There may be no comment period on the §25F rules. Treasury's own paperwork says they take effect the day they publish.

Start with the background. Congress created the Education Freedom Tax Credit last summer, but a law on paper cannot run by itself. Before anyone can use it, the IRS has to write the detailed rules: which organizations count as Scholarship Granting Organizations, how a state certifies them, what paperwork a donor needs to claim the credit. Everyone in this world has been told to expect those rules the normal way. Treasury said in its June preview that a draft would come out by the end of September, the public would get to comment on it, and only after that would anything become final. States, scholarship organizations, and advisors have planned their fall around commenting on that draft. This story is about a government document that says the plan may be different.

Here is what we found. Twice a year, the federal government publishes a master list of every rule each agency is working on, called the Unified Agenda. It is dry, official, and almost nobody reads it. The newest edition came out July 3, and it contains the first two entries ever filed for this program: RIN 1545-BR97 and RIN 1545-BS17 (a RIN is just the government’s tracking number for a rule). Both entries carry the same three words in their timetable: Interim Final Rule. The two entries are not duplicates. Read the fine print and they split the work in two. One covers the startup mechanics: how states make their elections, how SGO lists get submitted this fall, and how donations are tracked starting January 1, 2027. The other covers the bigger substantive rules, things like enforcement and recordkeeping, and Treasury’s own summary of that one still uses the phrase “proposed regulations.” So the most likely reading is that the rules needed to get the program running arrive already final, while the fuller rulebook may still get a normal draft-and-comment round later. We have archived both entries word for word so you can read exactly what Treasury filed.

Those three words are the whole story. A proposed rule, the thing everyone is expecting, is a draft. It binds nobody. The public gets a month or two to point out problems, the agency is legally required to respond, and only then does a final version take effect. An interim final rule skips the draft stage. It is legally binding the day it is published, and comments are collected afterward, once everyone is already living under it. The difference, in plain terms: one says “here is what we are thinking, tell us what you think.” The other says “these are the rules, effective today, complaints welcome.” If the agenda entries hold, the comment period everyone is planning for will not happen before the rules take effect.

Why would Treasury do that? Its own filing explains. The temporary rules are “necessary to provide the procedure for States to make an Election, and to submit the State’s SGO List in the Fall of 2026 to complete an Election or perfect an Advance Election, before Final regulations will be published.” Translated: the law wants every participating state to hand Treasury its list of approved scholarship organizations around January 1, 2027, and there is no way to publish a draft in September, run a comment period, answer the comments, and still have binding rules in time. Skipping the draft stage solves Treasury’s deadline problem. To be clear about what this does not mean: the credit itself still starts with donations made on or after January 1, 2027, not a day earlier. The only thing that moves up is the rulebook deciding who gets to participate.

Could this be nothing? Possibly, and we want to be straight about that. The Unified Agenda is a statement of plans, not a promise. Both entries say “Legal Deadline: None,” the July date they projected has already passed with nothing published, and the text may have been written before Treasury’s June preview. Treasury could still go the normal draft route. But this is also the government’s formal channel for declaring what it intends to do, and both entries say the same thing. We will know for certain at the last step in the process: before any major rule can be published, it must be cleared by a small White House office called OIRA, and the label the rule wears when it lands there will settle the question. It has not landed yet. We re-checked every fact in this story against the government’s own database, reginfo.gov, before publishing.

So what can anyone actually do? If the comment period disappears, one door stays open, and almost nobody outside Washington knows it exists. While a rule is sitting at OIRA for that final review, a standing executive order gives any affected member of the public the right to request a meeting about it: a scholarship organization, a school association, a state agency, a tax advisor, anyone. You fill out a form on reginfo.gov with the RIN and your topic, and OIRA schedules a call. The Treasury attorneys writing the rule typically listen in. You do not get to see the draft, but you get about half an hour to explain what will break if the rule is written a certain way, and to hand over a short memo that lands in front of the people writing it. For example: the law says an SGO must spend at least 90 percent of its income on scholarships, but never says how that is measured for an organization in its first year. That is the kind of question worth raising while the text can still change. As of this writing, not one meeting has been requested on either §25F rule. Comments after publication still count, Treasury has to address them in the eventual final version, but by then the rules are already in force.

We check the OIRA list every day and will report the moment either rule arrives, including which label it carries, because that is what proves or breaks this reading. If you are building an SGO, the practical takeaway is simple: the certification rules may arrive suddenly and already final, so be ready before September, not after. Start with our guide to starting an SGO, check your state on the participation map, and see who is already organizing in the SGO directory.