Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Minor

Require SROs to publish proposed rules for public comment

Not started

836 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Require all SROs to publish rules in proposed format and seek public comment before they are submitted to the SEC or the CFTC.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing requires an SRO to expose a rule for comment before filing it. FINRA does it voluntarily for some rules through its Regulatory Notice series — its Rule 3290 filing records that it published Regulatory Notice 25-05 in March 2025 and received 216 comments before submitting the rule to the SEC — but that is FINRA's own practice, not an obligation, and it binds neither the exchanges, the MSRB nor the NFA. The Exchange Act's existing procedure is the reverse of the ask: the SEC publishes a filed rule change for comment after it is submitted. No SEC or CFTC rulemaking in the window changed that, the SEC's 2026-08-14 Regulatory Flexibility Agenda has no SRO entry, and a govinfo full-text search of 119th-Congress bills for "self-regulatory organization" together with "cost-benefit analysis" or "annual report" returns zero.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The Primary record of FINRA’s voluntary pre-filing comment practice is https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/03/2026-02122/self-regulatory-organizations-financial-industry-regulatory-authority-inc-notice-of-filing-of-a (2026-02-03), which states that FINRA published Regulatory Notice 25-05 in March 2025 requesting comment on the proposed rule change and received 216 comment letters before filing. It is recorded here rather than as Evidence because the ask is for a requirement covering all SROs; a continuing voluntary practice by one SRO is neither the requirement nor a change inside the window.
  • The complete set of 85 FINRA filing notices, and the SEC’s whole rulemaking output for the window (57 rules and proposed rules), were read; neither contains a pre-filing comment mandate.
  • Cluster negative search for pages 836–837 is recorded in docs/research/ch-27.md.
  • The FINRA baseline read (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06) did not reach this ask. finra.org is off the evidence allowlist by design rather than by a wall, and finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/<number> opens to a bare curl — but the host rate-limits hard, answering HTTP 403 to every request for half an hour after four rules were read, through three spaced retries. Rules 9261 and 12904 were read (see #2168 and #2169); the FINRA By-Laws and the Rule 9600 series, which is where an obligation of this kind would sit if one existed, were not. So the question the row asked — whether the practice is binding on FINRA itself — is still open on FINRA’s own documents.
  • It is not open on the record that matters here, though, and that is why the Status does not move. The ask is for a requirement covering all SROs. Whether FINRA’s own framework binds FINRA is a fact about one SRO’s internal governance; it cannot make an unimposed requirement imposed, and no instrument in the window imposes one on the exchanges, the MSRB or the NFA.
Action
other
Object
SRO proposed rules and public comment
ID
2172