The Federal Regulatory Meetings Webcast & Records Act

Turning "Open Meetings" Into Accessible Meetings for Sunshine Act Agencies and Federal Advisory Committees

Executive Summary

Americans are asking a basic question: "How are major federal decisions actually made?" When the government cannot show its work in a way that ordinary people can easily see and verify, distrust fills the vacuum. Recent national survey work finds only 23% of Americans trust the federal government, and only 15% believe the government is transparent.⁸ Pew's long-running trust series also shows trust remains historically low.⁷ And when people suspect information is being withheld, confidence drops further—Pew has found large majorities believe the federal government intentionally withholds information it could safely release.⁹

This problem is not abstract. Independent commissions and boards regulate communications, markets, energy, consumer protection, and many other domains. They issue rules, grant approvals, impose penalties, and set standards that shape daily life and major sectors of the economy. The public's legal right to observe key meetings exists on paper—primarily through the Government in the Sunshine Act ("Sunshine Act," 5 U.S.C. § 552b) and the Federal Advisory Committee Act ("FACA," 5 U.S.C. ch. 10)—but "open" often still means physically present, hard to access, and hard to archive and search.⁴⁵⁶

At the same time, the United States runs a largely request-driven transparency system for many agency records. Demand is rising: the federal government received about 1.5 million FOIA requests in FY 2024, and the end-of-year backlog exceeded 267,000 requests.¹⁰ A transparency regime that relies too heavily on after-the-fact requests is costly for agencies and frustrating for the public. Put simply: we are paying for transparency the slow way.

The Federal Regulatory Meetings Webcast & Records Act modernizes "open meetings" for the digital era by requiring that meetings already required to be public are also:

1. Webcast live on a publicly accessible platform,
2. Recorded and archived promptly, and
3. Published as searchable public records with standardized metadata, transcripts/captions, and linked meeting materials.¹²

This reform does not force disclosure of legitimately protected information. Closed sessions remain closed under existing law. Instead, the Act converts the public's existing right to observe into a practical, low-friction reality—like what many Americans already experience with other democratic institutions and some federal bodies today.¹²¹³

Benefits are immediate and measurable:

• Access & equity: Anyone can observe without travel, time off work, or special connections.¹⁵
• Accountability: Agencies can demonstrate procedural fairness and reduce suspicion of backroom influence.¹⁵
• Administrative efficiency: More proactive disclosure reduces repeated FOIA demand for routine meeting content.¹⁰
• Better oversight & research: A standardized, machine-readable archive enables watchdogs and Congress to analyze patterns across agencies.¹⁷
• Public legitimacy: When government decisions are visible and understandable, legitimacy and compliance improve.⁸¹⁸

In short: This Act turns "sunshine" from a legal concept into a working product.

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The Problem Statement

1) The legal framework is real—but incomplete in practice

The Sunshine Act requires many multi-member federal agencies to conduct most meetings openly and to provide notice and certain records, subject to specific exemptions.⁴ It is a cornerstone of contemporaneous, proactive disclosure—alongside FACA's open-meeting and records-access rules for advisory committees.⁵⁶ But these laws were designed in the 1970s. They did not assume ubiquitous broadband, low-cost streaming, automated captioning, or modern public expectations for online access.

As a result, "open" can still mean:

• physically attending in Washington, D.C. (or another location),
• learning about meetings through fragmented notices,
• encountering inconsistent webcast availability,
• and facing archives that are missing, temporary, or not searchable.³⁴⁵⁶

2) Public trust is low, and transparency is a top repair lever

Trust and legitimacy are not cosmetic; they are operational. When trust collapses, participation falls and compliance weakens.⁸ Pew's trust series shows historically low trust levels,⁷ and the Partnership for Public Service's national survey finds only 15% of Americans believe the government is transparent.⁸ Pew also reports that many Americans think government deliberately withholds information it could safely release.⁹

When people can't "see" decisions being made, they understandably infer:

• special access,
• hidden agendas,
• or regulatory capture.

3) FOIA demand is rising; proactive transparency is a cost-control strategy

FOIA is essential, but it is also expensive and slow when used to retrieve routine meeting information after the fact. In FY 2024, agencies received roughly 1,501,432 FOIA requests and ended the year with 267,056 backlogged requests.¹⁰
A policy that proactively publishes the most-requested categories of meeting material—recordings, agendas, presentations, and minutes—reduces repeat requests and shortens the path from public interest to public knowledge.¹⁰

The Proposed Reform

A. Policy objective

To ensure that any federal regulatory meeting that is already required by law to be open to public observation is actually accessible to the public online, recorded, and published as a usable public record.¹²

B. Scope: what is covered (and what is not)

Covered bodies

• Agencies subject to the Sunshine Act (5 U.S.C. § 552b).⁴
• Federal advisory committees subject to FACA open meeting rules (5 U.S.C. ch. 10) and implementing regulations.⁵⁶

Covered meetings

• Any meeting required by statute or regulation to be open to the public under the Sunshine Act or FACA.⁴⁵⁶

Not covered

• Meetings properly closed under existing Sunshine Act or FACA exceptions (e.g., classified or otherwise protected matters).⁴
  The Act modernizes access to open meetings; it does not rewrite the underlying exemption regime.¹²

C. Core requirements: webcast, archive, searchable records

1) Live webcast on a publicly accessible platform

Agencies must provide a real-time webcast (video+audio where practicable; audio-only as a minimum fallback) accessible without paywalls or logins.¹²
Meeting notices must include the webcast link(s), and the platform must be reasonably reliable and scalable.¹²

Model already exists: The FCC routinely broadcasts open meetings live with captioning and a text alternative, and publishes official notices referencing the webcast.¹²

2) Recording and timely archiving

Agencies must record covered meetings and post the archive promptly (e.g., within a defined number of hours/days), along with key documents such as agendas and any non-exempt materials considered.¹²¹⁵

State precedent demonstrates feasibility: Indiana's statewide open-meetings rule requires live transmissions (or recordings where streaming is not possible) and requires the recording to remain publicly available for at least 90 days, with links to agendas/minutes where applicable.¹¹

3) Searchable public records: transcript/captions + metadata

Archived meetings must be accompanied by:

• captions and/or transcripts,
• basic meeting metadata (date/time, covered body, agenda topics, participants where applicable, and links to referenced documents), and
• open, machine-readable formats for indexing and reuse.¹²¹⁷

This aligns with modern federal information policy direction that favors standardized, machine-readable publication for public use and oversight.¹⁷

D. Accessibility and inclusion

Platforms must meet federal accessibility standards (Section 508), ensuring usability for people with disabilities, including captions/transcripts for the deaf and hard of hearing and compatibility with screen readers.¹⁶

E. Implementation details: making it work

• OMB/GSA issues implementation guidance for metadata, formats, and retention baselines, minimizing fragmentation.³⁶¹⁷
• Agencies may use shared services (or approved platforms) to reduce per-agency cost and accelerate compliance.¹²

F. Enforcement and compliance

To make this real (not aspirational), the Act should pair requirements with:

• internal accountability (designated meeting transparency official),
• routine IG/GAO-style compliance checks,
• and a clear public complaint pathway for missing postings or broken archives.¹²³

Impact Analysis

1) Transparency that people can actually use

"Open meetings" without convenient access function like transparency in theory only. Webcasting and durable archives convert legal rights into practical reality—especially for people outside Washington, people with disabilities, and people without flexible work schedules.⁸¹²¹⁶

2) Lower suspicion, higher legitimacy

When agencies can show the procedural steps of decisionmaking, it becomes harder for misinformation (and plausible cynicism) to fill the gaps. The Partnership for Public Service survey suggests transparency is a major perceived deficit; closing that gap directly targets a measurable driver of distrust.⁸¹⁸

3) FOIA pressure relief and administrative efficiency

Publishing recordings, agendas, and materials up front reduces repetitive FOIA requests for routine meeting information and may reduce processing time and litigation risk over "where the record is."¹⁰
Given the scale of FY 2024 demand (1.5M requests) and backlog (267k), even modest substitution effects can produce meaningful savings in staff time and public frustration.¹⁰

4) Better oversight, better research, better governance

A standardized archive enables:

• longitudinal analysis of agency deliberation patterns,
• detection of repeated issues and decision bottlenecks,
• and stronger congressional oversight with less dependence on ad hoc requests.³¹⁷
  It also enables civic-tech tools—alerts, dashboards, topic trackers—built on meeting metadata and transcripts.¹⁷

5) Feasibility and precedent

This reform is not speculative. Multiple bodies already do it:

• FCC open meetings are webcast with captioning and published in official notices.¹²
• SEC and related committees routinely conduct Sunshine Act-noticed meetings by remote means with public webcasts.¹³
• Indiana's statewide policy operationalizes livestreaming + archiving requirements across many governing bodies.¹¹
• ACUS has explicitly urged Sunshine Act agencies to consider webcasts/audiocasts and improved online access practices.¹⁴¹⁵

6) Costs and risk management (realistic, bounded)

Costs are primarily:

• basic A/V capture,
• streaming/hosting,
• storage,
• and transcript/caption workflows.

These are now commodity services and can be pooled via shared services to keep marginal costs low.¹²¹¹
Risks (security, privacy, chilling effects) are mitigated by:

• preserving existing closed-meeting exemptions,⁴
• allowing partial closure where authorized,
• and providing clear technical-failure rules (meeting validity not dependent on perfect streaming) consistent with tested state models.¹¹

Conclusion

The United States already recognizes a public right to observe key regulatory decisionmaking through the Sunshine Act and FACA.⁴⁵ But in 2025, a right that can be exercised only by insiders, lobbyists, or those who can travel is not a functioning democratic right—it is a procedural artifact.

The Federal Regulatory Meetings Webcast & Records Act is a practical modernization:

• it keeps legitimate secrecy protections intact,⁴
• it turns "open" into "accessible,"¹²
• it reduces avoidable administrative burden,¹⁰
• and it directly targets one of the public's clearest complaints: government is not transparent.⁸

In an era of low trust, the fastest credibility gains come from reforms that are:

1. easy to understand,
2. visibly enforceable, and
3. hard to spin as partisan.

This is one of those reforms. It should be enacted urgently.

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Reference List

1. Document B (Draft Act) - Federal Regulatory Meetings Webcast & Records Act (Draft). (Uploaded file)
   Link: sandbox:/mnt/data/14%20-%20Federal%20Regulatory%20Meetings%20Webcast%20%26%20Records%20Act.docx

2. Document A (Source Library) - Federal Regulatory Meetings Webcast & Records Source Library. (Uploaded file)
   Link: sandbox:/mnt/data/Federal%20Regulatory%20Meetings%20Webcast%20%26%20Records%20Source%20Library.md.docx

3. Congressional Research Service (CRS) - Access to Government Information: An Overview (R47058). (Dec. 18, 2023)
   Link: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47058

4. 5 U.S.C. § 552b - Government in the Sunshine Act (statutory text). Cornell LII
   Link: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/552b

5. 5 U.S.C., Chapter 10 - Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) (statutory text). Cornell LII
   Link: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/chapter-10

6. 41 C.F.R. Part 102-3 - Federal Advisory Committee Management (FACA regulations). eCFR
   Link: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-41/subtitle-C/chapter-102/subchapter-A/part-102-3

7. Pew Research Center - Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024. (Jun. 24, 2024)
   Link: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/

8. Partnership for Public Service - The State of Public Trust in Government 2024. (Jun. 10, 2024)
   Link: https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The-State-of-Public-Trust-in-Government_2024.pdf

9. Pew Research Center - Trust and Distrust in America. (Jul. 22, 2019)
   Link: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/trust-and-distrust-in-america/

10. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Information Policy (OIP) - 2024 Annual FOIA Report Summary.
    Link: https://www.justice.gov/oip/media/1398111/dl

11. Indiana Code § 5-14-1.5-2.9 - Livestreaming and archiving of public meetings; notice; technological failure. FindLaw
    Link: https://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-5-state-and-local-administration/in-code-sect-5-14-1-5-2-9/

12. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) - Sunshine Act; Open Commission Meeting (example Federal Register notice referencing live webcast with captioning via FCC Live). GovInfo (Jun. 24, 2025)
    Link: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-06-24/html/2025-11569.htm

13. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - Sunshine Act Notice (Investor Advisory Committee) — meeting conducted by remote means with public webcast. (Nov. 25, 2025)
    Link: https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/meetings-events/sunshine-act-notice-iac-120425

14. Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) - Government in the Sunshine Act in the 21st Century (Draft Recommendation, Mar. 20, 2014).
    Link: https://www.acus.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Sunshine%20Act%20Draft%20Recommendation%203-20-14.pdf

15. ACUS - Government in the Sunshine Act (Proposed Amendments / Recommendation).
    Link: https://www.acus.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Sunshine%20Act%20Recommendation%20PROPOSED%20AMENDMENTS_0.pdf

16. GSA / Section508.gov - Section 508 (federal accessibility requirements for electronic information and technology).
    Link: https://www.section508.gov/

17. Public Law 115-435 - Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (incl. Open Government Data Act provisions). Congress.gov
    Link: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2046

18. OECD - Recommendation of the Council on Open Government (OECD-LEGAL-0438).
    Link: https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments/OECD-LEGAL-0438

Changelog

• December 28, 2024 — Initial draft published