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Notices
Federal Register Vol. 86, No. 13
Friday, January 22, 2021

This section of the FEDERAL REGISTER
contains documents other than rules or proposed rules that are applicable to the public. Notices of hearings and investigations, committee meetings, agency decisions and rulings, delegations of authority, filing of petitions and applications and agency statements of organization and functions are examples of documents appearing in this section.

ADMINISTRATIVE CONFERENCE OF
THE UNITED STATES
Adoption of Recommendations Administrative Conference of the United States.
ACTION: Notice.
AGENCY:

The Administrative Conference of the United States adopted six recommendations and one official statement at its virtual Seventy-third Plenary Session. The appended recommendations address: a Rules on Rulemakings; b Protected Materials in Public Rulemaking Dockets; c Agency Appellate Systems; d Government Contract Bid Protests Before Agencies;
e Publication of Policies Governing Agency Adjudicators; and f Agency Litigation Webpages. The official statement addresses Agency use of Artificial Intelligence.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: For Recommendations 20201 and 20202, Todd Rubin; for Recommendation 20203, Gavin Young; for Recommendations 20204 and 20206, and Statement 20, Mark Thomson; and for Recommendation 20205, Leigh Anne Schriever. For each of these actions the address and telephone number are: Administrative Conference of the United States, Suite 706 South, 1120 20th Street NW, Washington, DC
20036; Telephone 2024802080.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The Administrative Conference Act, 5 U.S.C.
591596, established the Administrative Conference of the United States. The Conference studies the efficiency, adequacy, and fairness of the administrative procedures used by Federal agencies and makes recommendations to agencies, the President, Congress, and the Judicial Conference of the United States for procedural improvements 5 U.S.C.
5941. For further information about the Conference and its activities, see www.acus.gov. At its virtual Seventy-

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third Plenary Session on December 16
17, 2020, the Assembly of the Conference adopted six recommendations and one official statement.
Recommendation 20201, Rules on Rulemakings. This recommendation encourages agencies to consider issuing rules governing their rulemaking procedures. It identifies subjects that agencies should consider addressing in their rules on rulemakingswithout prescribing any particular procedures and it urges agencies to solicit public input on these rules and make them publicly available.
Recommendation 20202, Protected Materials in Public Rulemaking Dockets.
This recommendation offers agencies best practices for protecting sensitive personal and confidential commercial information in public rulemaking dockets. It identifies, in particular, best practices for agencies to use when redacting, summarizing, and aggregating comments that contain such information. It also encourages agencies to provide public notices that discourage commenters from submitting such information in the first place.
Recommendation 20203, Agency Appellate Systems. This recommendation offers agencies best practices to improve administrative review of hearing-level adjudicative decisions with respect to case selection, decision-making process and procedures, management oversight, and public disclosure and transparency. In doing so, it encourages agencies to identify the objectives of such review and structure their appellate systems to serve those objectives.
Recommendation 20204, Government Contract Bid Protests Before Agencies. This recommendation suggests improvements to the procedures governing agency-level procurement contract disputes commonly called bid protestsunder the Federal Acquisition Regulation and agency-specific regulations to make those procedures more simple, transparent, and predictable. It urges agencies to clarify what types of decisions can be the subjects of agencylevel bid protests, what processes and deadlines will govern such protests, and who in the agency will decide such protests; make it easier for protesters to get information about the decisions they
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protest; and publish more data on agency-level protests.
Recommendation 20205, Publication of Policies Governing Agency Adjudicators. This recommendation encourages agencies to disclose policies governing the appointment and oversight of adjudicators that bear on their impartiality and constitutional status. It offers best practices on how to provide descriptions of, and access to, such policies on agency websites.
Recommendation 20206, Agency Litigation Webpages. This recommendation offers agencies best practices for making their federal court filings and relevant court opinions available to the public on their websites, with particular emphasis on materials from litigation dealing with agency regulatory programs. It provides guidance on the types of litigation materials that will be of greatest interest to the public and on how agencies can disseminate the materials in a way that makes them easy to find.
Statement 20, Agency Use of Artificial Intelligence. This statement identifies issues agencies should consider when adopting, revamping, establishing policies and practices governing, and regularly monitoring artificial intelligence systems. Among the topics it addresses are transparency, harmful biases, technical capacity, procurement, privacy, security, decisional authority, and oversight.
The Appendix below sets forth the full texts of these six recommendations and the official statement. The Conference will transmit the recommendations and statement to affected agencies, Congress, and the Judicial Conference of the United States, as appropriate. The recommendations and statement are not binding, so the entities to which they are addressed will make decisions on their implementation.
The Conference based these recommendations and the statement on research reports that are posted at:
https www.acus.gov/meetings-andevents/plenary-meeting/73rd-plenarysession. Committee-proposed drafts of the recommendations and statement, and public comments received in advance of the plenary session, are also available using the same link.

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