Government guidance documents are supposed to be merely nonbinding interpretations or policy statements, but this research report shows that they have become a major tool for shaping federal policy outside the normal lawmaking and rulemaking processes. This report surveys the history, scale, and legal treatment of agency guidance across recent presidential administrations, showing the growing frequency with which agencies treat it as binding. It then outlines reforms aimed at restoring transparency and procedural discipline.

Key Findings:

• Guidance activity has grown substantially since the early 2000s.
• A 2018 review by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform identified more than 13,000 guidance documents issued between 2008 and 2018, but only 27 of 46 agencies provided complete inventories, indicating the total was much higher.
• The Trump administration’s 2019 reforms produced the first broad official count of federal guidance, identifying 73,424 documents by September 2020.
• This report finds that total federal guidance rose 46 percent in two years under the Biden administration, surpassing 100,000 documents in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
• The total volume of guidance is large, difficult to track, and inconsistently reported across agencies because there is no durable government-wide system for cataloging it. Agency and third-party counts of guidance often diverge sharply: For example, as of late 2025, one researcher found 48,921 guidance documents from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whereas an HHS portal listed only roughly 4,700 as of May 2026.
• Courts have repeatedly concluded that agencies cross over from mere interpretation to actual rulemaking when guidance imposes new obligations or requirements.

Policy Implications:

• Policymakers can improve transparency and procedural regularity by requiring agencies to maintain comprehensive public guidance inventories, subject significant guidance to centralized review, and use existing tools such as the Congressional Review Act, agency rules, and statutory reforms like the GOOD Act to distinguish genuinely nonbinding guidance from actions that should proceed through formal rulemaking.

Download the PDF here.