Most of those who recognize the acronym APA and its close cousin, APR, (with R = Rule) are regulators, politicians, or lawyers or some combination of the three. It’s certainly not a term one hears often in critical cleaning for contamination control.

But the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) is the reason that no exposure limit was required in EPA’s 2007 Significant New Alternatives Policy (SNAP) ruling on n-propyl bromide (n-PB). In keeping with the APA, the ruling contained only a recommendation for an exposure limit. And there’s a big difference between “required” and “recommended.”

THE RULE
The problem meant to be addressed by the APR was the government’s practice, before and during WWII, of creating administrative agencies with the authority to perform both legislative and judicial work. As then-president Franklin Roosevelt wisely observed, after earlier having tried to enforce the opposite opinion, this practice threatened “to develop a fourth branch of government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.”

In response to such concerns, the APR was created in 1946 to specify how administrative agencies of the United States federal government may propose and establish regulations.

It took more than ten years of contentious debate for the APR to be promulgated as Title 5 of the United States Code, beginning at Section 500. It applies to both independent agencies and executive department agencies.

WHAT THE RULE MEANS
Language within the APR states that a regulation produced by government agencies may not be “arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with the law.” What that means to you and me, and what it meant to those in the EPA involved with the 2007 SNAP decision, was “no surprises.”