Notice & Comment

Recent Rulemakings Reviewed: July 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): 2,294
    • vs June 2026: 2,311
    • vs July 2025: 2,411
  • Final rules: 287
    • vs June 2026: 340
    • vs July 2025: 326
  • Proposed rules: 171
    • vs June 2026: 142
    • vs July 2025: 233
  • Rules flagged significant in Federal Register metadata: 41
    • vs June 2026: 33
    • vs July 2025: 61
  • Comment periods closed last month: 700
  • Compliance obligations extracted from last month’s publications: 3,661

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.

July reversed June’s shape. Where June tilted sharply toward finalization—finals up, proposals down—July ran in the opposite direction overall: final rules fell from 340 to 287 while proposed rules rose from 142 to 171. Taken together, we have two months of the pipeline emptying and refilling.

Against the immediately preceding month, one figure moved the other way: significant rules rose from 33 in June to 41 in July, on slightly falling document volume—a larger share of a smaller month carried the OIRA designation. That is a month-over-month observation only. Set beside July 2025, which recorded 61, this July is the lighter of the two: on the significant count the year-over-year direction is down, not up.

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-final15349
Direct-final823
Temporary4714
Total expedited70386

Every row above is classified from the Federal Register’s own ACTION field, not from any inference on our end.

A second consecutive month with the same shape. Last month interim-final rules were uncommon—8 rules against 49 temporary ones—yet carried by far the most obligations (166). In July they were both more common and heavier: 15 rules, 349 obligations—roughly double on each measure, while temporary rules remained numerous and nearly weightless. Two months is a repetition; it is not yet enough to call a pattern or trend.

The weight is concentrated in two main documents. The Department of Homeland Security’s Counter-UAS Authority for State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Law Enforcement and Correctional Agencies (published July 6, effective July 1) is an interim final rule carrying 194 extracted obligations—the month’s second-densest final rule of any kind—and NASA’s NEPA procedures rule (below) carries 83. Together they are 277 of the interim-final bucket’s 349; the remaining thirteen interim-final rules carry 72 obligations between them.

July’s heaviest expedited rule is the Counter-UAS rule, and it is not a procedural one. It addresses counter-unmanned-aircraft authority for state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement and correctional agencies—its title is the description—and it reached the public in final form, with comment invited afterward. On this dataset’s obligation measure it is the single heaviest use of an expedited pathway in July, 56% of the interim-final bucket on its own. At least two of July’s interim-final rules were substantial by that measure. That is a claim about those two documents. It is not a claim about the pathway: obligation count is a measure of extracted duties, not a demonstrated measure of policy magnitude, and thirteen of the fifteen rules sit near zero.

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-13609) · FRTracker analysis

A smaller story, structurally the more interesting one: agency NEPA procedures

The rules below are far lighter than Counter-UAS by obligation count, and only one of the three was published in July. They earn the space for a different reason: they are agencies rebuilding the procedural layer that governs how they review their own actions, after the layer above them was withdrawn.

Some background. The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to consider and evaluate the environmental effects of their actions before taking them. For decades that obligation ran through two layers: government-wide regulations issued by the Council on Environmental Quality at 40 CFR 1500–1508, and each agency’s own implementing procedures beneath them. CEQ removed its government-wide regulations by interim final rule at 90 FR 10610 (2025-03014, February 25, 2025), effective April 11, 2025, and finalized the removal at 91 FR 618 (2026-00178, January 8, 2026). The top layer is gone and each agency now writes its own.

Across June and July 2026, three agencies acted on their NEPA procedures by interim final rule, and they did two different things. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation rescinded its procedures at 36 CFR part 805 (2026-11298, June 5) and put nothing in their place, concluding “that there is no need for the ACHP to establish agency-specific procedures at this time,” while noting it “may develop internal NEPA procedures in the future if necessary and appropriate.” The Department of Veterans Affairs replaced its own with a new part 26 (Implementing Regulation for National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), June 15, 79 obligations), and NASA replaced its own at 14 CFR part 1216 (Procedures for Implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, July 1, 83 obligations). A rescission and a replacement are not the same act: one subtracts a regime, the other substitutes a new one carrying its own duties. The first two took effect the day they published.

All three argued the point the same way, in two independent steps—first that notice and comment was never required, and then, in the alternative, that there was good cause to dispense with it. The VA and NASA passages are near-identical in structure and phrasing, and both track CEQ’s own interim final rule closely.

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-11298, 2026-11973, 2026-13245) · FRTracker analysis

A note on scope: we are coming in on a tail here. The concentrated episode came in July 2025, when at least twelve NEPA-procedure documents issued in three days, across eleven agency components (the Army Corps appears twice), immediately following CEQ’s rescission. What appears in June and July 2026 is the continuation, and a lesser one at that (at least in terms of agency count).

Remarkable Rulemakings

Six of the month’s eight densest documents are proposals. The heaviest single document was a proposed rule — the EPA‘s Amendments and Nonconformance Penalties for Model Year 2027 and Later Heavy-Duty Highway Engines, at 306 extracted obligations. Behind it, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission‘s Modernizing Reactor Licensing, Safety Oversight, and Siting Practices (262) and Homeland Security‘s EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 rule (255, significant).

The heaviest final rule was EPA’s National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Plywood and Composite Wood Products, at 267 obligations.

Primary source: Federal Register (2026-14112, 2026-13550) · FRTracker analysis

Volume and weight came apart again. Commerce led July on document count with 250 filings, carrying 281 extracted obligations. Transportation filed 225 documents carrying 310. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission filed 33 documents carrying 902 obligations — the month’s largest obligation load from an agency well outside the top ten by volume.

Also worth noting: the NRC filed 9 proposed-rule documents in July against 2–4 in every other month of 2026, and only 1 of the 9 is flagged significant. One of the nine is a correction to another (2026-15145, Modernizing Reactor Licensing, Safety Oversight, and Siting Practices; Correction), so eight are distinct proposals. Six of the nine carry extracted obligations, five of them substantial — Modernizing Reactor Licensing (2026-14341, 262) · Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (180) · Reducing Barriers to Medical Use Licensing (166) · Integrated Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal (163) · Reforming and Modernizing the NRC’s Radiation Protection Framework (116) · Modernizing Package Certification Requirements (2026-15117, 15).

What “removed” means, and what it doesn’t

This section courtesy of Jamie Beaubien, our research assistant.

Comparing proposed and final rules at the level of individual obligations reveals that regulatory survival and textual survival are not exactly the same. On the one hand, similar-looking language can mask a significant change in what the rule requires, while a proposed duty can vanish as a sentence, while remaining very much alive as a legal requirement.

Take a look at three recent reviews. A proposed FCC rule on pole attachments stated that “[a] cable television system operator or telecommunications carrier may accept a valid estimate and make payment” prior to the estimate being withdrawn. A later order carried those operative words forward almost intact, but the actor did not survive with them. It is now a defined term, “new attacher,” a broader class than the pair it replaced. Similar-looking language masking a change in who is actually bound.

A slightly different issue is presented by EPA lead-paint regulations. The proposed regulation carried forward a requirement—already law since 2008—that refresher courses for dust-sampling technicians, renovators, and project designers be at least four hours long. That requirement is still present in the final text. However, identifying the surviving obligation necessitates looking past the surrounding regulatory language and locating the specific duty contained within a much larger provision that governs testing, course content, accreditation, and hands-on requirements. While an obligation-level comparison explains what actually survived, a word-level comparison can identify the sentence.

Another issue is exemplified by an FAA Enhanced Flight Vision System (EFVS) rule. According to the proposed rule, an EFVS flight simulator had to be either a Level D simulator or a Level C simulator with a daylight visual display. The proposed rule set that requirement across three separate provisions—flight training, operating experience, and proficiency checks. The final rule consolidated all three into one, and declined to carry a small part forward: the daylight display condition no longer is part of recent flight experience, and proficiency checks are not among the uses at all. Here, the problem is not that the words changed, but that a rule can be reorganized and even narrowed while the sentence you are matching still appears facially to be there.

These illustrations highlight a small but crucial point regarding automated tracking of regulatory change: the sentence is not always the object worth matching. It is the sentence’s obligation. Even if the final rule’s language, location, or structure change, the actor, the operative requirement, and the pertinent conditions may endure. This distinction is particularly important when a proposed obligation cannot be found exactly in the final text.

“Not found” and “removed” are not always synonymous.

Further reading

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

Significant rules published. OIRA flagged these as 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. OIRA-significant rules (E.O. 12866 §3(f) designation) whose effective date fell in July, reached through the ordinary process, ordered by extracted obligation count. Ordering is ours; the significance designation is theirs. (Rules that reached effect through an expedited pathway are counted in the Shortcut Ledger above.) 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. Each entry was confirmed against the Federal Register’s own metadata as a final rule carrying the significance designation; the list is not certified exhaustive.

For readers who want the underlying dataset: the full monthly snapshot is at frtracker.app/monthly/2026-07, 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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