The White House has opened a closed-door proceeding to decide whether Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook should be removed from her post over mortgage-paperwork allegations, giving this year’s fight over the Fed’s independence a Federal Register paper trail for the first time.
- Executive Office of the President: A memorandum dated October 7 and published today establishes a three-member Committee of Inquiry to investigate whether Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook made false statements on mortgage paperwork, and to recommend whether that gives the President cause to remove her from the Fed’s board under 12 U.S.C. 242, the standard the Supreme Court addressed this year in Trump v. Cook. The committee is made up of the President’s top economic aide, the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the director of the Office of Government Ethics, none of whom has a background in banking or mortgage regulation, and it will hold a closed four-hour hearing at the White House on November 5 before Cook can file a final written statement by November 10. Routing a question about central bank independence through a closed administrative hearing on a six-week timeline departs from how the Fed’s own governance, or the courts, would normally handle an allegation against a sitting governor. Read the memorandum.
- Homeland Security Department: An interim final rule that took effect the moment it was published cuts, from 30 days to 10, how long a refugee has to respond to a notice that DHS intends to terminate their status over a finding that they did not actually qualify as a refugee when admitted, often years earlier. Because it is an interim final rule rather than a proposed rule, it skipped the usual comment-before-you-act sequence; the public only gets to weigh in, by November 13, on a policy DHS has already been enforcing for a month, while refugees facing termination have far less time to gather evidence or request a hearing before losing their status. Read the rule.
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: A proposed rule would scrap the agency’s long-standing practice of generally deferring to its own prior approval when an employer seeks to extend the same visa holder’s petition on unchanged facts, a presumption that has governed renewal cases since the mid-2000s. USCIS argues deference wrongly shifts the burden of proof onto the government and projects the change will generate roughly 6,000 additional requests for evidence a year; the 30-day comment period, closing November 13, is the only chance employers and visa holders get to argue that reopening settled cases will cause more disruption than the fraud USCIS says it is trying to catch. Read the proposed rule.
- National Institutes of Health: A notice of proposed reorganization within the Office of the Director would create a new Office of the NIH Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and fold the Office of Dietary Supplements under the Office of Nutrition Research. Creating or eliminating an office changes who signs off on NIH’s AI-related grants and supplement-safety reviews going forward, and the notice invites public comment before either move is finalized, a chance to flag staffing or oversight gaps the restructuring might open up. Read the notice.
- Environmental Protection Agency: An interim final rule pushes the reporting deadline for 2025 greenhouse gas emissions data from October 30 of this year to March 10, 2027, a five-month extension granted just over two weeks before the original deadline. EPA again chose the interim-final-rule route, so the extension took effect on publication and the agency is soliciting comments, due November 30, only after the fact; anyone who tracks facility-level emissions data, including the public, will simply wait that much longer for numbers that were supposed to post this month. Read the rule.
- Drug Enforcement Administration: A notice of intent to temporarily place two kratom-derived compounds, 7-hydroxymitragynine and mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, above a set threshold in Schedule I replaces a plan DEA floated for the same chemical as recently as July, this time using a concentration threshold based on an October 8 recommendation from HHS. Temporary scheduling exists so DEA can act fast on emerging drug risks without the years-long rulemaking Congress built for permanent scheduling decisions, but reversing course on the same chemical twice within three months leaves kratom manufacturers and retailers aiming at a target that keeps moving. Read the notice.
This edition reviewed all 126 documents published in today’s Federal Register issue. Excluded as routine, absent an anomaly signal: agency information-collection notices under the Paperwork Reduction Act, meeting and hearing announcements, FAA airworthiness directives and airspace designations, FEMA flood hazard determinations, SBA disaster declarations, antidumping and countervailing-duty determinations from the International Trade Administration and International Trade Commission, SEC self-regulatory-organization filings, and routine Postal Regulatory Commission, PBGC, and Defense Department filings.
