Thanks a lot for your comment, liilly! 

We agree with your assessment. We were also aware of the timelines for law students (especially in the US), but decided to take our chances. This was our reasoning:

• The funder behind this project agreed to provide funding only if we found suitable applicants (given the late announcement). So in the scenario where we don't find any applicants after all, we will only have lost some time announcing and advertising the opportunity. We thought it was worth a try.
• The fellowship is also open to applicants who are not US law school students, which significantly increases our applicant pool.
• If the fellowship goes well despite the late announcemment, it will be much easier for us to secure early funding for future fellowships. Having received 864 applications for this fellowship (of which 122 from the US), we're optimistic that this will be the case!

Multiple factors affected the timing of the announcement, some of which were outside of our control, but we hope to have more predictable schedules as our capacity (staff and funding) increases.

Thanks again!

Thank you so much!

Update: We've announced the winners!

Thanks for this question as well. You're right that other regulations, statutes, and advisory documents guide how regulatory analysis is conducted. 

On the statutory side there is the Regulatory Flexibility Act, the  Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the Information Quality Act, to name a few. 

On the regulatory/executive side, there are several  executive orders besides 12866 that contain analytical requirements. OMB has issued other guiding documents like this, and the GAO has its own Greenbook. And some agencies have adopted their own guidelines and requirements.

We chose to highlight A-4 because the most recent Executive Order calling for alterations to these processes specifically cited Circular A-4 as a potential target for alteration.

Thanks for the patience here. We've reached out to our legal advisors on this questions and hope to have an answer soon. If you (or anyone else reading this) has a particular person in mind who this question would be relevant to, please reach out at [email protected].

Thanks for the interest, Jaime. Unfortunately only US residents are eligible to apply for the competition. If you (or others outside the US) would nonetheless like to weigh in on the comments we plan to draft following the competition, please reach out to us at [email protected] to discuss. 

A side note: Non-US residents are eligible to apply for LPP's other programing including the upcoming Summer Institute. (Applications due June 17th)