Notice & Comment

Recent Rulemakings Reviewed: August 2026

Recent Rulemakings Reviewed is a monthly quantitative snapshot of federal regulatory activity, drawn from FRTracker—a platform that ingests Federal Register documents and decomposes binding rules into structured “obligations.”

An “obligation” in this dataset is a single regulated duty extracted from a rule’s text, comprised of: an actor (e.g., operator, employer, importer), a deontic modal (must, shall, may not), and an action.

Each issue of Recent Rulemakings Reviewed will present the preceding month’s key numbers, some developments worth watching, and links for readers who want to dig deeper.

A note on the figures: all counts are drawn from FRTracker as of this column’s publication date. Because document processing and obligation extraction run continuously, monthly totals and per-rule counts can shift modestly as records are reprocessed; the numbers here reflect the database as it stood the day this issue was published.

The numbers

  • Documents published (excluding presidential documents): 2,079
    • vs July 2026: 2,294
    • vs August 2025: 2,046
  • Final rules: 281
    • vs July 2026: 287
    • vs August 2025: 218
  • Proposed rules: 143
    • vs July 2026: 171
    • vs August 2025: 136
  • Rules flagged significant in Federal Register metadata: 31
    • vs July 2026: 41
    • vs August 2025: 35
  • Comment periods closed last month: 690
  • Compliance obligations extracted from last month’s publications: 2,945

The four document-count rows above are the Federal Register’s own counts, not FRTracker’s. The two figures below them — comment periods closed, and compliance obligations — are FRTracker’s; the Federal Register publishes neither.

August was a quieter month than July on every Federal Register count. Documents fell from 2,294 to
2,079, final rules from 287 to 281, and proposed rules from 171 to 143 — a 16% drop that undoes the
refilling July’s column described, when proposals had risen from 142 to 171. Significant designations
fell hardest as a percentage, from 41 to 31.

Set beside August 2025 the picture inverts on rules and holds on designations. Final rules are up
29% year over year (281 against 218) and proposals up 5% (143 against 136), while the significant
count is down (31 against 35). More rules than a year ago, fewer of them flagged — and, as the
Remarkable Rulemakings section below explains, fewer still once the corrections are considered.

The Shortcut Ledger

Not every rule travels the full notice-and-comment route. An agency can issue a rule as interim-final (issued in final form, with comment invited afterward), direct-final (effective unless someone objects), or temporary—each a shortcut around the ordinary notice-and-comment sequence, available where the conditions its statutory basis requires are satisfied. The label alone is neither proof that the shortcut was proper nor proof that it was not and is offered purely in an informational capacity; the good-cause exception these rules usually rest on can be entirely valid. The pathways are nonetheless relevant, because they are where binding obligations reach the public without a proposal first. The running ledger is at frtracker.app/shortcutledger.

PathwayRulesObligations
Interim-final1143
Direct-final387
Temporary4039
Total expedited54169

Every row above is classified from the Federal Register’s own ACTION field, not from our inference. Of August’s 281 final rules, 277 carry an ACTION value; the remaining four carry none in the Federal Register’s own metadata (two of them are correction documents), and they sit outside the table.

A brief note on which obligation count this is. The “Obligations” column here—and every per-rule obligation count in this column—is FRTracker’s extracted-requirement count, the same number shown on the linked Ledger and on each rule’s FRTracker page. The 2,945 figure in “The numbers” above is a narrower subset: only requirements typed COMPLIANCE_OBLIGATION. However, each series is computed the same way throughout, but the two series are different measures and must NOT be compared to one another. (On the narrower method August’s expedited rules carry 138 rather than 169, split 30 / 74 / 34; the shape is unchanged.)

The pattern of the last two months didn’t hold. June’s column found interim-final rules uncommon but relatively heavy—8 rules carrying 166 obligations. July’s then found them both more common and heavier still—15 rules, 349 obligations—and there we said that two months is a repetition and not yet a trend. August made the caution worthwhile: 11 interim-final rules carrying 43 obligations, the lightest showing of the three. The heaviest of the eleven is the Department of Homeland Security’s Adjudication of Civil Penalties Against International Marriage Brokers (published August 11, effective September 10), at 24.

The weight moved to the direct-final column, and it is concentrated significantly in one document. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s NRC Modernization: Rulemaking Procedure, Federal Advisory Committee Act Alignment, Access, and Security carries 83 of the bucket’s total 87 obligations. It is a direct final rule in the classic form: effective October 26, 2026 “unless significant adverse comments are received,” with a companion proposed rule published the same day and a comment window that closed September 10. The agency describes it as streamlining information-withholding and post-promulgation comment procedures and aligning its advisory-committee rules with government-wide standards, taken in response to Executive Order 14300. The other two direct-final rules of the month carry four obligations between the two.

And a direct-final rule shows what “unless someone objects” can mean practically. The Department of Energy published a direct final rule rescinding its regulations for loans to minority business enterprises on May 16, 2025. Its effective date has since been delayed to September 12, 2025; to December 9, 2025; to March 9, 2026; to June 4, 2026; to September 1, 2026; and, by a notice published August 26 that the Federal Register flags as significant, to December 24, 2026—now fully nineteen months after publication. The pathway’s premise is that a rule takes effect unless adverse comment arrives. Here the record shows six extensions and no effective date yet. The ledger counts the rule where the Federal Register’s ACTION field puts it, which is neither “effective” nor “withdrawn.”

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-16374, 2026-17381, 2026-16290) · FRTracker analysis

Remarkable Rulemakings

The federal-contractor affirmative-action regime was rewritten in a single day. On August 21 the Department of Labor‘s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs published three final rules, each flagged significant, each a “Final rule.” in the Federal Register’s own ACTION field: Rescission of Executive Order 11246 Implementing Regulations (126 obligations extracted; effective October 26), Modifications to the Regulations Implementing Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (141; effective September 21), and Modifications to the Regulations Implementing the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 (132; effective September 21). Taken together they carry 399 extracted obligations, and they are the month’s three heaviest significant rules of any type. All three respond to Executive Order 14173, which revoked Executive Order 11246 on January 21, 2025. The Section 503 and VEVRAA programs rest on their own statutes and survive; their rules, in the department’s words, “align” the regulations with that order (and, for Section 503, with Executive Order 14219), and the VEVRAA rule removes the cross-references to the revoked authority.

A rescission carrying 126 obligations warrants explanation; the explanation is in the amendatory instructions. The rule removes and reserves eight parts of Title 41 — 60-1, 60-2, 60-3, 60-4, 60-20, 60-40, 60-50 and 60-999 — and revises in full the ninth, 41 CFR part 60-30, the rules of practice for administrative enforcement proceedings. Every one of the 126 obligations the extractor found is in that revised part: what an administrative order must contain, when a contractor must be given an opportunity to show cause, what must be in writing and served on the parties. The obligation count measures the regulatory text a document publishes. It does not measure what a document removes, and it does not net one against the other. A rescission that republishes a procedural part can therefore carry a substantial count: that count describes the duties found in the text the document published, and it establishes neither that the rescission added those duties nor how many it took away.

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-17114, 2026-17115, 2026-17116) · FRTracker analysis

Nine of the month’s 22 “significant final rules” are corrections, a delay, or an enforcement notice. The Federal Register’s significance flag programmatically follows a rule onto its corrections. August’s 31 significant documents divide into 9 proposed rules and 22 finals—and of the 22, thirteen are substantive final rules. The other nine: the Office of Personnel Management published four civil-service rules on August 3 — Reduction in Force (75 obligations), Streamlining Probationary and Trial Period Appeals (48), Suitability Action Appeals (39) and Reduction in Force Appeals (34), all effective September 2—and on August 25 published a correction to each of the four, plus correcting amendments to a fifth rule. Labor corrected the VEVRAA rule on August 31. Treasury corrected the Federal Independent Dispute Resolution rule. The Department of Transportation’s Accessible Lavatories on Single-Aisle Aircraft document is a notification of enforcement discretion. The ninth is the Energy Department’s sixth delay of a direct final rule, described above. Every one of the nine carries the significance flag in the Federal Register’s metadata—this is because a correction inherits its rule’s flag—and every one is counted in the 31. On a substantive-rule reading, August’s significant final rules number thirteen, and its significant documents 22.

The OPM package is worth a sentence on its own terms. By the agency’s own summaries, three of the four August 3 rules change who adjudicates an appeal: for suitability actions and for reduction-in-force actions, OPM “will replace the Merit Systems Protection Board as the adjudicative agency” for probationary and trial-period terminations, the rule “establishes a new, limited appeals process adjudicated by OPM” after an executive order rendered the prior MSPB procedures inoperative. The fourth revises the reduction-in-force regulations to prioritize “performance over tenure and length of service” in deciding who is retained. Four rules, 196 extracted obligations, one day, and four corrections eight days before they took effect.

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-15665, 2026-15654, 2026-15650, 2026-15666, 2026-17335) · FRTracker analysis

Proposals carried nearly half the month’s obligations on a third of its rules. August’s 143 proposed rules carry 1,751 extracted obligations; its 281 final rules carry 1,848. The heaviest single document was a proposal—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission‘s Federal Sector Equal Employment Opportunity, at 203, not flagged significant—and five of the ten densest documents are proposals. The heaviest final rule of general applicability was Labor’s Section 503 rule, at 141. (The month’s densest final by raw count is the Federal Communications Commission‘s Auction of FM Broadcasting Construction Permits, at 186—a “final action; requirements and procedures” governing one auction, which the Federal Register types as a rule and the ledger classifies as procedural.)

Volume and weight came apart again, and this month the gap has a name. The Commerce Department led August on document count with 235 filings carrying 162 extracted obligations. The Energy Department filed 164 documents carrying one. The Environmental Protection Agency filed 23 proposed rules—the month’s second-largest proposer—carrying three obligations between them, every one an air-plan approval, a National Priorities List deletion or a pesticide-petition receipt. At the other end, the Treasury Department led on obligations with 492 on 68 documents, 438 of them in proposals; the EEOC’s 203 sit in four documents. Document counts measure how often an agency writes to the Federal Register, they do not measure what it writes.

Three Developments Worth Watching

1. The Roadless Rule. The Agriculture Department‘s Forest Service proposes to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which in the department’s description “established broad prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting within inventoried roadless areas” of the National Forest System, and to return those decisions to forest-level land management planning. The proposal—Special Areas; Roadless Area Conservation, published August 20, flagged significant—carries a 32-day comment window closing September 21. As of September 14, Regulations.gov listed 3,396 comments on it, six times the next August proposal. The extractor found zero obligations in it. A rescission proposal is exactly the shape that can produce a zero—the obligation lens, as the Labor example above shows from the other direction, cannot see a restriction being taken away—and the zero describes the extractor’s output, not a finding that the proposal contains no duties. It is the month’s clearest illustration of what this dataset does not measure.

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-16965) · FRTracker analysis

2. “Trump accounts.” The Treasury Department and IRS proposed regulations on Employer Contributions to Trump Accounts and Nondiscrimination Rules for Dependent Care Assistance Programs on August 11, with a public hearing scheduled for October 15 and comments due September 25. Not designated significant; 35 obligations extracted. By the agency’s summary the rules “would affect employers maintaining a Trump account contribution program or a dependent care assistance program and employees participating in those programs.”

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-16314) · FRTracker analysis

3. Regulation Crypto Assets. The Securities and Exchange Commission‘s Regulation Crypto Assets, proposed August 21 and flagged significant, carries 109 extracted obligations — the month’s heaviest significant proposal and, by that count, its fourth-heaviest significant document of any type. Comments close October 20.

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-17183) · FRTracker analysis

Further Reading

Most active agencies last month (number = Federal Register documents published):

Significant rules published. Federal Register metadata marks these documents significant under E.O. 12866 §3(f). We show those with the largest extracted obligation count; ordering is ours, designation is theirs.

Rules that took effect. Final rules that Federal Register metadata marks significant under E.O. 12866 §3(f) and whose effective date fell in August, ordered by extracted obligation count. Ordering is ours; the significance designation is theirs. Two of them—NASA’s interim final rule and Interior’s direct final rule—reached effect through expedited pathways and appear in the Shortcut Ledger’s series, above, as well. Most of these were published in earlier months: a rule’s effective date and its publication date are different things, and this list is keyed to the former. All fourteen qualifying documents are listed and each was confirmed against the Federal Register’s own metadata as a final rule carrying the significance flag.

Four additional significant rules took effect in August with no obligations extracted: the Department of Transportation’s pipeline-safety correction, two Interior Department Endangered Species Act rules (regulations pertaining to endangered and threatened wildlife and the revised Canada lynx critical habitat designation), and OPM’s correcting amendments to its civil-service performance rule.

For readers who want the underlying dataset: the full monthly snapshot is at frtracker.app/monthly/2026-08, with methodology at frtracker.app/methodology.

Andrew Leahey is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Law at Drexel Kline School of Law.

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