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Federal Advisory Committee Act

United States statute

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 17, 2026
Entity authorityQ5439996 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) (Pub. L. 92–463, 86 Stat. 770, enacted October 6, 1972), is a United States federal law which governs the behavior of federal advisory committees. In particular, it has special emphasis on open meetings, chartering, public involvement, and reporting.

The Committee Management Secretariat of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) oversees the government-wide FACA program.

Overview

Advisory committees

The Federal Advisory Committee Act defines advisory committee as "any committee, board, commission, council, conference, panel, task force, or other similar group" that dispenses "advice or recommendations" to the President of the United States, and excludes bodies that also exercise operational functions. They are provisional bodies and have the advantage of being able to circumvent bureaucracy and collect a range of opinions.

Committees composed of full-time officers or employees of the federal government do not count as advisory committees under FACA. Furthermore, the following organizations are also not governed by FACA: the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, the Commission on Government Procurement, the National Academy of Sciences, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Reserve, and the National Academy of Public Administration.

Purpose

In drafting FACA, legislators wanted to ensure that advice by the various advisory committees is "objective and accessible to the public" by formalizing the process for "establishing, operating, overseeing, and terminating" the committees.

The Committee Management Secretariat at the GSA is charged with monitoring compliance.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Federal Advisory Committee Act” as united States statute. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Federal, Advisory and Committee.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1972—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Federal, Advisory and Committee providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Federal Advisory Committee Act”, the useful work is to connect “united States statute” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5439996. VIAF identifies the subject as 175382580. The Library of Congress control number is n79034274. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972.

Critical limits

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Federal Advisory Committee Act” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.