"It's unprecedented in the history of administrations to try to do something this way, and do it the right way," Fratto said.
Environmental activists and government watchdogs, on the other hand, say Bush rushed several of the rules to completion so that Obama could not easily overturn them.
Obama can summarily reverse anything not enacted by the time he takes office, a lesson Bush learned by blocking several of Clinton's last-ditch environmental measures, such as a ban on road-building in national forests.
"The Bush administration is trying to prevent Obama from doing to it what it did to Clinton," said Matt Madia, a regulatory policy analyst for OMB Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group.
Under federal rules, it takes 60 days to enact an economically "significant" regulation, which carries an estimated impact of $100 million or more. Other regulations take 30 days. Today is the deadline for "significant" regulation, though Fratto calls it "irrelevant to our process."
The process moved especially quickly in the case of oil shale. In July, the administration proposed rules that would eventually lead to leasing 2 million acres of public land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for oil shale extraction, even though serious questions remain about how much power and water -- a particularly scarce resource on much of that land -- would be needed to make it work.
The rules were finalized this week.
The American Petroleum Institute praised the move as "an integral step" toward increased domestic energy production. "It lays the groundwork, lets investors know what they're going to face going forward," said Andy Radford, a senior policy advisor for the institute.
Environmentalists cried foul. Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) said Bush had "fallen into the trap of allowing political timelines to trump sound policy."
Activists also accuse Bush of disregarding public comments on a proposal to change how the Endangered Species Act guides federal projects. Currently, federal agencies must check with government species experts before building a dam or paving a road.
Bush would allow the agencies to determine on their own if they were putting protected species in danger. The change would be "absolutely necessary if we're going to move projects forward," said William Kovacs, vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
