Defending Ed Submits Public Comment on the Proposed Agency Rule: Education Department General Administrative Regulations

The U.S. Department of Education published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on August 24, 2026, proposing to modernize the Education Department General Administrative Regulations (EDGAR), which govern how nearly every federal education dollar is awarded, monitored, or terminated. The proposed rule would harmonize the separate and often inconsistent requirements that apply to direct grants under Part 75 and state-administered formula grants under Part 76. It would also reconcile EDGAR with the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) April 2024 Uniform Guidance, retire the Department’s duplicative Federal Register publication requirement in favor of the governmentwide Grants.gov portal, codify the Secretary’s long-exercised discretion over continuation awards and terminations, and require that hiring, admissions, promotions, and compensation practices carried out under a Department grant rest on merit and high standards rather than race, sex, religion, or national origin. It would do all this while extending existing free-speech and free-inquiry protections beyond colleges and universities to school districts, charter schools, states, and community nonprofits.

On September 23, 2026, Defending Education filed a comment supporting the proposed rule, arguing that the revisions make EDGAR materially easier for a grantee to read and follow—something all administrative regulations ought to be. DE’s comment notes that when identical obligations are worded differently across EDGAR’s parts, or when terms go undefined, similarly situated recipients receive different answers to the same question, forcing grantees to guess at accuracy. DE also notes that the proposed rule’s cleanup of severability provisions, stale cross-references, and mismatched language reduces that burden. The comment welcomes ending duplicate grant notices as a pro-access measure, noting that Federal Register publication costs roughly $453 per page (money that could be spent on students). The Department claims little new power in the rulemaking: its continuation-award and termination-for-convenience provisions codify existing practice and parallel authority the Uniform Guidance already confers, and its merit obligations rest on civil rights statutes long since incorporated into EDGAR. Because agencies must give regulated parties fair warning of what a regulation requires, and because Supreme Court precedent makes clear that an agency’s unwritten interpretations no longer command judicial deference, DE argues the Department is right to put its practices in regulatory text subject to notice and comment. The comment also offers certain recommendations to strengthen the final rule.

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