SDOs like the CP.
Rosen 16 – former Professor of Law at Georgetown University, Director of the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section at the American Bar Association, J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Jeffrey A. Rosen, “Report to the House of Delegates,” American Bar Association, https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/house_of_delegates/ebook-of-resolutions-with-reports/2016_hod_annual_meeting_electronic_report_book1.pdf#page=403
Both the National Technology Transfer Act of 1995 and Office of Management and Budget Circular A-119 encourage federal agencies to rely on private voluntary consensus standards. 8 Accordingly, agencies have, on a great many occasions, worked with private standards development organizations (SDOs) and incorporated privately drafted standards by reference into thousands of federal regulations. These privately drafted standards unquestionably have significant public value. SDOs often support and sometimes even seek to have their privately drafted standards adopted as the law of the land. And agencies indisputably find it useful to draw upon this stock of standards.
The Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) presently contains nearly 9,500 agency incorporations by reference of standards. These "IBR rules" have the same legal force as any other government rule.9 Some IBR rules incorporate material from other federal agencies or state entities, but thousands of these rules are privately drafted standards prepared by SDOs. 10 SDOs range from the ASTM International (formerly the Association for Testing and Materials) to the Society of Automotive Engineers and the American Petroleum Institute.