Category: Regulatory Affairs

• Federal Register Watch: September 23, 2026

  President Trump extended the $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa petitions for another year, and the same day’s docket also revived a shelved drug-scheduling plan, quietly relabeled a foreign-aid advisory council, and locked in a Colorado military land withdrawal for another decade and a half.

  • Executive Office of the President — H-1B fee extended, program-integrity order issued alongside it. Proclamation 11069, signed September 18 and published today, extends through September 21, 2027 the rule that H-1B petitions for specialty-occupation workers must be accompanied by a $100,000 payment, with only narrow national-interest exceptions. The administration cited what it called a 92 percent drop in H-1B filings from major IT outsourcing firms since the fee took effect as evidence it worked. It paired the extension with Executive Order 14431, directing agencies to coordinate more closely on policing the program. Renewing the fee for a second year, rather than letting it lapse, is a stronger signal that it is becoming a permanent feature of the visa system rather than a temporary emergency measure.
  • HHS — an interim final rule that took effect the moment it was published. The new rule pauses registration for ACA marketplace agents and brokers who lack a current Plan Year 2026 agreement with the federal exchanges, blocking them from registering for Plan Year 2027 until February 1, 2027. HHS invoked authority to skip the advance notice-and-comment process that precedes most rules, meaning the policy bound brokers before anyone outside the agency had a chance to object; the public only gets to comment after the fact, which limits how much the process can still change before it takes hold.
  • Interior/BLM — a 15-year renewal of the Army’s hold on Fort Carson and Piñon Canyon. Public Land Order No. 7971 keeps roughly 5,650 acres of public land and more than 141,000 acres of federal mineral rights in Colorado off-limits to the mining, grazing, and homesteading uses normally allowed on public land, reserving them for Army training and live-fire exercises. A “withdrawal” of this kind removes land from the ordinary rules that let private parties stake claims or apply for permits on it; renewing one for 15 years, rather than a shorter term, locks in military control of the long-contested Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site well into the 2040s.
  • Millennium Challenge Corporation — a council “reestablished” months after it was renewed. MCC published a notice reestablishing its Advisory Council for the 2026–2028 term, less than three months after a July 2 notice announced that same council’s charter had already been renewed for that identical term. Agencies typically renew an advisory committee’s charter once per term rather than following a renewal with a reestablishment of the same body soon after, so the change in language is the kind of “why now” wrinkle worth a second look. Neither notice explains what changed between July and September, or why “renewal” stopped being the operative word.
  • DEA — reviving a scheduling plan it shelved four years ago. The agency proposed placing five tryptamine hallucinogens — 4-OH-DiPT, 5-MeO-AMT, 5-MeO-MiPT, 5-MeO-DET, and DiPT — into Schedule I, the most restrictive drug category, reserved for substances found to have no accepted medical use, that carries the strictest handling requirements and criminal penalties. DEA proposed the same scheduling action back in 2022 but withdrew it to seek updated scientific evaluations from HHS. Its return now, with the same five substances and no public explanation of what new evidence closed that gap, is the sort of resurfacing worth flagging.
  • OMB/DOD/GSA/NASA — paperwork notices tied to a “Revolutionary” rewrite of federal contracting rules. Three linked notices (FAR Case 2026-011, 2026-006, and 2026-010) seek public comment on the paperwork burden of a sweeping Federal Acquisition Regulation overhaul proposed on September 18 under Executive Order 14275, spanning twelve coordinated proposed rules that touch contractor qualifications, contract types, patent and data rights, bonding, and dozens of other subjects. The FAR governs how the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on contracts, so a rewrite at this scale reshapes federal procurement well beyond the routine paperwork notices that formally introduced it today.

  This edition draws on the full Federal Register docket for September 23, 2026: 98 documents in all. Excluded as routine: roughly two dozen NAGPRA repatriation and inventory-completion notices, about ten SEC self-regulatory-organization rule filings, routine FERC pipeline and hydroelectric project notices and combined filings, antidumping/countervailing-duty determinations, bank holding company formation and control notices, standard Paperwork Reduction Act information-collection notices unrelated to the FAR overhaul, and routine advisory-committee and agency meeting notices.

  2026.09.23

• Federal Register Watch: September 22, 2026

  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.

  2026.09.22

• Federal Register Watch: September 21, 2026

  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.

  2026.09.21

• Federal Register Watch: September 18, 2026

  The day’s most sweeping action came out of federal procurement policy, where four separate proposed rules published together would rewrite large stretches of the Federal Acquisition Regulation under an executive order aimed at loosening how the government buys goods and services.

  • OFPP proposes a four-part rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy, joined by the Defense Department, the General Services Administration, and NASA, published four separate proposed rules that together touch parts 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38, 44, 47, 51, and 52 of the FAR, implementing Executive Order 14275, “Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement.” Splitting one rewrite into four dockets makes each filing easier to process, but it also means no single comment period covers the full scope of the change. That window closes October 19, just 31 days out, a tight timeline for contractors, watchdog groups, and other agencies to weigh in on a rewrite that reaches into commercial-item buying, indefinite-delivery contracts, construction, and dozens of other procurement mechanics. Read the lead proposal.
  • Justice Department settles part of its RealPage rent-pricing case, while the core suit continues. DOJ and ten state attorneys general published a proposed final judgment resolving their claims against Pinnacle Property Management Services, one of several large landlords sued alongside software vendor RealPage over allegations that its pricing tools let competing landlords coordinate rents through shared, competitively sensitive data rather than competing on price. Pinnacle would have to stop licensing that kind of revenue-management software and put antitrust compliance training in place, but the case against RealPage itself, which the complaint says controls roughly 80 percent of the commercial revenue-management software market, is unaffected. Settlements like this one go through the Tunney Act, which gives the public 60 days to comment before a judge decides whether the deal serves the public interest, so renters and tenant groups still have a formal chance to object before it becomes final. Read the filing.
  • FTC settles a rare interlocking-directorate case between two rival gunmakers. The FTC published a proposed consent order over Beretta’s right to appoint two directors to the board of competitor Sturm, Ruger & Co., which the agency says violated the Clayton Act’s ban on competitors sharing board members, a rule meant to stop rivals from trading sensitive business information through shared leadership. The order requires any Beretta-appointed director to be financially independent of Beretta, bars Beretta from seeking Ruger’s nonpublic information, and requires 15 days’ notice before any future board appointment. Cases enforcing that particular provision are uncommon, so one naming two of the country’s largest firearms makers stands out on its own. Comments are due October 19. Read the notice.
  • State Department eases export controls on underwater drones without the usual advance comment period. State issued an interim final rule removing certain uncrewed underwater vehicles from Category XX(a) of the U.S. Munitions List, loosening export restrictions on a defense-relevant undersea drone technology. Interim final rules take legal effect, October 19 here, on their own schedule rather than waiting for the public input an ordinary proposed rule would collect first; State says it will still take comments on refining the change, but those comments won’t hold up the rule from becoming binding. Reaching for that faster track to loosen, rather than tighten, export controls on militarily relevant hardware is worth flagging on its own. Read the rule.
  • A 2022 DOE energy rule was erased by Congress, not by DOE. The Energy Department published a notice stating that its 2022 final rule setting energy-conservation standards for manufactured housing “has no legal effect,” because a new law, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, overrode it. The notice took effect immediately with no comment period, because there was nothing left for DOE to decide: a rule that took years of standard rulemaking to finish was wiped out by lawmakers rather than through the notice-and-comment process agencies normally have to use to repeal their own regulations. Read the notice.
  • OPM proposes rewriting who counts as an “excepted service” federal employee. OPM proposed changes to the rules governing the excepted service, the Pathways Programs for students and recent graduates, and how administrative law judges get appointed. Excepted-service positions are filled outside the competitive process that applies to most federal jobs and often carry fewer job protections, so redrawing which jobs fall into that category can shift both how much hiring flexibility agencies have and how much insulation from ordinary civil-service rules. Comments are due November 17. Read the proposal.

  This edition draws on the Federal Register’s full docket of 114 documents published on September 18, 2026. Set aside as routine: antidumping and countervailing-duty determinations and orders, a batch of roughly 18 SEC self-regulatory-organization filings tied largely to exchanges’ move toward a 23-hour trading day, FERC combined notices and utility and pipeline filings, routine OMB/PRA information-collection notices and corrections, advisory-committee and agency meeting notices, and other standard administrative filings that didn’t trip an institutional-significance or anomaly signal.

  2026.09.19

• Federal Register Watch: September 17, 2026

  EPA moved to unwind its own legal basis for regulating power-plant greenhouse gases, finalizing a repeal of its 2024 carbon standards for electric generating units while, on the same day, proposing to rescind the underlying 2015 findings that justified regulating those emissions at all.

  • EPA proposes rescinding the 2015 findings behind power-plant climate rules. EPA proposed rescinding the 2015 findings that greenhouse gases from fossil-fuel power plants endanger public health, the legal foundation beneath a decade of federal climate regulation for the sector. The agency offers three separate arguments for reversing itself, including that Congress never clearly authorized EPA to regulate power plants over climate change under the “major questions doctrine,” and that eliminating the entire U.S. power sector’s emissions would have only a negligible effect on global temperatures. Because this is a proposed rule rather than a final one, it opens debate instead of closing it: comments are due November 2 and a virtual public hearing is set for October 1, giving utilities, states, and advocacy groups a real chance to contest the reasoning before it can take legal effect. Read the proposal.
  • EPA finalizes repeal of most of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards. In a companion action published the same day, EPA finalized the repeal of most of its 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, including emission guidelines for existing coal- and gas-fired power plants and carbon-capture requirements the agency itself adopted only two years earlier. Unlike the proposal above, this one is already final, meaning it takes legal effect without any further public comment. Pairing a final repeal with a still-pending proposal to erase the legal findings underneath it is an unusual sequence, since it leaves EPA’s authority to write any future power-plant rule resting on a foundation the agency has separately proposed to tear down. Read the final rule.
  • FDIC calls a merger-policy board meeting on unusually short notice. The FDIC gave notice of a board meeting held with less than seven days’ advance warning, short of the one week of public notice its Sunshine Act procedures normally require, to take up two proposed rules on bank merger transactions and “state bank parity” plus a vote to rescind an existing supervisory guidance document. Federal open-meeting law expects an agency to state why a shortened notice period was necessary, and this notice offers no reason, which matters because that explanation is the only real check on how much warning the public and affected banks get before a board acts on merger policy. Read the notice.
  • FDA denies exemption for AI radiology software, despite a title that reads the other way. FDA denied a device maker’s petition to exempt certain AI-based radiology software, including cancer-detection and triage tools, from the premarket notification process that normally requires FDA clearance before a device can be sold. The agency found that relying on the company’s prior clearances and a proposed post-market monitoring plan wasn’t enough to show that skipping that clearance review would leave patients just as safe. It’s worth flagging because the document’s own title, “Exemption From Premarket Notification,” names the type of request under review rather than its outcome; read quickly, it can look like FDA loosened oversight of AI diagnostic tools when the agency in fact declined to. Read the notice.
  • Commerce renews export ban on Aeroflot, citing an active violation. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security renewed its temporary denial of export privileges against Russia’s PJSC Aeroflot, citing evidence the airline kept operating U.S.-regulated aircraft components in violation of the denial order Commerce had renewed just last September. A temporary denial order cuts a company off from anything subject to U.S. export rules, and a finding that Aeroflot defied the prior renewal, rather than the agency simply extending it as a precaution, signals that the restriction isn’t achieving compliance and that Commerce is now treating the airline as an active violator rather than a monitored risk. Read the order.

  This edition draws on the Federal Register’s full docket of 72 documents published on September 17, 2026. Set aside as routine: airworthiness directives, OMB/PRA information-collection notices, Coast Guard drawbridge and safety-zone notices, SEC self-regulatory-organization filings, FERC combined filings and blanket-authorization notices, cultural-property exhibition determinations, Postal Service product notices, and other standard administrative filings that didn’t trip an institutional-significance or anomaly signal.

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  2026.09.17

• SEC Moves to Tear Up the Federal Rulebook for Shareholder Proposals

  WASHINGTON — The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed Wednesday to eliminate one of the federal government’s longstanding mechanisms governing how shareholders get proposals before their fellow investors — potentially shifting much of that fight back to the states and individual corporations.

  The SEC proposed rescinding Exchange Act Rule 14a-8, the federal rule governing shareholder proposals included in companies’ proxy materials.

  If adopted, the change would not merely tweak eligibility thresholds or adjust paperwork. It would remove Rule 14a-8 altogether.

  The Referee Leaves the Room

  In its announcement of the proposal, the SEC says the rule exceeds the scope of the Commission’s statutory authority and intrudes into an area traditionally governed by state corporate law. The agency also argues that some of the original policy justifications for the rule have either failed to materialize or become less persuasive over time.

  Under the proposal, questions about the role of shareholder proposals would instead largely be determined by state law and companies’ own governing documents.

  That is a substantial jurisdictional shift disguised in the familiar beige wrapping of federal rulemaking.

  Rule 14a-8 currently establishes a federal framework through which qualifying shareholders can submit proposals for inclusion in a company’s proxy materials, subject to numerous procedural requirements and grounds for exclusion. The system has consequently made the SEC an important referee in disputes between corporations and shareholders over what belongs on the ballot.

  The Commission is now proposing to send much of that argument elsewhere.

  Atkins, Briefly, in Plain English

  SEC Chairman Paul Atkins described the proposal as part of an effort to keep federal securities regulation from improperly encroaching upon state corporate law while modernizing rules to account for changes in markets and technology.

  The SEC also proposed amendments to Rule 14a-4(c), which governs circumstances in which companies may exercise discretionary authority over proxy votes. According to the Commission, those changes would provide companies greater flexibility while giving shareholders greater control over proposals subject to discretionary voting.

  While They Had the Hood Open

  And Rule 14a-8 was not the only piece of proxy plumbing placed on the workbench Wednesday.

  In a separate proposal, the Commission moved to modernize additional portions of the proxy solicitation process. Among other things, the SEC proposes eliminating the requirement that companies deliver annual reports to security holders, eliminating certain delivery deadlines for documents incorporated by reference into proxy statements, eliminating Notices of Exempt Solicitation, and shortening the minimum broker search period from 20 business days to five.

  Simplification, or Just a Change of Address?

  Taken together, the proposals suggest something larger than regulatory housekeeping.

  The Commission is reconsidering how much of corporate shareholder governance should be administered through federal proxy rules in the first place, while simultaneously stripping away some procedural requirements built for a decidedly less digital era.

  Whether that produces a simpler system or merely relocates the complexity remains to be seen.

  State corporate law is not uniform, corporate governing documents vary, and removing a national SEC framework could produce considerably different shareholder-proposal environments depending upon where a company is incorporated and what its governing documents permit.

  For now, nothing changes.

  These are proposed rules, and the SEC will accept public comments for 60 days following publication of the proposals in the Federal Register.

  But the proposal is worth watching closely. Washington occasionally simplifies a regulatory system by simplifying it.

  Other times, it simply moves the paperwork somewhere else.

  2026.09.16

• Federal Register Watch: September 16, 2026

  The federal government’s most consequential move of the day came not from the President but from a sub-Cabinet arms-control official at the State Department, who quietly waived the last sanctions Washington still held over Syria’s chemical-weapons history.

  • State Department \u2014 Waiver of Sanctions on Syria Under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act (document 2026-18918) — published a notice memorializing an August 20 determination by the Under Secretary for Arms Control and Nonproliferation waiving the two remaining sanctions on Syria under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act, covering arms sales and arms-sales financing. The move completes a process the President started in June 2025 by finding that a change in Syria’s government justified lifting most of the sanctions imposed over the Assad regime’s chemical attacks on its own people, but this final step, unlike that one, did not require a fresh presidential determination or the public accountability that comes with it, because it was made under delegated authority by an official two levels below the Secretary. Read the notice.
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Order Under Sections 362 and 365 of the Public Health Service Act (document 2026-18948) — renewed, for at least the fourth month running, an order under Sections 362 and 365 of the Public Health Service Act suspending the right of people from countries with quarantinable communicable disease outbreaks to enter the United States, this time through October 11. That authority is normally reserved for acute public health emergencies and used briefly, so a standing suspension that has now been rolled over roughly every month since early summer is worth watching, particularly since the notice itself does not say which disease or which countries are driving the repeated renewal. Read the notice.
  • National Science Foundation — Advisory Committee for Integrative Activities; Reestablishment (document 2026-19008) — announced it is “reestablishing” its Advisory Committee for Integrative Activities, a panel that advises the NSF Director on priorities that cut across the agency’s science directorates. Federal advisory committees are ordinarily kept alive through charter renewals described in exactly those terms, so calling this one a reestablishment suggests the prior charter may have been allowed to lapse before being revived, a gap that would have left the committee without formal standing to meet or advise in the meantime. Read the notice.
  • Department of Homeland Security — Registration of Lawful Permanent Residence for Children Born to Foreign Government Employees in the United States; Correction (document 2026-18949) — corrected an interim final rule it had published just one week earlier, on September 9, restoring language on registering U.S.-born children of foreign government employees for permanent residence that the agency says was “unintentionally removed” from the original filing. Interim final rules take effect immediately and skip the advance public comment period that ordinary rulemaking requires, so when a substantive drafting error surfaces within days of one taking effect, it is a reminder that the speed those rules offer comes at the cost of the review that might otherwise have caught the mistake before it became binding. Read the notice.
  • State Department — International Traffic in Arms Regulations: Modification of Civil Aircraft to Incorporate Aircraft Survivability Equipment; Correction (document 2026-18914) — also corrected an interim final rule from August 28 that had removed certain aircraft survivability equipment from the U.S. Munitions List, fixing an error in one of the rule’s amendatory instructions so the regulatory text matches what the agency says it intended. Munitions List determinations decide what counts as a regulated arms export, so even a brief drafting error in the text that draws that line carries higher stakes than an ordinary typo, and its being the second rushed correction to a recent interim final rule in this same day’s docket is worth watching for a pattern rather than dismissing as one-off sloppiness. Read the notice.
  • State Department, Bureau of Consular Affairs — Delegation of Authority for Visa Bond Waivers (document 2026-18958) — delegated its authority to waive Visa Bond Program requirements down from the Assistant Secretary to the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Visa Services, covering waivers for individual travelers, entire countries, or categories of applicants. The program requires certain visa applicants, generally from countries the department judges to have elevated overstay rates, to post a bond before traveling, so whoever holds the waiver pen effectively controls how easily that restriction gets lifted case by case, and pushing that discretion down a rung or two in the chain of command is a small but real shift in who sets immigration policy day to day. Read the notice.

  This edition draws on the full Federal Register issue for September 16, 2026, 104 documents in all. Excluded as routine: roughly a dozen antitrust consortium registration notices under the National Cooperative Research and Production Act, fifteen Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act repatriation and inventory-completion notices, a dozen antidumping and countervailing duty determinations, seven SEC self-regulatory organization fee filings, and several dozen routine information-collection, advisory-committee meeting, and safety-zone notices.

  2026.09.16

• Federal Register Watch: September 15, 2026

  Wednesday’s Federal Register carried a cluster of civil-service actions from the Office of Personnel Management, the most notable of which was a second correction in six weeks to the same reduction-in-force rule the agency finalized this summer.

  • Office of Personnel Management — Reduction in Force; Correction (document 2026-18800): OPM corrected its own reduction-in-force and Career Transition Assistance Plan regulations for the second time since the underlying rule took effect on September 2, after finding that an earlier amendatory instruction had accidentally deleted two paragraphs from the definition of a “displaced” employee. Two corrections to the same rule within six weeks is worth a second look, because “displaced” status is what determines which employees keep recall and reassignment rights when a reduction in force hits, so an error there is not merely typographical. Read the correction.
  • Office of Personnel Management — Promoting Employee Accountability (document 2026-18943): OPM reopened, for two weeks, the comment period on a proposed rule that would loosen the standards agencies must meet to discipline or remove employees for poor performance or misconduct, a window that had already closed in early August. The reopening is specifically to gather views on new OPM data and on a report from an outside advocacy group called We the Doers, which is an unusual reason to reopen a closed docket and raises the question of why that particular report, rather than the agency’s own review, prompted a fresh round of public input. Read the notice.
  • Office of Personnel Management — Shared Certificates and Pooled Hiring Actions (document 2026-18828): OPM issued an interim final rule, effective October 15, letting federal agencies share hiring certificates and applicant pools with each other for jobs common across government. The rule cites a specific 2015 statute that authorizes OPM to skip the normal notice-and-comment process, so the change takes legal effect before the public comment period even closes on November 16, which is the exception rather than the rule for how federal regulations are ordinarily made. Read the rule.
  • Office of Personnel Management — Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Optimizing FEHB Plan Offerings (document 2026-18944): OPM asked for public input on whether to lift the regulatory cap limiting FEHB carriers to three plan options, or two options plus a high-deductible plan, a limit currently set out in agency regulation. It is only a request for information rather than a proposed change, but it signals OPM may be building a record to expand its authority over health-plan choices for the federal workforce, the kind of structural question worth flagging well before any formal rule follows. Read the request for information.
  • Federal Energy Regulatory Commission / North American Electric Reliability Corporation — Order Approving Reliability Standard CIP-014-4 (document 2026-18868): FERC approved an updated mandatory standard requiring electric transmission owners to reassess, more rigorously and more often, which substations are critical enough that physical damage to them could destabilize the broader grid. The order followed FERC’s standard approval process with no sign of an expedited timeline or dissent, but it is a real tightening of physical-security obligations for the utilities that operate the country’s most sensitive transmission infrastructure. Read the order.

  This edition reflects a full screen of all 121 documents published in today’s Federal Register. Excluded as routine: state-by-state SNAP demonstration project notices, antidumping and countervailing duty determinations, self-regulatory organization exchange-rule filings, OMB/PRA information-collection requests, airworthiness directives and airspace amendments, safety zones, advisory-committee and Sunshine Act meeting notices, and foreign-trade zone actions.

  2026.09.15

• Federal Register Watch: September 14, 2026

  The White House issued five separate proclamations today rewriting, yet again, which Canadian products face a 50 percent tariff, the latest turn in a trade fight over motor vehicles, dairy, and alcoholic beverages that has shifted by presidential proclamation every few weeks since July.

  • Executive Office of the President: Five Presidential Proclamations published today adjust the scope of the 50 percent additional tariff on Canadian goods covering motor vehicles, dairy, and alcoholic beverages, some removing specific products from the duty and others keeping or reimposing it. The proclamations invoke Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and Section 604 of the Trade Act of 1974, and take effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern the following morning, meaning importers of the affected goods had less than a day’s notice before the new duty status applied. This is at least the third adjustment to the same underlying tariff order since it was first imposed in July, following a brief suspension and what the proclamations describe as Canada’s failure to honor negotiating commitments in August. See the motor vehicles proclamation, the dairy proclamation, and the alcoholic beverages proclamation.
  • OCC, Federal Reserve, and FDIC: The three banking regulators issued a joint interim final rule doubling, from under $3 billion to under $6 billion in total assets, the size threshold under which small banks and U.S. branches of foreign banks qualify for a lighter-touch 18-month exam cycle instead of the standard 12-month one, implementing a provision of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (Public Law 119-101). Because it is an interim final rule rather than a proposed one, the change is already in effect; the agencies are only taking public comment after the fact, through October 14, which limits outside input to whether the rule should be revised rather than whether it should have happened in the first place.
  • Federal Aviation Administration: The FAA proposed a new airworthiness directive requiring repeated borescope inspections, and in some cases parts replacement, on CFM56-5B, -5C, and -7B engines, which power a large share of the in-service Boeing 737NG and Airbus A320 fleets, after multiple reports of a turbine seal shedding material inside the engine. The entry’s own title in the Federal Register is simply its regulatory identifier, “RIN 2120-AA64,” rather than a description of the affected aircraft or the defect, the kind of gap that would make it easy to miss for anyone scanning the day’s docket by title rather than reading every entry in full.
  • Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA): NRCS rescinded its own December 2022 notice of intent to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement for a proposed dam and reservoir on the West Fork of Battle Creek in Carbon County, Wyoming, stating plainly that the original notice “was issued prior to confirming viable alternatives and need for an EIS.” An EIS notice launches a multi-year formal review process and commits an agency to studying a defined set of alternatives, so unwinding one nearly four years in means whatever groundwork occurred under it is now void and any future review would effectively start over.
  • Administration for Community Living (HHS): ACL announced its intent to award a single-source, non-competitive supplemental grant of $1,084,718 for fiscal year 2026 to the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, bringing that cooperative agreement’s total funding since fiscal year 2024 to $4,345,417, for outreach and training aimed at engaging older adults with behavioral health conditions in evidence-based health programs. Sole-source awards skip the competitive process most federal grants go through, and the notice states only that ACL “intends” to make the award without explaining why this recipient was chosen over any competing applicant, leaving the public comment period as the only real check before the money goes out.
  • National Institutes of Health (HHS): NIH released a draft biosafety policy meant to eventually replace its longstanding Guidelines for recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid molecule research, the rulebook that governs safety practices at essentially every NIH-funded lab doing this kind of work. Comments are open through October 19, and because NIH is, by its own description, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, any change to how it defines biosafety compliance will eventually reach thousands of grantee institutions rather than staying confined to NIH’s own facilities.

  This edition draws on the full 156 documents published in the Federal Register on September 14, 2026. Categories screened and excluded absent an anomaly signal: routine antidumping and countervailing duty determinations and administrative reviews, SEC self-regulatory-organization fee-schedule filings, the large block of immigration and naturalization information-collection renewal notices, Sunshine Act meeting notices, routine state disaster declarations, FERC environmental-assessment scheduling notices, International Trade Commission complaint-receipt notices, and standard OMB and Paperwork Reduction Act information-collection requests.

  2026.09.15

• Federal Register Watch: September 10, 2026

  Today’s Federal Register carried 119 documents, headlined by a Census Bureau proposal that would exclude people without legal status from congressional apportionment counts and strip race, ethnicity, and sexual-orientation questions from the census questionnaire entirely.

  • Census Bureau (Commerce Department): The Bureau proposed writing formal residence criteria into regulation for the first time, including a rule that would exclude people without legal status from the count used to divide up House seats and Electoral College votes, while still counting lawful permanent residents, prisoners at their facilities, and military and federal personnel at their duty stations. A companion proposal would limit the census questionnaire to biological sex, date of birth, and household relationship, dropping race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation questions altogether. Because apportionment decides how much political weight each state carries and federal agencies lean on census demographic data to enforce civil rights law and steer funding formulas, this is a rewrite of how power and money get divided among the states rather than a clerical update. Comments are due October 13, 2026. Read the proposal.
  • Homeland Security Department: DHS issued a correction to the data table underlying its August 25 proposal to charge $103,265 for most cap-subject H-1B petitions, fixing the historical petition-volume figures it used to estimate how many petitions the fee would apply to and how much revenue it would raise. The correction touches exactly the numbers that justify the fee’s size, yet the comment period and the proposed fee amount are untouched, so the public is left commenting on a rule whose supporting math changed midstream. Read the correction.
  • Office of Foreign Assets Control (Treasury Department): OFAC indefinitely suspended three general licenses and a licensing policy that had authorized narrow categories of transactions with Iran, covering overflight payments, aircraft-safety licensing, bunkering and emergency repairs, and the temporary return of certain civil aircraft, with the suspension effective September 8, two days before the rule was published. The agency invoked the Administrative Procedure Act’s foreign-affairs exception to skip notice-and-comment rulemaking entirely, which is a lawful shortcut for sanctions actions but one that means the public had no chance to weigh in before the change took effect. Read the rule.
  • Securities and Exchange Commission: The SEC proposed rescinding the 15-year-old rule that bars investment advisers from collecting fees from a government client for two years after the adviser or a covered employee makes a political contribution to an official who could influence that business. The Commission argues the rule produced blanket contribution bans and hiring restrictions beyond its original purpose and that existing fraud and fiduciary-duty rules can police pay-to-play conduct instead, trading a bright-line restriction for one that depends on case-by-case enforcement. Comments are due November 9, 2026. Read the proposal.
  • Fish and Wildlife Service (Interior Department): FWS reopened public comment on its proposal to remove the Gila chub, a small Southwestern fish, from the endangered species list, more than a year after the original comment period closed in August 2025. The agency cites a statutory obligation to give proper notice as the reason for reopening, but the notice does not explain what happened to the rule during the thirteen months in between, which is the kind of gap worth watching for what surfaces when a final rule eventually appears. Comments are now due September 25, 2026. Read the notice.
  • Executive Office of the President: The White House published two executive orders signed September 4. “Supporting America’s Ranchers” frames ranching as central to food security, while “Promoting Fair Competition in Livestock Markets and Expanding Market Access for American Meat Producers” takes up ranchers’ complaints that concentrated meat processors squeeze them on price and make it harder to sell across state lines. Because executive orders direct agencies rather than create enforceable rules on their own, the pair mainly signals where USDA and other agencies are expected to focus rulemaking and enforcement in the months ahead. Read EO 14425 | Read EO 14424.

  This edition reflects the full day’s docket of 119 documents published in the Federal Register for September 10, 2026. Excluded as routine: agency information-collection and OMB/PRA notices, self-regulatory-organization rule filings from national stock exchanges, antidumping and countervailing duty administrative review notices, FEMA flood hazard determinations, airworthiness directives, foreign-trade zone production-activity notices, procurement list additions and deletions, medical device classification notices, USPS product-change notices, and routine advisory-committee meeting and marine-event notices.

  2026.09.10