19. Department of Transportation · Notable
Drop FRA certification requirements for dispatchers and signal employees
Attempted
Printed page 637 19. Department of Transportation
“FRA will be proposing certification requirements for dispatchers and signal employees despite the failure of the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC) to identify any safety benefit.”
What has happened
- Attempted
FRA proposed to rescind both rules. Responding to petitions for reconsideration of its May 21, 2024 final rules, FRA published two NPRMs on 2026-05-15 proposing to rescind the certification requirements for dispatchers and the certification requirements for signal employees outright. It extended both comment periods by 30 days on 2026-07-14. As of 2026-09-01 neither rescission is final, so the certification requirements remain in force.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- attempted, not partial: a proposed rescission is a directive without effect - the two 2024 final rules are still law until a final rescission publishes. Playbook section 3, “a proposed rule is attempted or partial depending on whether an earlier directive already exists”; there is no earlier directive here.
- The Quote was written when FRA had only announced it would propose these requirements. They were finalized on 2024-05-21, before the evidence window, so the ask now means undoing a standing rule; that is what FRA proposed.
- Comment-period extensions: 2026-07-14, docs 2026-14160 and 2026-14161. No final rule appears in the Federal Register Corpus, which is current to 2026-09-01, so the silence is a negative.
- Action
- withdraw
- Object
- FRA certification rulemaking for dispatchers and signal employees
- ID
- 1753