The Education Department has priced the Federal Register at $453 a page, and two thirds of what its grants rewrite is worth is simply not paying it

Four hundred and fifty three dollars. That is what a federal agency pays for one published page of the Federal Register, and the Education Department has been counting its pages.

It filed a 68 page proposed rule on Friday morning rewriting the Education Department General Administrative Regulations, the rules that govern how it runs its grant programmes. Publication is scheduled for 24 August and comments close 30 days after that. The Department says it means to finalise the package in late 2026.

The arithmetic sits in the impact analysis, and it is unusually plain.

The count

From fiscal 2021 through fiscal 2025 the Department published an average of 84 notices inviting applications a year in the Federal Register. Each ran an average of 6.34 pages. At $453 a page that comes to $241,250 a year, and the analysis says so.

Staff time is the other half of it. The Department assumes a programme officer at grade GS-13 step 5, on a loaded rate of $89.49 an hour, spends 10 hours per competition getting a notice into Federal Register format. Two attorneys at GS-14 step 5 spend two and a half hours each on the same notice at $105.754 an hour. An analyst spends five more hours transmitting it to what the analysis still calls the Government Printing Office system, and a senior attorney at GS-15 step 5 spends 10 hours a year keeping a style guide that exists only for these notices. That comes to $158,451 a year.

Add the printing to the labour and the Department arrives at $399,701 a year, or $3,409,531 over ten years discounted at 3 percent and $2,807,333 at 7 percent.

Two thirds of the whole rule

Table 4.1 of the analysis puts the net annual benefit of the entire package at $586,064. The Federal Register line is $399,701 of it. Everything else the rewrite does, across two parts of title 2 and four parts of title 34, is worth the remaining $186,363 a year on the Department's own accounting.

That table also has a defect. Two of its rows both read "Total Net Present Value (NPV), 3 percent", holding $4,999,247 and $4,116,270, and two more both read "Annualized, 7 percent", each holding $586,064. Discount a level $586,064 for ten years at 7 percent and the answer is $4,116,270, so the second net present value is the 7 percent figure wearing the 3 percent label.

Where the notices would go

Section 75.100 is the operative change. It would eliminate the requirement for the Secretary to publish application notices in the Federal Register at all. Section 75.104 does the same for maximum award amounts and section 75.105 for annual priorities, both of which would move into the application notices themselves. Five further sections, 75.222, 75.224, 79.3, 79.6 and 79.8, are pulled the same way.

Applicants would use Grants.gov, which the Department points out already carries the opportunities and will send email alerts when new ones post. The reasoning runs that applicants currently have to watch two places, and formatting rules at the Federal Register both delay a notice and constrain how it can be laid out.

The Department is also candid about its own position. It cites Executive Order 14242 and what it calls its final mission to return education to the States, and the analysis warns that as the Department winds down operations, depending on what Congress funds, the benefits estimated for later years may fall.

It has asked for comments on the analysis.