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President Bush may be a lame duck, but he wields considerable influence as his administration draws to a close. By all accounts, Bush's people are taking a savvy approach to the rule-making mechanisms of the executive branch to ensure that large parts of his agenda survive, or even outlast, the administration of President-elect Obama.

These late rules, issued by an outgoing administration between Election Day and the inauguration, have come to be known as "midnight regulations" and are a fixture of modern presidencies. The Federal Register, where the rules are published, thickened in the waning weeks of George H.W. Bush's presidency with about 100 new rules. One allowed truckers to stay on the road longer between breaks, and another opened the way for businesses to exceed emissions limits on pollutants that cause acid rain. President Clinton, described as a "whirling dervish" in his lame-duck days, left the younger Bush chafing at stricter water quality and workplace ergonomics rules.

Now it is Bush's turn to embed his legacy in the next administration. On deck are new standards for vehicle fuel economy, food safety, fisheries, and pollution from mines and farms. Significant changes to employee medical leave rules and to port security regulations are also likely, according to the government watchdog group OMB Watch. One proposed rule would make it easier for coal-mining companies to raze the tops of mountains and dump the waste into streams. Another would make it harder for workers to claim unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, OMB Watch says.

Environmental and consumer advocacy groups are nervously monitoring the administration's closing moves, given the president's generally favorable attitude toward industry. Organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Food & Water Watch predict that the rules, some of which have been in the works for years, will weaken pollution standards and prioritize industry wish lists over the well-being of consumers.

"There are surprises that will come up as they go out the door that we're keeping our eyes out for," said Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera. "It feels like dangerous territory on that front."

On the industry side, officials at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, representing 3 million small and large companies, said they don't expect significant changes from the current administration in the next two months. The influx of Democrats will stymie rather than spur Bush's midnight activity, they say.

"I think Bush will do some things that would be helpful, but since we'll have a unified government, it's less clear that there's going to be a groundswell of new rules like we saw in the Clinton years," said Bill Kovacs, vice president of the chamber's environment, technology, and regulatory-affairs division. Kovacs is hoping for a proposed rule that would exempt power plants from having to add new pollution-control technologies when expanding their existing facilities.

Although many of the new rules will likely involve deregulation, not all business groups think that they're in the clear. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy organization, is keeping an eye on proposed Internet gambling restrictions. CEI argues that the rules would unfairly burden banks and credit unions with oversight and reporting duties during a deepening financial crisis.

Recently, the institute joined an unlikely coalition of free-market and environmental groups that asked Bush to abstain from issuing late regulations. In a letter posted on October 31, the eight groups objected not to the language of any particular rule but to the overall practice, arguing that midnight regulations subvert the democratic process by allowing the executive branch to act without the usual political checks. "You should set a good example and avoid leaving your [successor] with the type of headaches you inherited," the letter said, referring to the flurry of midnight regulations issued by Clinton.

One signatory was Eli Lehrer, a senior fellow at CEI. Lehrer, who calls himself an "ardent supporter" of Bush, said he simply wants the president to stick to his promise to minimize midnight rules. His co-signers included an official from the National Wildlife Federation, as well as a chief economist at FreedomWorks, another free-market group.

"On balance, I would support more Bush regulations than I would oppose, but that isn't the issue," Lehrer said. "The issue is on principle. These last-minute regulations after an election are done without the most important check -- the ballot box. It's regulation without representation."

White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten has done his best to bat down the assumption that late rules are imminent. He sent out a memo in May promising to "resist the historical tendency of administrations to increase regulatory activity in their final months." Such rules, Bolten wrote, will be issued only "in extraordinary circumstances." He set a deadline of November 1, three days before the election, for the submission of finalized rules.

For now, aides say that Obama will focus on overturning Bush's push for oil and gas drilling near national parks in Utah and limits on embryonic-stem-cell research. But any rules published as "final" in the Federal Register could be difficult for Obama to reverse, according to Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch. Obama's options involve asking the Cabinet secretary to forge a new rule through the exhaustive rule-making process, which can take months or even years. Obama could also suspend any final rules -- but only for "good reason," Bass said -- that have not yet been put into practice.

Bass interprets Bolten's memo as part of a larger strategy to enact new rules early enough in Bush's final year that they can't be overturned by the incoming Obama administration. Experts in the field say that significant rule changes are expected to start appearing next week.

Under the little-used Congressional Review Act, Obama also has the option to turn to Congress for a filibuster-proof, non-amendable "resolution of disapproval." According to Bass, invoking the act requires Congress and the president to cooperate -- a rare circumstance: Congress has successfully employed the act just once, to overturn Clinton's workplace ergonomics rule soon after Bush took office in 2001.

Obama's chief spokesperson, Stephanie Cutter, would not directly address the issue of midnight regulations, saying in an e-mail that the Obama team's relationship with the White House has been "good" and "cooperative."

Many scholars worry that the rush of last-minute rules will overwhelm the Office of Management and Budget, the agency assigned to assess them. According to a study by the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit free-market research organization at George Mason University, OMB's budget and staffing remain constant during the midnight period, while the workload swells to enormous proportions.

For these reasons, Veronique de Rugy, a senior fellow at Mercatus, suggests eliminating or capping the number of midnight regulations. She also supports limiting the budget allotted for implementing late rules, or allowing the new president to easily repeal them.

Defenders of midnight regulations appear to be in the minority. Shopfloor.org, a blog supported by the National Association of Manufacturers, said it opposes bad rule-making but believes that it won't happen under Bush. The group also argued that a ban on the regulations would lengthen the lame-duck period of future presidents.

"If the administration calls it quits now, the November deadline will become a July deadline soon enough," the association's blog argued. "Eventually some activists will demand that future administrations take no action at all in their final year in office."

The term "midnight regulations" dates to the "midnight judges" appointed by John Adams in the final weeks of his presidency in 1801. It was President Carter who pioneered today's method of flooding the zone with last-minute rules. During his last 10 weeks in office, the total number of pages printed in the Federal Register swelled to what was then a record 24,531, according to a Cato Institute study. Clinton in his final days upped the ante to 26,000 pages.

"Just before a president leaves office, you would think that if his party loses he wouldn't have any power," de Rugy said. "He in fact still has a lot of power to do a lot of things, and that raises an interesting question: Should a president who has been booted out of office still have the ability to pass laws?"