30_day notice

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Federal Register / Vol. 88, No. 142 / Wednesday, July 26, 2023 / Notices

whether the information will have
practical utility; (2) the accuracy of the
agency’s estimate of the burden of the
proposed collection of information
including the validity of the
methodology and assumptions used; (3)
ways to enhance the quality, utility, and
clarity of the information to be
collected; and (4) ways to minimize the
burden of the collection of information
on those who are to respond, including
the use of appropriate automated,
electronic, mechanical, or other
technological collection techniques or
other forms of information technology.
Comments may be sent to Dr. Angela
Parham, U.S. Department of Agriculture,
National Appeals Division, 1320
Braddock Place, Fourth Floor,
Alexandria, Virginia 22314. All
comments received will be available for
public inspection during regular
business hours at the same address.
All responses to this notice will be
summarized and included in the request
for OMB approval. All comments will
become a matter of public record.
Frank Wood,
Director, National Appeals Division.
[FR Doc. 2023–15792 Filed 7–25–23; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE P

DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

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Submission for OMB Review;
Comment Request
The Department of Agriculture has
submitted the following information
collection requirement(s) to OMB for
review and clearance under the
Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995,
Public Law 104–13. Comments are
requested regarding; whether the
collection of information is necessary
for the proper performance of the
functions of the agency, including
whether the information will have
practical utility; the accuracy of the
agency’s estimate of burden including
the validity of the methodology and
assumptions used; ways to enhance the
quality, utility and clarity of the
information to be collected; and ways to
minimize the burden of the collection of
information on those who are to
respond, including through the use of
appropriate automated, electronic,
mechanical, or other technological
collection techniques or other forms of
information technology.
Comments regarding this information
collection received by August 25, 2023
will be considered. Written comments
and recommendations for the proposed
information collection should be
submitted within 30 days of the
publication of this notice on the

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following website www.reginfo.gov/
public/do/PRAMain. Find this
particular information collection by
selecting ‘‘Currently under 30-day
Review—Open for Public Comments’’ or
by using the search function.
An agency may not conduct or
sponsor a collection of information
unless the collection of information
displays a currently valid OMB control
number and the agency informs
potential persons who are to respond to
the collection of information that such
persons are not required to respond to
the collection of information unless it
displays a currently valid OMB control
number.
Food and Nutrition Service
Title: School Meals Operations Study:
Evaluation of the School-based Child
Nutrition Programs.
OMB Control Number: 0584–0607.
Summary of Collection: FNS
administers the school-based Child
Nutrition (CN) Programs (i.e., the school
meal programs) in partnership with
States and local SFAs. Section 28(a) of
the Richard B. Russell National School
Lunch Act authorizes the USDA
Secretary to conduct annual national
performance assessments of the school
meal programs. FNS plans to conduct
this annual assessment through the
SMO Study in SY 2023–2024. This
notice covers the fourth year of the SMO
Study, which will collect data from
State and local agencies on the CN
COVID–19 waivers as well as data on
state and local CN Program operations
during SY 2022–2023. Data collection
will occur in SY 2023–2024.
Need and Use of the Information: The
goal of data collection for the SMO
Study is to respond to annual research
questions on the following topics: (1)
school participation, (2) student
participation, (3) meal counting, (4)
financial management, and (5) program
integrity. This revision covers data
collection for one school year, with
revisions of surveys and administrative
data collection instruments from
previous years.
1. General descriptive data on the
characteristics of CN Programs to inform
the budget process and answer
questions about topics of current policy
interest;
2. Data on Program operations to
identify potential topics for training and
technical assistance for SFAs and State
agencies (SAs) responsible for
administering the CN Programs;
3. Administrative data to identify
program trends and predictors;
4. Information on the use and
effectiveness of the CN COVID–19
waivers.

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Description of Respondents: State,
local, and Tribal government.
Number of Respondents: 1,342.
Frequency of Responses: Reporting:
On occasion.
Total Burden Hours: 2,031.
Ruth Brown,
Departmental Information Collection
Clearance Officer.
[FR Doc. 2023–15813 Filed 7–25–23; 8:45 am]
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DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
Census Bureau
Agency Information Collection
Activities; Submission to the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) for
Review and Approval; Comment
Request; Business Trends and
Outlook Survey
The Department of Commerce will
submit the following information
collection request to the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) for
review and clearance in accordance
with the Paperwork Reduction Act of
1995, on or after the date of publication
of this notice. We invite the general
public and other Federal agencies to
comment on proposed, and continuing
information collections, which helps us
assess the impact of our information
collection requirements and minimize
the public’s reporting burden. Public
comments were previously requested
via the Federal Register on November 9,
2021 during a 60-day comment period.
This notice allows for an additional 30
days for public comments.
Agency: U.S. Census Bureau,
Department of Commerce.
Title: Business Trends and Outlook
Survey.
OMB Control Number: 0607–1022.
Form Number(s): This online survey
has no form number.
Type of Request: Regular submission,
Request for a Revision of a Currently
Approved Collection.
Number of Respondents: 858,000
annually.
Average Hours per Response: 8
minutes.
Burden Hours: 111,540.
Needs and Uses: The mission of the
U.S. Census Bureau (Census Bureau) is
to serve as the leading source of quality
data about the nation’s people and
economy; in order to fulfill this mission,
it is necessary to innovate to produce
more detailed, more frequent, and more
timely data products. The Coronavirus
pandemic was an impetus for the
creation of new data products by the
Census Bureau to measure the

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Federal Register / Vol. 88, No. 142 / Wednesday, July 26, 2023 / Notices
pandemic’s impact on the economy: the
Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS)
and the weekly Business Formation
Statistics. Policymakers and other
federal agency officials, media outlets,
and academia commended the Census
Bureau’s rapid response to their data
needs during the largest economic crisis
in recent American history. The Census
Bureau capitalized on the successes that
underlaid the high frequency data
collection and near real time data
dissemination engineered for the SBPS
by creating the Business Trends and
Outlook Survey (BTOS).
BTOS uses ongoing data collection to
produce high frequency, timely, and
granular information about current
economic conditions and trends. BTOS
is the only biweekly business tendency
survey produced by the federal
statistical system, providing unique and
detailed data during times of economic
or other emergencies. The BTOS initial
target population is all nonfarm, singlelocation employer businesses with
receipts of $1,000 or more in the United
States, the District of Columbia, and
Puerto Rico. The current sample
consists of approximately 1.2 million
single-unit businesses split into six
panels. Data collection occurs every two
weeks, and businesses in each panel are
asked to report once every 12 weeks for
one year. Current data from BTOS are
representative of all single location
employer businesses (excluding farms)
in the U.S. economy and are published
every two weeks. The data are available
at the national and state levels, in
addition to the 25 most-populous
Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs).
North American Industry Classification
System (NAICS) sector, subsector, and
state by sector are also published, as are
employment size class, and sector by
employment size class data, according
to the same timeline.
Data from BTOS are currently used to
provide timely data to understand the
economic conditions being experienced
by single unit businesses; BTOS
provides near real time data on key
items such as revenue, paid employees,
hours worked as well as inventories
which is being added in for the second
collection cycle. BTOS also provides
high level information on the changing
share of businesses facing difficulties
stemming from supply chain issues,
interest rate changes, or weather events.
Previously, there had been few data
sources available to policymakers,
media outlets, and academia that
delivered near real-time insights into
economic trends and outlooks. BTOS
data has been used by the Small
Business Administration to evaluate the
impact of regulatory changes. Use of the

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BTOS data (or additional requirements)
is being determined by the Economic
Development Agency (EDA) to
understand the impact of natural
disasters on U.S. businesses for the EDA
to then guide the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) and/or
policymakers in assisting in economic
recovery support missions.
In the approved OMB package for
BTOS, the Census Bureau proposed an
incremental path to reach the full scope
of BTOS. This request is the first scope
expansion to propose adding multi-unit
businesses (those with more than one
location or establishment) to BTOS.
BTOS is currently limited in scope to
include only single-unit businesses.
Despite comprising a relatively small
share of the total number of businesses,
multi-unit (MU) businesses are
responsible for most of the employment,
payroll, and revenue/sales in the United
States and contribute disproportionately
to economic activity. In addition, MU
businesses are on average larger than
single-unit businesses. Adding these
businesses would help ensure that
BTOS results are representative of the
full economy. The Census Bureau still
proposes an incremental path to the
final scope of BTOS in order to learn at
each implemented stage and to allow for
modifications based on lessons learned
or internal/external stakeholder
feedback in prior iterations.
For the first year of BTOS, the content
remained unchanged at 26 questions.
After two rounds of cognitive testing
and guidance from data users, the
Census Bureau will move to a set of core
questions and supplemental content,
when needed. In addition to adding
multi-unit businesses, the Census
Bureau also proposes to change the
content for the second year of BTOS
collection. The majority of the content
will be referred to as the core content
and comprises most questions included
on the BTOS instrument during the first
year of collection. Core content includes
measures of economic activity that are
broadly applicable across non-farm
sectors and are important across the
business cycle and during economic or
other emergencies. Core content is also
complementary to key items found on
other Economic surveys, such as
revenues, employees, hours, and
inventories. Core items may also
include concepts that may become core
topics. The core content remains an at
approximately six minutes of burden. A
skip pattern will be added for the new
core concept of inventories to avoid
additional burden if a business does not
carry inventories.
Supplemental content will be
included on the instrument as needed

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and with a regular periodicity. It will be
designed to provide urgently needed
data on an emerging or current issue.
The supplement will include a set of
questions that perform a deeper dive
into a focused topic that requires timely
data. The Census Bureau estimates the
supplemental questions will impose an
additional 2 minutes of burden.
Consideration for core and
supplemental concepts will be based on
data consistency, how the questions
performed on the current BTOS, the
results of cognitive testing, stakeholder
feedback, and the ability to collect
complementary items on monthly,
quarterly, annual, or census programs to
provide context and benchmarking.
Thus, the Census Bureau is requesting
three years of approval from OMB to
expand the scope of BTOS to include
multi-unit businesses and adjust the
core and include supplemental content.
The Census Bureau will submit a
request to OMB including 30 days of
public comment announced in the
Federal Register to receive approval to
make any substantive revisions to the
content or methods of the proposed
survey, including incremental scope
changes. It is likely new supplemental
content will be chosen for each year and
an updated instrument will be
submitted to OMB for review along with
a 30-day Federal Register Notice.
The BTOS is a survey with bi-weekly
data collection and publication;
estimates produced from the BTOS are
released as experimental data products.
The SBPS demonstrated the ability of
the Census Bureau to collect and
publish high frequency, timely data
during a national economic emergency.
The BTOS capitalizes on this success
and provides regularly occurring high
frequency data products and measures
of quality based on national and
subnational representative samples
using transparent methodology. The
BTOS produces data continuously, in
part as a response to feedback on the
SBPS that longer time series would have
been useful to contextualize the
pandemic impact. Continuous data
allows for the measurement of economic
trends during all phases of the business
cycle as well as during times of
economic and other emergencies. The
BTOS uniquely provides the ability to
produce these data and associated
measures of quality.
The Census Bureau proposes to add
multi-unit businesses to the target
population of the BTOS beginning in
the second year of data collection
starting on September 11, 2023. Adding
these businesses would help ensure that
BTOS results are representative of the
full economy. BTOS will continue to

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Federal Register / Vol. 88, No. 142 / Wednesday, July 26, 2023 / Notices

publish data using standard business
size class categories and will research
the expansion of additional size classes
for publication, thus continuing to be
responsive to stakeholders whose
missions include supporting small
business research, analysis and
advocacy and reflecting numerous
requests from data users to monitor
economic trends impacting small
businesses. As with other Census
Bureau data products, detailed
methodology and measures of quality
will be published for BTOS data
products. BTOS products will be based
on representative samples drawn from
the full universe of businesses, making
them unique and the results reliable
when compared to other high frequency
business survey data such as those
produced in the private sector.
Core content on the BTOS is used to
create high frequency economic
measures including inputs (for example,
employment and hours), outcomes (for
example, output prices) and conditions
faced by businesses (for example,
demand). Survey responses are used to
create national level as well as industry
and geographically detailed diffusions
indexes which are easily interpretable
as measures of change over time for
these core measures. No other federal
statistical data products exist which
provide high frequency measures such
as those produced by BTOS.
Frequency: Bi-weekly.
Respondent’s Obligation: Voluntary.
Legal Authority: Title 13 U.S.C.,
sections 131 and 182.
This information collection request
may be viewed at www.reginfo.gov.
Follow the instructions to view the
Department of Commerce collections
currently under review by OMB.
Written comments and
recommendations for the proposed
information collection should be
submitted within 30 days of the
publication of this notice on the
following website www.reginfo.gov/
public/do/PRAMain. Find this
particular information collection by
selecting ‘‘Currently under 30-day
Review—Open for Public Comments’’ or
by using the search function and
entering either the title of the collection
or the OMB Control Number 0607–1022.

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

Foreign-Trade Zones Board

Foreign-Trade Zones Board

[Order No. 2147]

[Order No. 2146]

Reorganization of Foreign-Trade Zone
84 (Expansion of Service Area) Under
Alternative Site Framework; Houston,
Texas

Reorganization of Foreign-Trade Zone
84 (Expansion of Service Area) Under
Alternative Site Framework; Houston,
Texas

Pursuant to its authority under the
Foreign-Trade Zones Act of June 18,
1934, as amended (19 U.S.C. 81a–81u),
the Foreign-Trade Zones Board (the
Board) adopts the following Order:
Whereas, the Foreign-Trade Zones
(FTZ) Act provides for ‘‘. . . the
establishment . . . of foreign-trade
zones in ports of entry of the United
States, to expedite and encourage
foreign commerce, and for other
purposes,’’ and authorizes the Board to
grant to qualified corporations the
privilege of establishing foreign-trade
zones in or adjacent to U.S. Customs
and Border Protection ports of entry;
Whereas, the Board adopted the
alternative site framework (ASF) (15
CFR 400.2(c)) as an option for the
establishment or reorganization of
zones;
Whereas, the Port of Houston
Authority, grantee of Foreign-Trade
Zone 84, submitted an application to the
Board (FTZ Docket B–8–2023, docketed
January 23, 2023) for authority to
expand the service area of the zone to
include Wharton County, Texas, as
described in the application, adjacent to
the Houston Customs and Border
Protection port of entry;
Whereas, notice inviting public
comment was given in the Federal
Register (88 FR 4969, January 26, 2023)
and the application has been processed
pursuant to the FTZ Act and the Board’s
regulations; and,
Whereas, the Board adopts the
findings and recommendations of the
examiners’ report, and finds that the
requirements of the FTZ Act and the
Board’s regulations are satisfied;
Now, therefore, the Board hereby
orders:
The application to reorganize FTZ 84
to expand the service area under the
ASF is approved, subject to the FTZ Act
and the Board’s regulations, including
section 400.13, and to the Board’s
standard 2,000-acre activation limit for
the zone.

Pursuant to its authority under the
Foreign-Trade Zones Act of June 18,
1934, as amended (19 U.S.C. 81a–81u),
the Foreign-Trade Zones Board (the
Board) adopts the following Order:
Whereas, the Foreign-Trade Zones
(FTZ) Act provides for ‘‘. . . the
establishment . . . of foreign-trade
zones in ports of entry of the United
States, to expedite and encourage
foreign commerce, and for other
purposes,’’ and authorizes the Board to
grant to qualified corporations the
privilege of establishing foreign-trade
zones in or adjacent to U.S. Customs
and Border Protection ports of entry;
Whereas, the Board adopted the
alternative site framework (ASF) (15
CFR 400.2(c)) as an option for the
establishment or reorganization of
zones;
Whereas, the Port of Houston
Authority, grantee of Foreign-Trade
Zone 84, submitted an application to the
Board (FTZ Docket B–4–2023, docketed
January 11, 2023) for authority to
expand the service area of the zone to
include Waller County, Texas, as
described in the application, adjacent to
the Houston Customs and Border
Protection port of entry;
Whereas, notice inviting public
comment was given in the Federal
Register (88 FR 2602, January 17, 2023)
and the application has been processed
pursuant to the FTZ Act and the Board’s
regulations; and,
Whereas, the Board adopts the
findings and recommendations of the
examiners’ report, and finds that the
requirements of the FTZ Act and the
Board’s regulations are satisfied;
Now, therefore, the Board hereby
orders:
The application to reorganize FTZ 84
to expand the service area under the
ASF is approved, subject to the FTZ Act
and the Board’s regulations, including
section 400.13, and to the Board’s
standard 2,000-acre activation limit for
the zone.

Sheleen Dumas,
Department PRA Clearance Officer, Office of
the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs,
Commerce Department.

Dated: July 21, 2023.
Lisa W. Wang,
Assistant Secretary for Enforcement and
Compliance, Alternate Chairman, ForeignTrade Zones Board.

Dated: July 21, 2023.
Lisa W. Wang,
Assistant Secretary for Enforcement and
Compliance, Alternate Chairman, ForeignTrade Zones Board.

[FR Doc. 2023–15812 Filed 7–25–23; 8:45 am]

[FR Doc. 2023–15804 Filed 7–25–23; 8:45 am]

[FR Doc. 2023–15803 Filed 7–25–23; 8:45 am]

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