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Over the past 12 months, the higher ed community has faced a whirlwind of rulemaking from the Department of Education (ED), making some of the biggest changes to education policy in at least two decades. And as Politico Pro described yesterday, there is more to come.

A major factor impacting colleges and universities is not just the scope of changes but also the speed of changes — the amount of time between seeing draft rules for negotiated rulemaking (NegReg) sessions and the final rules being published.

Has the timeline for rulemaking been compressed? And if so, at what cost?

People have long lamented the slow, laborious pace of ED’s rulemaking process. Put changes on the federal agenda, collect initial public comments, publish draft rules and conduct NegReg sessions that often take months, take the revised rules and publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), collect final public comments over a period of 1-2 months, revise those rules and then publish Final Rules.

The short answer is that yes, the major rules from the Trump II Administration are far quicker than the Biden, Trump I, Obama II, and Obama I Administrations.

To see whether this speed is genuinely new, I mapped every major Department of Education higher-education rule going back to 2009, grouped them by administration, and measured how long each one took to travel from the first Negotiated Rulemaking session (where ED and negotiators work through draft regulatory language) to a published Final Rule. The pattern is unambiguous. Across the rules I examined, a typical rule took about 17 months to make that trip, and the fastest anyone had managed before now was roughly nine months. The three Trump II rules — RISE (student loan limits) at about seven months, and the two AHEAD rules, Workforce Pell at five months and Institutional Accountability at six — are not merely quick; they are the three fastest rules in the entire 2009–2026 record, and they clear the old floor by a comfortable margin. Some of that was forced, since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act set a statutory July 1, 2026 effective date that pushed ED to move fast. But forced or not, the result is a compression of the rulemaking calendar with no precedent in the period I looked at, and it came alongside an equally unusual run of consensus in the negotiations themselves.

The stacked bar chart is the clearest way to see it. Each bar is a single rule, and its height is the full Neg-Reg-to-Final duration in months, split into two pieces so you can see where the time actually went. The lighter lower segment is the stretch from the first negotiating session to the NPRM, and the darker upper segment is the stretch from that NPRM to the Final Rule. The shaded background bands mark the five administrations, so you can read left to right and watch the cadence change by era.

Trump II is the only era that is short top and bottom. What jumps out is that the red Trump II bars on the right are not only the shortest overall, they are short in both segments at once: ED did not simply rush the comment-to-final step while taking its time up front, or the reverse — it ran the entire pipeline fast. The long bars elsewhere get long in different ways, which is part of the point. State Authorization in 2016 (34 months) stretched almost entirely in the lower segment, because ED sat on negotiated text for roughly two years, while the 2019 Borrower Defense rule stretched in the upper segment, bogged down between proposal and finalization.

Regardless of whether you like or dislike the policies of each of the rules, what we are seeing with the Trump II Administration is unprecedented in speed. But there could be an argument that this record should have an asterisk — Congress passed OBBB with an unusual level of detail, essentially writing much of the resultant regulations, and they set aggressive timelines.

Rather than an asterisk, however, I would argue that what we are seeing is a considered strategy designed to get fast results.

The first step is getting Congress (through a lot of strong-arming) to actually legislate with specific policy details. The second step is picking NegReg negotiators who, while they purposely are chosen to represent divergent points-of-view, are personally inclined to listen and actually negotiate. The third step is choosing federal negotiators and moderators who are inclined to make hard decisions quickly with the express aim of reaching consensus (meaning the outcome rules are largely written even before the NPRM). And the fourth step is to very quickly review and respond to public comments in an all-hands-on-deck manner.

There is a cost of this strategy, and not just from forcing colleges and universities to scramble to implement the final rules. There are mistakes that are made in the final rules due to the rush, ones that expose ED to litigation risks. Congress set the clock, but the most litigable choices — e.g., how professional programs are defined, whether undergraduate certificates count — were ED's own, not Congress's.

But more on that in a future post.

I would expect this speed strategy to continue for at least the next two years, and there will be consequences.

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