It's (probably) Not 500,000 Comments on OMB's Proposed Regulation

July 17, 2026

This post was co-authored with Abigail Haddad and a version of it is cross-posted at Present of Coding.

We analyzed over 50,000 comments posted on the Office of Management and Budget’s Proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance (i.e., the Uniform Guidance codified at 2 CFR 200). Many news outlets, including the New York Times, have reported that there were 500,000 comments received and, thus, the posted comments represent only 10% of the true count.

That’s probably not true - the count is likely closer to what was actually posted by OMB.

Why? Because there is a major flaw in the way that regulations.gov counts comments received that can be easily gamed to increase that denominator – and based on the patterns in the data in terms of when OMB has been receiving vs. posting comments, there’s no 450,000 backlog of comments they have yet to post.

A qualification of a viral cartoon graph of the growth in public comments on this topic.

Arbitrarily increasing the comment count is easy for users. As we’ll show, we were able to increase the comment count for a different proposed regulation by almost a million comments with just one actual comment submission. This is because the General Services Administration, which runs the site, has built-in a feature that allows gaming by design.

Here’s how to game the system to increase the count:

1. When you add an attachment instead of only using the provided comment field, you’re asked: Did you attach files that contain comments from more than one person/entity?

2. If you check “Yes”, you’re asked to provide a value in a numeric field for the Number of persons/entities represented.

3. This is where the game can happen. Whatever value you enter in that field is added to the total number of comments received.

According to the documentation, it takes until 11:59 PM ET of that day for this change to be reflected on the website, which adds to the lack of transparency about what is actually happening because it’s not instantaneously reflected in the count.

To illustrate this, we conducted a few repeatable experiments on notices that are currently open for comment. Here we share the most dramatic of those experiments where we incremented the count by 999,999 comments – this is the biggest number you can enter in that field.

We picked “Considering Lands with Wilderness Characteristics in the BLM Land Use Planning Process”. As of around 8:00 AM ET on 7/16/2026, the total number of comments received was just 310.

We submitted a simple comment with an attachment and indicated that it represented 999,999 entities:

The next day, the total count went up by roughly that amount, now showing a total of over 1 million comments received, and they had posted 301 of them:

What does this mean for the 500,000 reported comments on 2 CFR 200? They’re likely not real. But it was reasonable for media outlets to assume they were real. The only way to figure out how this number is calculated via the website is to click on “more details,” then “FAQ page,” then “How are Comments counted and posted to Regulations.gov?”. There, you’ll find an explanation, more or less. But almost no one does that. Neither of us learned it that way; we only know this because it was explained to us.

Comments have been closed for several days now, and based on the patterns in terms of when OMB is receiving vs. posting comments, we just don’t think it’s plausible that they have yet to post 450,000 – we can see when comments were submitted vs. posted, and they’ve clearly posted the vast majority of them already.

This method is misleading and GSA should fix it. It should be replaced with a count that actually represents what everyone currently assumes it does—the total number of comments that have been submitted. That way, it will be possible for those following public interest in regulations to track submitted comments, even if there’s a lag in agency posting.

When this many people are getting the meaning of a published statistic wrong, the problem is with the statistic, not the people.

Tags: general government