The Unified Agenda is a special feature in the Federal Register that, every six months, lists the regulatory priorities of the agencies, notes the stage of the process in which the priority items are currently projected to be, and identifies which items are being removed from the agency agenda. Although most discussions of agenda items refer to them collectively as rulemaking items, the agenda is not exactly a rulemaking tracking system. Instead, most agencies use the Unified Agenda as an "agenda" in the broadest sense of the term, and they list major priority projects and key events in addition to activities that are intended to result in actual regulations. Some examples:

• The Food and Drug Administration uses the Unified Agenda to announce the progress of its reviews of drugs' over-the-counter status.
• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has used the Unified Agenda to post major undertakings and events in the life of what might otherwise be considered a single rulemaking endeavor. For example, in the Spring 2004 agenda, NHTSA announced the need to rescind its first effort at a tire pressure monitoring system rule as a UA entry with its own RIN under the completed actions category, and it also announced the launch of efforts to produce a new TPMS rule in a separate UA entry, with a separate RIN.
• Agencies are required to announce the progress of their reviews of existing regulations under the Regulatory Flexibility Act, 5 U.S.C. § 610. Many agencies opt to post announcements of these "section 610 reviews" in the UA.

As the standard preamble suggests, the UA is not the exclusive source of comprehensive information about regulatory priorities:      The activities included in the Agenda are, in general, those that will have a regulatory action within the next 12 months. Agencies may include activities that will have a longer timeframe than 12 months. Agency agendas also show actions or reviews completed or withdrawn since the last Unified Agenda. The agendas do not contain regulations that were excluded under Executive Order 12866, such as those concerning military or foreign affairs functions or regulations related to agency organization, management, or personnel matters.      Agencies prepared entries for this publication to give the public notice of their plans to review, propose, and issue regulations. They have tried to predict their activities over the next 12 months as accurately as possible, but dates and schedules are subject to change. Agencies may withdraw some of the regulations now under development, and they may issue or propose other regulations not included in their agendas. Agency actions in the rulemaking process may occur before or after the dates they have listed. The Unified Agenda does not create a legal obligation on agencies to adhere to schedules in this publication or to confine their regulatory activities to those regulations that appear within it. Instead, the UA is less like a tracking system than an announcement board. Despite the actual season of the month in which an agenda is published, it is often referred to as either the “fall” or “spring” agenda of a given year.