The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is amending one word of its rules, from shall to may, and the sentence it sits in is the one that guarantees a comment period after a rule is already made
The amendment is one word long.
Buried in the regulatory text of a rule the Nuclear Regulatory Commission published on Tuesday, after eleven pages about advisory committees and security clearances, is instruction 3. It reads, in full, that in section 2.804 the Commission amends paragraph (e) introductory text by removing the word "shall" and adding in its place the word "may".
The sentence that word governs is the one requiring the agency to take comments on a rule after the rule has already been made.
Where the requirement came from
Nothing in the Administrative Procedure Act demands it. The APA lets an agency skip notice and comment altogether for interpretative rules, general statements of policy, rules of agency organization, procedure or practice, and where an agency finds good cause that comment would be impracticable, unnecessary or contrary to the public interest.
The NRC volunteered anyway. In April 1985 it amended 10 CFR part 2 to give itself a post-promulgation comment period precisely in those excused categories, on a recommendation from the Administrative Conference of the United States, and it wrote down what the period was for: to give interested persons a chance to expose any errors or oversights that occurred in the formulation of the rule, and to present policy arguments for changing it.
Forty one years later the agency's position is that the obligation was never required and imposes unnecessary administrative burdens. Making it voluntary, the document says, will reduce burden and let the Commission use the process where appropriate. The same passage quotes the 1985 rule back approvingly on one point, that the agency normally provides notice and comment on policy statements and interpretative rules and will continue to do so.
The procedure being used to make the change
This is a direct final rule, and the Commission states that it considers the action to be non-controversial. That is the test for using the mechanism. The rule takes effect on 26 October without anything further happening, and comments close on 10 September.
If a significant adverse comment arrives, the NRC publishes a withdrawal and folds the comment into a later final rule answering the companion proposed rule, which was published in the same issue and is identical in scope. If none arrives, that is the end of it. The document also states that absent significant modifications requiring republication, the agency will not open a second comment period.
A comment counts as significant and adverse, the rule says, if it explains why the rule would be inappropriate, challenges its underlying premise or approach, or argues that it would be ineffective or unacceptable without a change. Simple opposition does not clear the bar.
The rest of the package
The one word is the smallest part of a larger tidy-up. Part 7, the advisory committee rules, is revised and republished whole to match a General Services Administration rule issued in December on government-wide Federal Advisory Committee Act management. The information withholding provisions in 10 CFR 2.390 are trimmed to match a change the agency made in November 2025, which dropped the substantial competitive harm test on the ground that the Supreme Court rejected it in Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media. National security eligibility criteria in part 10 are updated.
All of it is filed under Executive Order 14300, signed on 23 May 2025, which orders the reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and requires a wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance. The docket is NRC-2025-1139.
