The Securities and Exchange Commission today proposed rescinding Rule 14a-8, the federal rule that has long let shareholders force a company-wide vote on social, environmental and governance proposals at annual meetings, making it the most significant document to clear the Federal Register today.
- Securities and Exchange Commission — The SEC proposed rescinding Rule 14a-8 entirely, which would end the federal requirement that companies put qualifying shareholder proposals on the ballot and instead leave those questions to state corporate law and each company’s own governance documents. It paired that proposal with a companion rule, Proxy Solicitation Modernization, which would drop the requirement that companies deliver annual reports before a shareholder vote and shorten how long brokers must search for a company’s beneficial owners; together the two proposals would remove federal minimums that have applied uniformly across all public companies and hand that oversight to fifty different state codes instead, which is why the pairing carries more weight than either proposal would alone. Comments on the proxy modernization piece are due November 20, giving investors, companies and state regulators roughly two months to weigh in before either rule could be finalized. Read the notice.
- Executive Office of the President — President Trump signed Executive Order 14428, revoking a 2009 Chesapeake Bay directive outright and instructing the secretaries of War, Interior, Agriculture and Commerce, along with the Homeland Security secretary and the EPA administrator, to prioritize funding for measurable, science-based nutrient-reduction projects over broader bay-restoration spending. The order also directs EPA to work with the bay’s watershed jurisdictions to identify and encourage repeal of local stormwater fees, which the administration frames as unjustified “rain taxes” on residents; giving the Department of War a formal seat alongside the conventional environmental agencies in a regional water-quality program is the kind of institutional detail worth watching for what it signals about how funding and authority get redistributed going forward. Because the order revokes the prior directive rather than amending it, the previous oversight structure ends immediately rather than phasing out. Read the order.
- Homeland Security Department — DHS published a new Finding of Mass Influx of Aliens, extending for another 180 days an authorization that began as a 60-day emergency measure in January 2025 and has now been renewed three times without ever lapsing back into ordinary immigration procedure. The prior extension expired September 17 and this one was not published until September 21, leaving a four-day gap during which the underlying finding technically was not in effect, worth asking why an authorization meant to be temporary keeps getting renewed after the fact rather than allowed to run its course or replaced with a different legal mechanism. The finding relies on 8 U.S.C. 1103(a), the provision that lets DHS request state and local law-enforcement assistance during a mass-migration event, which is a substantial authority to keep active on a rolling basis rather than through ordinary appropriations or legislation. Read the notice.
- Executive Office of the President — A presidential memorandum on Restoring Reciprocity in Government Procurement directs the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Trade Representative and federal agency heads to identify and remove Canadian-origin products from federal purchasing wherever the law allows, citing Canadian “Buy Canadian” policies and provincial barriers that the administration says lock out U.S. companies while Canadian firms keep access to more than $280 billion a year in federal contracts. The memo sets no implementation deadline, which matters because an open-ended instruction to “take all steps permitted by applicable law” gives agencies wide discretion over both timing and scope with no public checkpoint to measure compliance against. The Trade Representative must monitor Canada’s treatment of U.S. goods and report back on whether the restrictions should ease, though the memo does not say when that report is due. Read the memorandum.
- Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board — The Board disclosed that after the Justice Department and FBI submitted 22 additional requests to postpone releasing records tied to five civil-rights cold cases, it approved only three of them. The notice exists because the 2018 law that created the Board requires it to publish these determinations within 14 days, a transparency requirement that makes it possible to see, in a single document, how often federal law enforcement asks to keep decades-old civil-rights records sealed and how often an independent board pushes back. Denying the large majority of the postponement requests is itself notable, since it suggests the Board found most of DOJ and the FBI’s stated justifications for continued secrecy unpersuasive. Read the notice.
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission — The CFTC reopened the comment period on a proposal to exempt its CFTC-59 Insider Risk Program Records System from key Privacy Act protections, but for only ten additional days after the original comment window had already been closed since June. A Privacy Act exemption of this kind determines whether employees or contractors named in an internal insider-threat database can find out what the CFTC has recorded about them or challenge inaccurate entries, so the scope of the exemption carries real stakes for the people it covers even though the filing itself is procedural. A ten-day reopening arriving more than three months after the original window closed gives the public comparatively little additional time to respond relative to the length of the delay that preceded it. Read the notice.
Editorial note: This edition was compiled after screening all 76 documents published in the Federal Register on September 21, 2026. Excluded as routine: information-collection and OMB/PRA notices, antidumping and countervailing-duty determinations, SEC self-regulatory-organization rule filings, Coast Guard safety zones, DEA individual-practitioner decision-and-order notices, routine advisory-committee meeting notices, and routine FERC filings and funding announcements that did not otherwise trip an institutional or anomaly signal.
Bureaucracy Times 