The Investigative Journal’s daily read of notable Federal Register entries scheduled for publication on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, drawn from the Office of the Federal Register’s public-inspection list and the underlying agency filings.
Tuesday’s Federal Register edition is dominated by a sweeping unwind of Biden-era public-lands policy, two parallel rollbacks of pandemic-era child-care and Head Start workforce mandates, and a Commodity Futures Trading Commission proposal that would lock in the post-LIBOR transition for Canadian dollar and Mexican peso interest-rate swaps. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation also breaks with annual practice and declines to inflation-adjust its civil penalties for the first time under the 2015 inflation-adjustment statute, citing a new Office of Management and Budget directive. Below, the eight items investigative readers should track, with comment-period deadlines, dockets, and the agency-by-agency chain of authority.
1. Interior rescinds Biden-era Conservation and Landscape Health Rule
The Bureau of Land Management’s final rule “Rescission of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule” (RIN 1004-AF03; Docket BLM-2025-0001) fully repeals the May 2024 rule that placed conservation on equal footing with grazing, mining, and energy development under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The rescission takes effect 30 days after publication. According to the BLM’s preamble, the agency received 138,161 comment-letter submissions during the proposed rulemaking, including 9,132 unique submissions, and concluded that the 2024 rule “introduced unnecessary complexity and placed operational constraints on the BLM’s planning and permitting processes.”
The repeal restores the Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) framework that had been in place since 1983 and eliminates the 2024 rule’s restoration- and mitigation-leasing provisions. BLM argues that under 43 U.S.C. 1732(b) the bureau may only authorize third parties to “use, occupy, and develop” public lands, and that conservation leasing exceeded that statutory grant. Land-health standards will continue to be applied through the existing grazing regulations, with potential refinements deferred to a separate rulemaking — see Item 2.
Records suggest the rescission will reset planning processes for the roughly 245 million acres BLM administers across the West. Litigation is widely expected from conservation organizations that intervened in support of the 2024 rule; that risk is acknowledged in the preamble’s discussion of “avoiding unnecessary litigation risk” through full repeal rather than partial revision.
2. BLM proposes new grazing-administration framework
Issued in tandem with the rescission above, BLM and the Interior Department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) released a notice of proposed rulemaking to revise the grazing regulations at 43 CFR Part 4100 (RIN 1004-AE82; Docket BLM-2026-0001). The proposal would establish a new part addressing land-health management — relocating provisions from existing rules — and update procedures for administrative appeals of BLM grazing decisions to OHA’s Departmental Cases Hearings Division.
BLM’s filing reports that it administers grazing on approximately 155 million acres of public land under the Taylor Grazing Act, the Public Rangelands Improvement Act, and FLPMA, with nearly 18,000 grazing permits authorizing roughly 12.3 million animal-unit-months annually. The 60-day public comment period closes 60 days after Federal Register publication. Comments on the proposed information-collection requirements must be submitted to the Office of Management and Budget within 30 days of publication. Industry groups representing public-lands ranchers will likely treat this as the substantive replacement for the rescinded 2024 rule’s land-health provisions.
3. HHS finalizes rollback of 2024 Child Care and Development Fund mandates
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families published a final rule, “Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund” (RIN 0970-AD20). The rule rescinds four specific requirements from the March 2024 CCDF final rule: the cap on family co-payments at 7 percent of income, the requirement that some direct services be delivered through grants or contracts, the requirement to pay providers prospectively, and the requirement to pay providers based on enrollment rather than attendance. The rule takes effect 60 days after publication.
HHS data in the preamble shows that the CCDF program received $12.381 billion in fiscal year 2026 enacted funding, supporting subsidies for more than 1.6 million children from approximately 994,000 families each month, based on FY2023 figures. The agency notes that 55 of 56 states and territories had requested transitional or legislative waivers from at least one March 2024 requirement, and 19 states have since requested second two-year waivers. According to the preamble, states “have expressed concerns about the increased potential for fraudulent payments” associated with prospective and enrollment-based payment requirements — a finding likely to anchor TIJ’s continuing reporting on subsidy-program integrity.
4. ACF proposes companion rollback of Head Start workforce wage requirements
Filed jointly with the CCDF final rule, the Office of Head Start’s notice of proposed rulemaking, “Restoring Flexibility to Support Head Start Program Access” (RIN 0970-AD21; Docket ACF-2026-0364), would remove the wage-and-benefit requirements added in the August 2024 rule, “Supporting the Head Start Workforce and Consistent Quality Programming” (89 FR 67720). ACF estimates the rescissions, if finalized, would yield “over $2 billion in future cost savings for Head Start programs.”
The proposal targets §1302.90 of the Head Start Performance Standards, which mandated wage parity between Head Start staff and local public-school early-childhood educators. ACF’s preamble argues those requirements “are not in line with the plain language of the Head Start Act and are costly and overly prescriptive.” The public comment period is 30 days from Federal Register publication — an unusually short window for a rule of this scale, which deserves close scrutiny from program administrators and grant-recipient organizations. Comments are submitted via Regulations.gov referencing Docket ACF-2026-0364 or by mail to the Office of Head Start, 330 C Street SW, 4th Floor, Washington, DC 20201.
5. CFTC proposes interest-rate-swap clearing update for CAD CORRA and Mexican F-TIIE
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s notice of proposed rulemaking (RIN 3038-AF69; 17 CFR Part 50) would amend the swap-clearing requirement under Section 2(h) of the Commodity Exchange Act to reflect the global benchmark transition away from the Canadian Dollar Offered Rate (CDOR) toward the Canadian Overnight Repo Rate Average (CORRA), and from the Mexican Interbank Equilibrium Interest Rate (TIIE) to the Overnight TIIE Funding Rate (F-TIIE).
The transition continues the broader post-LIBOR shift to overnight, near-risk-free reference rates that derivatives clearing organizations and major sell-side dealers have been preparing for since the 2021 cessation of the legacy USD LIBOR fixings. Filings indicate the proposed clearing list would conform CFTC rules with operational practice already in place at registered DCOs. The comment period closes 30 days after Federal Register publication, with submissions accepted via Regulations.gov or mail to CFTC Secretary Christopher Kirkpatrick at Three Lafayette Centre, 1155 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20581.
6. FDA opens drug-repurposing public docket
The Food and Drug Administration’s request for information, “Drug Repurposing for Unmet Medical Needs” (Docket FDA-2026-N-4492) opens a public docket soliciting input on FDA-approved drugs that could be redirected to new uses through supplemental new-drug-application pathways. The agency is specifically focused on candidates “for which there appears to be no commercial interest in adding a new use through a supplement to a new drug application.”
The RFI is significant because it surfaces a recurring policy gap at the intersection of patent expiration and rare-disease drug development: many older, off-patent compounds that could plausibly treat additional conditions never receive supplemental approvals because no sponsor will fund the necessary trials. The 30-day comment window, while short, will likely draw responses from academic medical centers, rare-disease advocacy organizations, and the National Institutes of Health’s drug-repurposing programs. Submissions are accepted at Regulations.gov referencing Docket FDA-2026-N-4492.
7. PBGC declines inflation adjustment of ERISA civil penalties — citing OMB memo
In a notable break with annual practice under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s notice, “No Adjustment of Civil Penalties for Inflation”, announces that PBGC’s maximum civil-penalty amounts under ERISA Sections 4071 and 4302 will remain at 2025 levels — $2,739 per day for failure to provide certain notices and reportable-event filings, and $365 per day for multiemployer-plan filings.
The notice points to Office of Management and Budget memorandum M-26-11, dated April 17, 2026, which “informed agencies of the cancelation of the inflation adjustment for 2026.” The 2015 inflation-adjustment statute generally requires annual updates by January 15 of each year. Records suggest this is the first time since the statute’s 2016 implementation that the standard adjustment has been suspended government-wide; if applied across the federal enforcement landscape, the OMB directive would freeze a wide range of civil-penalty schedules at 2025 levels through the 2026 calendar year. TIJ will publish a separate inventory of agencies affected by M-26-11 once the memorandum’s full text is posted publicly.
8. Presidential proclamations: Military Spouse Day and Victory Day for World War II
Two presidential proclamations from the Executive Office of the President are scheduled for publication: Proclamation 11027, Military Spouse Day, 2026, and Proclamation 11028, Victory Day for World War II, 2026. Both were signed May 7, 2026.
The Victory Day proclamation marks May 8, 2026 — the 81st anniversary of V-E Day — and frames the observance within the broader “America 250” semiquincentennial commemorating the founding. The Military Spouse proclamation cites the administration’s first-term work on spouse-employment portability, federal hiring flexibilities, and licensure reciprocity, and signals continued attention to military housing, child care, and healthcare access. Neither proclamation creates new regulatory obligations.
Items relevant to TIJ’s investigative beats
Three of Tuesday’s filings warrant follow-up reporting. First, the BLM rescission and companion grazing NPRM are the most consequential public-lands deregulation since the start of the second Trump administration; the comment-record asymmetry — 138,161 letters on the 2024 rule versus a 60-day window for the new grazing proposal — will shape future Administrative Procedure Act litigation. Second, the HHS child-care rollbacks and the Head Start NPRM together unwind nearly all of the 2024 social-services workforce rules and will reverberate through state agency budgets currently operating under transitional waivers. Third, the PBGC notice and its citation of OMB Memorandum M-26-11 deserve a cross-agency follow-up: if M-26-11 indeed cancels civil-penalty inflation adjustments government-wide, the practical effect is a real-terms reduction in deterrence across dozens of regulatory regimes, from environmental enforcement to securities supervision.
The CFTC swap-clearing proposal is technical but worth flagging for finance-desk readers: the LIBOR transition is now in its final operational phase, and Tuesday’s NPRM closes one of the few remaining open jurisdictional gaps for North American interest-rate derivatives. The FDA drug-repurposing docket, while structured as a request for information rather than a rulemaking, may signal a forthcoming policy framework on supplemental approvals for off-patent compounds — an area TIJ has previously covered in connection with rare-disease pricing and orphan-drug exclusivity.
Comment-period deadlines listed above are calculated from Federal Register publication date (May 12, 2026) unless otherwise noted in the underlying filing. All linked documents are public-inspection PDFs from the Office of the Federal Register; final, citable Federal Register text will appear at federalregister.gov on the publication date.
Sources
- Federal Register — Office of the Federal Register, NARA
- Federal Register — Public Inspection List (current)
- BLM — Rescission of Conservation and Landscape Health Rule (RIN 1004-AF03)
- BLM/OHA — Revision of Grazing Administration Regulations (RIN 1004-AE82)
- HHS/ACF — Restoring Flexibility in the CCDF (RIN 0970-AD20)
- HHS/ACF — Restoring Flexibility to Support Head Start Program Access (RIN 0970-AD21)
- CFTC — Interest Rate Swap Clearing Requirement, CAD/MXN benchmark transitions (RIN 3038-AF69)
- FDA — Drug Repurposing for Unmet Medical Needs RFI (Docket FDA-2026-N-4492)
- PBGC — No Adjustment of Civil Penalties for Inflation
- Proclamation 11027 — Military Spouse Day, 2026
- Proclamation 11028 — Victory Day for World War II, 2026