Wednesday’s Federal Register, Volume 91, Number 193, ran 148 numbered pages, and the headline rules were mostly absent. What the issue offered instead was a cluster of privacy notices in which three federal agencies described, in their own words, new or enlarged piles of personal data. The Treasury Department is assembling a file on student borrowers, the Justice Department is building a firearms rights database and asking to keep it largely closed to the people in it, and the Drug Enforcement Administration is widening who counts as a subject of its aviation records. The Labor Department, meanwhile, abandoned a rulemaking it spent fifteen months not finishing.
Treasury Takes the Student Loan File
The most consequential item is easy to miss because it carries a dull name. Treasury’s notice of a new system of records, Department of the Treasury .033, covers Federal Student Aid portfolio research, analysis, oversight, reporting and compliance records. Under an interagency agreement, the Education Department will hand Treasury data, including personally identifiable information, on recipients of federal student grants and loans under Title IV of the Higher Education Act. The notice names three Education sources, the National Student Loan Data System, the Default Management Collection System and the Enterprise Data Management and Analytics Platform Services, and it concedes that some of the data may come from education records protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The Office of the Fiscal Assistant Secretary and the Office of Economic Policy will run it.
The categories of records are broad. Treasury lists loan origination, disbursement, repayment, default, collection, discharge and consolidation data, plus application and eligibility information such as dependency, income and household details. The people covered include borrowers, co-signers, endorsers, parents and spouses, along with anyone who files an inquiry or complaint. Treasury says it will use the material for research, modeling, forecasting, audit coordination and responses to oversight bodies, and it promises role based access controls, audit logging and periodic access reviews. Education remains the custodian of the underlying program records, but Treasury wants its own single system anyway, because the records serve one Treasury mission under one governance framework.
One purpose deserves a second look. The tenth listed purpose is to support program transition, implementation, reporting and closeout activities tied to the transfer, ownership, administration, oversight or management of the portfolio. What follows is an inference and not a statement in the notice. The wording suggests Treasury expects some part of the student aid portfolio to change hands or change managers, and it is building the paper trail before the move. The reasoning rests only on that purpose line and on the notice’s repeated references to Treasury’s ownership and administration responsibilities, and the notice never says a transfer is planned. Comments are due November 6 under docket TREAS-DO-2026-0628. The notice lists no Privacy Act exemptions for the system, which makes it a useful contrast with the next item.
A Second Chance With the Blinds Drawn
The Office of the Pardon Attorney published two companion documents. One is a notice of a new system of records, the Firearms Rights Restoration Electronic Records Database. The other is a proposed rule exempting that database from parts of the Privacy Act. The database will receive, track and adjudicate applications under 18 U.S.C. 925(c), which lets people barred from possessing firearms ask the Attorney General for relief. The notice explains that since 1992 Congress has restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from spending its appropriated funds on those investigations, which left the program unusable, and that the Attorney General withdrew ATF’s delegation in March 2025 after reviewing the matter under Executive Order 14206. A final rule on the application process followed in August 2026.
The records will live on the FBI’s Electronic Departmental Order service inside the Next Generation Identification system, and the database will interface with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Justice proposes to claim exemptions under subsections (j)(2) and (k)(2) of the Privacy Act, the law enforcement provisions, from several requirements, including the rights to request access to and amendment of one’s own records. The stated reasons are that notice, access and amendment would reveal the nature and scope of the adjudication, chill candid communication among officials advising the Attorney General, and expose people who gave information under a promise of confidentiality. Those are real interests. They are also bought with the applicant’s own access and correction rights, which is what the exemption does by its terms. Comments on both documents are due November 6.
Down the page, the DEA republished and retitled its aviation records system as the DEA Aviation Division Reporting System, last published in full in 2000. The old notice covered pilots. The revision adds DEA employees and contractors, vendors, detainees, inmates, non-DEA law enforcement personnel and other federal employees and contractors, and it updates the record categories, purposes and routine uses. Comments are due November 5. The addition of detainees and inmates suggests the system now tracks passengers as well as crews, an inference drawn only from the expanded list of covered individuals.
Labor Declines to Move Its Furniture
The Wage and Hour Division withdrew a proposed rule it published on July 2, 2025, which would have removed from the Code of Federal Regulations the Fair Labor Standards Act interpretive parts that were never issued or amended through notice and comment. The idea was to demote those parts to subregulatory guidance posted elsewhere. The comment period ran 30 days. The Department received six substantive comments, two in favor and four opposed, and it denied 10 requests for more time. Fifteen months later, Administrator Andrew B. Rogers signed the withdrawal, which took effect October 6.
The stated reason is that further action no longer aligns with the Department’s needs, priorities and objectives, a sentence that could justify almost any abandoned project. The notice adds that commenters raised concerns about the effect on specific industries and that the Department will keep looking for ways to modernize its interpretive guidance. For employers and workers who rely on those parts, the practical result is that the guidance stays exactly where it was.
The Rest of the Docket
The Federal Reserve extended the comment period on its Regulation O proposal by 30 days, to November 4, after commenters asked for more time. The August 4 proposal would update the rule on loans by member banks to their insiders, index outdated dollar thresholds, and address how the rule applies to banks that lend to companies presumed to be controlled by large asset managers through passive investment funds. The Copyright Office opened a notice of inquiry on music streaming fraud at the request of Representative Scott Fitzgerald of the House Judiciary Committee, with comments due November 23 and replies December 21. The notice puts domestic streaming revenue for sound recordings at about $9.5 billion.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed that the two 2018 Section 301 actions on China did not terminate on their four year anniversaries, because domestic industry representatives asked that they continue, and the statutory review goes on. The Department of Energy withdrew the appendix B test procedure for commercial warm air furnaces in a final rule, finding an uncertain gain in representativeness that did not outweigh the burden. The IRS asked for comments, due December 7, on its information collection for Trump Account elections. The Office of Special Counsel published a notice naming the members of its Senior Executive Service Performance Board, and sanctions actions from the Office of Foreign Assets Control filled 17 pages. The only presidential document was Proclamation 11071, designating National Manufacturing Day.
