The §25F rules reached the White House as two rules. The half that opens SGO certification binds the day it publishes.

The rules that decide who can run a Scholarship Granting Organization are written. Treasury sent them to the White House on September 10, 2026. Here is the background that makes that sentence mean something. Before a significant federal rule can publish, it goes for a final review to a small White House office called OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That review is the last stop before the Federal Register, and the public listing of what is sitting there is the earliest reliable signal that publication is close. Both §25F rules, RIN 1545-BS17 and RIN 1545-BR97, filed together under regulation number REG-117199-25, were received there on September 10 and are listed as pending review. In July we read Treasury’s own regulatory agenda and reported that the startup rules looked set to arrive already binding, and we said the label those rules carried when they reached OIRA would settle the question. They have reached OIRA. Each one carries a label, and the two labels are not the same.

The split is the story. RIN 1545-BS17, the temporary regulations, is filed at the interim final rule stage. An interim final rule is legally binding the day it publishes, with comments collected afterward, once states and SGOs are already operating under it. That is the half covering the startup mechanics: how a state makes its election, how it submits its list of approved SGOs this fall, and what contributions an SGO must begin tracking on January 1, 2027. RIN 1545-BR97 is filed at the ordinary proposed rule stage. A proposed rule is a draft that binds nobody until the agency has taken comments, answered them, and issued a final version, and this one carries the fuller rulebook: enforcement of the SGO requirements, recordkeeping, and information reporting. So the honest answer to “will there be a comment period” is that it depends which rules you mean. On the rules that determine whether your state can certify you this fall, no, not before they take effect. On the rules that determine what you must do once certified, yes.

Two caveats, stated plainly, because a rule at OIRA is not a published rule. Review can change a rule’s text and occasionally its instrument, so Treasury could still emerge with something different from what it filed, and none of this is law until it appears in the Federal Register. Review also has no fixed length: Executive Order 12866 allows OIRA up to 90 days, extendable, and some reviews conclude in days. “Weeks rather than months” is a reasonable read of the situation, not a schedule anyone has published. One fact did firm up in the filing. OIRA has flagged both rules economically significant, the government’s own term for a rule with an annual effect of at least $100 million, where Treasury’s agenda entries had left that field undetermined. And one fact has not moved at all: the credit is available for contributions made on or after January 1, 2027, and not a day earlier.

So what can anyone actually do in the weeks before the startup rules bind? One door is open right now that was shut in July, and it closes again the moment OIRA concludes its review. While a rule sits at OIRA, Executive Order 12866 gives any affected member of the public the right to request a meeting about it. Not just lawyers and lobbyists: a scholarship organization, a school association, a state agency, a CPA with clients who will claim this credit. You submit a short form on reginfo.gov naming the RIN and your topic, OIRA schedules a call, and the Treasury attorneys drafting the rule ordinarily attend. You do not get to see the draft. You get roughly half an hour to explain what breaks if the text reads a particular way, plus a memo that lands in front of the people writing it, and the attendee list and materials are published afterward. As of September 11, 2026, the meeting log shows zero requests on 1545-BS17 and zero on 1545-BR97. The request forms are live: one for the temporary regulations, one for the proposed regulations. A concrete example of the kind of question worth raising: §25F requires an SGO to spend at least 90 percent of its income on scholarships, and the statute never says how that is measured for an organization in its first year, when contributions arrive in December and scholarships go out the following spring. That is cheap to answer in the text now and expensive to fix afterward.

We check the OIRA listing every day and will report when either review concludes, because the conclusion action recorded there tells you whether the rule cleared as filed or went back for changes. If you are building an SGO, the planning assumption should now be that the certification rules land with little warning and already in force, which is close to the opposite of the draft-then-comment autumn most people penciled in. Be ready before they publish rather than after. Start with our guide to starting an SGO, check where your state stands on the participation map, and see who is already organizing in the SGO directory.