The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation proposed rolling back a rule adopted after the 2008 financial crisis that forces the country’s largest banks to maintain their own systems for calculating deposit insurance, betting that the agency’s own systems have caught up enough to do that work instead.
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — The FDIC proposed rescinding Part 370, the rule that has required banks with at least $2 billion in deposits and two million or more deposit accounts to build and maintain in-house IT systems able to identify exactly which depositors are insured within 24 hours of the bank’s failure. Adopted in 2016, after the 2008 crisis exposed how slowly megabanks could tell regulators who was owed what, the rule put that computing burden on the banks themselves rather than on the agency. The new proposal would drop that requirement and have the FDIC’s own systems do the calculating instead, a bet that the agency’s internal capabilities have caught up enough that duplicating the work at every large bank is no longer worth the cost. The FDIC would also start indexing the size thresholds that trigger these requirements to inflation beginning in 2029, and shorten how long it holds depositors’ personal data after a compliance review. Comments are due January 4, 2027, a roughly two-month window meant to give banks, consumer advocates, and other regulators a chance to weigh in before the rule can be finalized. Read the proposed rule.
- Internal Revenue Service / Treasury Department — The IRS scheduled a public hearing for December 16 on its proposed rules spelling out which investments qualify for Trump Accounts, the tax-advantaged children’s savings accounts created by this year’s tax law that the federal government seeds with an initial deposit. Anyone who wants to testify has to submit a written outline by November 17, and anyone who just wants to attend has to request a spot by December 11, a sequencing that is standard for IRS hearings but means the practical window for shaping the rule’s substance has effectively already closed by the time most people learn a hearing is happening. The hearing is a procedural step toward finalizing the rule, not a reopening of it. Read the notice.
- National Credit Union Administration — NCUA finalized, without any changes, a rule it first adopted as an emergency interim measure in April 2020 governing how credit unions treat Paycheck Protection Program loans: the loans get a zero percent risk weight, loans pledged as collateral to the Federal Reserve’s PPP Liquidity Facility don’t count toward a credit union’s total assets when calculating its net-worth ratio, and PPP loans don’t count as “commercial loans” under NCUA’s business-lending limits. All of that relief has already been in effect for six years, so converting it from interim to final changes nothing going forward; it mainly closes out a rulemaking file NCUA left open since the start of the pandemic. The rule took effect immediately on publication, which NCUA justifies by noting that nothing in it requires credit unions to change behavior they’ve already been following since 2020. Read the final rule.
- Commerce Department — Commerce issued a final rule retiring the title “Assistant General Counsel for Employment, Litigation and Information” from its regulations, replacing it in different sections with two new titles: “Assistant General Counsel for Litigation and Strategic Support” and “Assistant General Counsel for Information Security and Emerging Technologies.” The department calls this pure nomenclature, but it also states plainly that the old position “has been eliminated” as part of a restructuring of its Office of the General Counsel, without saying more about what else that restructuring touches. Commerce skipped notice-and-comment entirely, invoking the standard legal exemption for rules about agency management and personnel; that’s ordinary for a title change like this one, but it also means the public gets no window to ask what the broader reorganization involves. The split itself is a small, legible signal of where legal offices have been adding capacity lately: one new title for litigation support, the other for information security and emerging technology. Read the final rule.
- Federal Aviation Administration — The FAA proposed updates to its passenger facility charge regulations, the fee of up to $4.50 per flight segment that airports can add to tickets to fund approved construction projects, to bring a 2023 version of the proposal in line with the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, which passed after that earlier proposal was already issued. The changes would lower the share of federal airport-improvement grants that large airports must give up as a tradeoff for collecting the higher charge tier (from 75 to 60 percent), open the program to new project types like airport noise barriers, and double, from 30 to 60 days, how long the FAA has to object before an airport can start collecting a newly proposed charge. That timeline matters because if the FAA objects after collection has already begun, the money has to be refunded to passengers in cash rather than travel credit or miles, so giving the agency more time to weigh in upfront is meant to avoid that kind of clawback later. Comments are due January 4, 2027. Read the proposed rule.
This edition draws on the full Federal Register docket for November 4, 2026 — 81 documents in all. Categories excluded as routine absent an anomaly: standard Paperwork Reduction Act and information-collection notices, agency meeting and advisory-committee notices, SEC self-regulatory-organization filings, routine antidumping and countervailing-duty determinations, small-business disaster declarations, and routine Coast Guard safety-zone and special-local-regulation notices.
