The regulations for the consideration of parliamentary bills by departments have been tightened

The White House will extend the internal government experiment on automatic approval of bills to interaction with the State Duma – now if departments do not submit comments on parliamentarians’ initiatives on time, then the White House’s responses to them will be provided by the government without their objections automatically. This approach has already reduced the ability of ministries to artificially delay administrative decisions within government, and the scheme should improve interaction between the executive and legislative branches. However, a mechanism that is effective for government work may require adjustments—if parliamentarians are too active, initiatives that run counter to the course of the executive branch may fall under “auto-coordination.”

The White House continues to work to improve the executive discipline of officials – according to government decree No. 432 of April 5, 2024, ministries and departments will have to speed up work on preparing reviews of bills prepared by deputies. As the secretariat of Deputy Prime Minister and White House Chief of Staff Dmitry Grigorenko explained to Kommersant, in order to improve the procedure for preparing reviews or conclusions, an “auto-coordination” mechanism will be introduced into it. “If the ministry or department has not provided comments within five days, the draft review or conclusion is considered approved and sent to the government. The measure is aimed at increasing the executive discipline of ministries and departments,” the secretariat of Mr. Grigorenko told Kommersant.

Automatic approval, launched a year ago, on April 1, 2023, closed the possibility of delaying the submission of positions on draft documents by departments from “approval sheets” (documents indicating with which ministries the project needs to be discussed). Initially, the experiment affected a limited range of ministries and topics, but since September 2023, the principle of “no objection means approval” was extended to almost all government documents (with the exception of law enforcement agencies). The secretariat of Dmitry Grigorenko says that the “auto-coordination” mechanism has proven its effectiveness in the preparation of by-laws. Thus, since its implementation in May 2023, the number of by-laws adopted in violation of deadlines has decreased from 17% to 2.5%, which were recorded in 2022. Speeding up the process for MPs’ bills, however, carries risks. Taking into account the legislative activity of representatives of different factions (and the accelerated process of lawmaking in general – against the backdrop of sanctions, the State Duma has been adopting a record number of laws in recent years), initiatives that directly contradict the initiatives of ministries and departments may fall under “auto-coordination”.

This effect can be mitigated by a clause in the new government regulations for working with draft documents: the ministry responsible for preparing the draft review must notify the co-executor who “ignored” the request about the automatic approval of the document. If after this the co-executor submits comments of a conceptual nature, then the government apparatus can take them into account.

When asked by Kommersant whether the innovation would complicate the work of the White House itself with the State Duma (including due to the impossibility of avoiding submitting negative reviews to the projects of deputies, on whom the passage of government initiatives through parliament depends), Mr. Grigorenko’s secretariat reminded yesterday: mutual control of the timing of procedures by the government and the State Duma through the integration of IT systems of the government apparatus and the control department of the State Duma was de facto implemented about a year ago, and the regulation of this work is aimed only at the implementation of standards. In any case, ministries will have to change work patterns so as not to disrupt them. Instead of delaying the process, departments will have to discuss objections to projects – the government regulations also contain instructions in case of disputes (the minutes of the conciliation meeting are sent to the government along with the draft review). Let us recall that at the experimental stage it was not possible to test the mechanism for resolving such disputes – they did not arise, but the government noted that an internal agreement on an informal protocol for such work exists.

Diana Galieva, Oleg Sapozhkov