Late one Friday afternoon in late December -- the week before Christmas, no less -- OIRA finally released the long-awaited final version of its peer review guidelines. As the Information & Access team discusses here, the final guidelines make only modest changes to a faulty policy designed to burden the process of generating the science and other information that will become the basis of sensible regulation. Interesting to note, in light of recent events, that the final guidelines still essentially exclude the work of the National Academy of Sciences: "the principal findings, conclusions and recommendations in official reports of the National Academy of Sciences that fall under this Section are generally presumed not to require additional peer review," according to the guidelines, which also repeatedly refer agencies to the conflict of interest policies of the NAS as a good model for establishing peer review panels. The recent events that make this part of the guidelines worth noting are discussed in more detail below: the recent news that the White House pushed and pulled and generally forced an NAS panel to weaken its conclusions on the risks associated with rocket fuel ingredient perchlorate. That same panel was biased by overrepresentation of industry interests -- not the first time a National Academies panel has been tainted and tilted.