The Bush administration is refusing to inform the public about the justifications for deciding which regulatory protections were added to its hit list of safeguards to be weakened or eliminated. The White House invited industry last February to nominate regulatory protections to be added to a hit list, and industry groups responded with 189 discrete calls for regulatory rollbacks. The White House reported those nominations in December and announced that it would submit the industry nominations to the relevant agencies for their review. The White House released the final version of its 2004-05 anti-regulatory hit list on March 9, with a report detailing 76 out of 189 items from the industry-nominated list that received the endorsement of the administration as "regulatory reform priorities." The White House declined, however, to provide any justification for the administration's choices in narrowing down the 189 items to the 76 that will ultimately receive agency attention. Instead, the White House's report simply summarized industry's reasons for wanting rules on the hit list. A series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by OMB Watch has uncovered evidence that agencies did provide the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) with justifications for the rules that appeared on the final hit list -- justifications that OMB is refusing to share with the public. OMB Watch filed FOIA requests with OMB and every agency that was required to review industry's hit-list nominations. Most agencies are refusing to disclose their correspondence with OMB about the hit list. Two agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), did respond with partial disclosures. From the documents these agencies provided, it is clear that OMB instructed agencies to assign a priority status to each reform nomination and to provide a justification for that status. Regulations the agency thought were high priorities to reform received a "1," while those the agency did not wish to pursue received a "3." OMB presumably has the justifications for each reform nomination in a chart. OMB failed to release this document with the announcement of the final hit list and declined to reveal it when OMB Watch filed its FOIA request. An example of the information that the administration is suppressing appears below: