.

First, agencies should publish deduplicated counts within 30 days of a comment period closing. The public should see raw submissions, unique comments, form-letter campaigns, and late comments as separate categories.

Second, agencies should publish a topic-level response matrix for every rule that receives more than 100,000 comments. The matrix should show the issue, the number of comments, the agency’s response, and whether the final rule changed. That is not a burden; it is the basic record of reasoned decision-making.

Third, agencies should disclose the use of automated tools and contractors in comment analysis. The public does not need proprietary algorithms, but it does need to know who sorted the record and how.

Fourth, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs should establish a common data standard for comment dockets. Regulations.gov should make it easy to search by campaign, topic, and agency response.

Fifth, Congress should fund a small, independent comment-analysis unit. The unit would not decide policy. It would audit agency disclosure and publish annual statistics on comment volume, duplication, and response quality.

The legitimacy question

Public participation in rulemaking is not a popularity contest. Agencies are supposed to weigh evidence, not count votes. But the comment record is one of the few places where the public can see how an agency reasoned. When that record is dominated by duplicate submissions and thin summaries, the legitimacy of the process suffers—even if the final rule is legally sound.

In 2026, ordinary Americans flooded agency dockets in numbers that were both impressive and difficult to interpret. The lesson for 2027 is not that citizens should comment less. It is that agencies should show, more clearly than they do now, what they heard and what they did with it. Without that, public participation becomes a volume machine, and the loudest organized campaigns will keep winning the appearance of public support.