The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation used a board meeting called on less than the customary seven days’ notice, with no stated reason for skipping that window, to advance two rules reshaping bank mergers and interstate branching while quietly retiring an internal policy on how examiners talk to the banks they supervise.
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation: The FDIC board met with less than seven days’ advance notice, short of the window the Government in the Sunshine Act normally requires so the public has some warning before a federal board acts, and today’s notice offers no explanation for the shortened timeline. At that meeting the board advanced two proposed rules, Merger Transactions and State Bank Parity, and separately voted to rescind the board’s prior statement on how examiners communicate supervisory findings to banks. Nothing in the record explains why the meeting needed to happen on short notice, which is the kind of procedural shortcut worth flagging even when the underlying policy changes turn out to be defensible on their own terms. (Sunshine Act notice)
- FDIC, Merger Transactions: The proposal would let smaller bank mergers gain “deemed approval” automatically if the agency doesn’t act within a set window, and it narrows the FDIC’s own discretion to pull an application out of expedited review for closer scrutiny. That trades case-by-case judgment for a clock: an applicant that clears the deadline gets its merger approved by default rather than through an affirmative agency decision, which is a real loosening of how much scrutiny bank consolidation receives. (Federal Register)
- Securities and Exchange Commission: The SEC granted temporary, conditional exemptive relief letting certain blockchain-based trading venues handle tokenized versions of ordinary, exchange-listed stocks without registering as a stock exchange, and letting their liquidity providers skip dealer registration too. Exemptive relief lets the agency test a new market structure, tokenized trading of real company shares, without a full rulemaking first, and the SEC is asking for public comment on the approach at the same time it’s already letting it operate. (Federal Register)
- The White House: Two companion executive orders on outdoor recreation, signed September 17 and published today, direct federal agencies to act on tight deadlines. Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation creates a new interagency task force on shark and seal predation of fish stocks and gives agencies 30 to 60 days to identify and suspend, revise, or rescind rules deemed to “overly burden” anglers and boaters. Reinvigorating America’s Hunting Heritage directs agencies to open hunting on additional federal land, including at two national monuments, unless a specific local reason justifies keeping it closed, and gives Interior a year to expand Sunday hunting. Executive orders take effect the moment they’re signed, so both have already been federal policy for five days; today’s Federal Register entry is the public paper trail catching up, not the trigger, and the deregulatory deadlines set in motion are worth watching for when they come due.
- Federal Communications Commission: The FCC opened a comment period on radiofrequency exposure limits that a federal appeals court ordered it to reconsider back in 2021, in Environmental Health Trust v. FCC, meaning the agency is answering a court mandate roughly five years after the fact. The delay is the story: the court found the FCC hadn’t adequately explained why its existing RF exposure safety limits remain adequate, and only now is the agency formally reopening that question to public input. (Federal Register)
This edition reviewed all 102 documents published in today’s Federal Register issue across 38 agencies. Excluded as routine: information-collection and Paperwork Reduction Act renewal notices (filed today by, among others, HUD, NRC, EPA, HHS, DOJ/ATF, OMB, and FCC), advisory-committee and fishery-council meeting notices, routine antidumping and countervailing-duty administrative reviews from the International Trade Administration, FAA airworthiness directives, Coast Guard safety zones, routine SEC self-regulatory-organization fee and rule filings from Cboe, Nasdaq PHLX, and the NYSE, and ten State Department arms-sales notifications that, on inspection, turned out to be a single coordinated helicopter and precision-munitions package to Bahrain rather than anything unusual.
Bureaucracy Times 