How The Senate Can Make the GOOD Act Great

The opinions expressed here are the author's own and do not reflect the positions of his employer.

A new federal proposal to boost regulatory transparency in the United States represents a significant step forward in shining light into the often obscure set of guidance and policy documents agencies increasingly promulgate to evade the rulemaking process.

The Guidance Out of Darkness (or GOOD) Act would require US federal agencies to publish sub-regulatory guidance and policy documents in a central location on their websites. Sub-regulatory guidance and related policies have de facto regulatory effects, without US federal agencies having to go through the formal rulemaking process. The GOOD Act intends to fill a transparency gap in open government by making such guidance easier to find and more accessible to regulated entities, Congress and the general public. I agree with the Washington Post editorial board that “The GOOD Act is a good act” — but it's not great.

Most notably, the GOOD Act lacks technical modernization that would bring policy guidance publication into the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

While the bill has already cleared the House of Representatives in a bipartisan way (H.R. 1515), to make the GOOD Act great and ensure this legislation provides maximum utility, the Senate should consider these five amendments to its current iteration of the bill (S.B. 252).

Mandate open, machine-readable formats

As currently drafted, the act chiefly requires documents to be "published" in a single location. In the modern era, where machine-readability and findability are paramount for both human and AI-systems alike, a collection of static PDFs is no longer a sufficient source for agencies to rely on to promulgate guidance. Congress should require agencies to promulgate all existing and new guidance in open, machine-readable formats like JSON or XML (Atom).

Machine-readability allows regulated entities, researchers, developers, and others to build tools that track changes in policy in real-time. Congress currently publishes PDFs, plaintext and XML for (almost) all of its legislative documents. It should be a minimum expectation that federal agencies do the same for its policy guidance. With the availability of large language models that can translate across document types and file-formats with very few errors, it should be trivial to modernize policy guidance publication in this way.

The GOOD Act should be amended to make this a requirement.

Require robust metadata for legal citations

Transparency is about more than just finding a document; it is about understanding its context. A guidance document does not exist in a vacuum; it interprets specific statutes, executive orders and regulations.

The Senate should amend the Act to require specific metadata elements for every guidance document. Most importantly, these should include direct citations to relevant laws, statutes and policies (such as the relevant US Code or the Code of Federal Regulations).

By linking guidance to its statutory authority, the government can create a legal digital map of sorts that helps the public understand exactly which laws are being interpreted and why.

Standardize the endpoint

One of the most successful aspects of the Open Government Data Act was the requirement for agencies to provide a comprehensive data inventory at a standardized URL This predictable structure allowed for the automated harvesting of data across the entire executive branch by the General Services Administration (GSA) and into Data.gov, which has enabled centralized findability and accessibility to all federal agencies’ data assets.

The GOOD Act should follow this proven model. By specifying that the full inventory of guidance documents be provided at a standardized endpoint, Congress can ensure that the "single location" mentioned in the bill is not just a collection of dozens of human-readable webpages, but a predictable digital gateway for automated systems (thus supporting the first proposed improvement for machine-readability) as well as a seamless entry point for the public.

Establish a centralized catalog

While individual agency pages are helpful, the public shouldn't have to visit dozens of different websites to understand federal policy. We need a single point-of-entry for all executive branch guidance.

The Senate should authorize and require the GSA, specifically, its Technology Transformation Services (TTS), to establish and maintain such a clearinghouse, potentially under the available guidance.gov URL. This portal would function as a centralized catalog, harvesting the standardized inventories from every agency much in the way Data.gov does for the Federal Data Catalog. This would create a one-stop shop for small businesses, legal professionals, Congress and the general public to search the entirety of federal guidance from a single interface. It would greatly improve the findability of federal policies and enable the transparency intended by the GOOD Act.

Appropriate the necessary funds

Perhaps most importantly, Congress must recognize that transparency is not free. Even without the technical improvements proposed here, implementing the GOOD Act comes at a cost.

Building the digital infrastructure, converting and tagging thousands of legacy documents with metadata and maintaining centralized portals places a significant resourcing burden on agencies. In particular, TTS has suffered a significant blow to its staffing by DOGE cuts and even the existing infrastructure it is supposed to maintain (again, like Data.gov) is under threat.

Congress has a responsibility to ensure that the GOOD Act doesn't become yet another unfunded mandate that agencies won't be able to fully implement. The Senate must amend the Act to appropriate specific funds to agencies to cover the costs of implementation. It doesn't have to be much, but it has to be enough to cover the resourcing needed for this modernization — AI systems can certainly help agencies with translation, conversion, and publication.

The GOOD Act is common-sense legislation that targets the practical hurdles of government transparency. While its current Senate sponsors are all Republicans, the boost to transparency in open government it would provide should reflect bipartisan value, as should the fact that its House counterpart cleared the chamber by voice vote and had bipartisan sponsorship. By moving toward machine-readability, standardized endpoints and centralized discovery — all backed by proper funding — the Senate has the opportunity to turn a helpful transparency bill into a model for modern and efficient information policy governance.