Congress Froze the OMB Grant Rule Until December 11. NSF and the Education Department Are Writing It Into Their Own Rulebooks Anyway.

On September 1, 2026, the House passed the Senate's version of H.R. 6500, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027, by a vote of 370-48, sending it to the President. The Senate had cleared it 90-6 on August 8. The measure funds the government at FY 2026 levels through December 11, 2026, and — in the provision the nonprofit and county sectors spent the summer lobbying for — delays implementation of OMB's Uniform Guidance overhaul until that same date.

The trade press read this as a reprieve. For the OMB rule itself, it is one. The 2 CFR Part 200 rewrite that OMB proposed on May 29, drew something on the order of half a million comments on, and intended to make effective October 1, 2026 is not going to be effective October 1, 2026.

But a delay of the OMB rule is a delay of the OMB rule. It is not a delay of anything else. And in the ten weeks before the House vote, at least two federal grantmakers proposed their own regulations that import the OMB rule's substance under their own statutory authority, on their own timelines, in dockets that received a rounding error's worth of the attention the OMB proposal got.

If you are a university, a school district, or a research nonprofit, the December 11 date is not the one that governs you.

What NSF proposed

NSF is rewriting the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide — the PAPPG, the single document that governs how every NSF proposal is written, submitted, reviewed, awarded, and administered — and renaming it the NSF Guidance on Financial Assistance (GFA). The vehicle is docket NSF-2026-OTR-0001, noticed in the Federal Register on June 24, 2026 (91 FR 38030). The stated purposes are unobjectionable on their face: plain language, separating policy from procedure, retiring obsolete provisions, and incorporating "mandated statutory, regulatory, Executive Order, and policy-related changes."

That last clause is where the work happens.

The draft GFA includes language advising recipients that "NSF may act immediately to suspend or terminate [grants] if needed to protect government interests" — a formulation that tracks the termination-for-convenience posture in OMB's proposed 2 CFR 200.340 rather than the current Uniform Guidance's narrower termination grounds. Other provisions in the draft rely on or implement elements of the OMB proposal that, as of this writing, has never been finalized.

The comment period closed August 24, 2026. It drew a little over 3,000 comments. The OMB proposal, covering much of the same substance, drew roughly 500,000.

The American Council on Education, writing on behalf of two dozen higher education associations, urged NSF not to finalize the GFA as drafted and specifically to strip out the provisions implementing OMB's unfinalized rule — the straightforward objection being that an agency should not enforce a regulation that does not exist yet, and that institutions cannot build compliance systems against a moving target.

What the Education Department proposed

The parallel action is docket ED-2026-OPEPD-2542-0001, the Department of Education's rewrite of EDGAR, published August 24, 2026, with comments due September 23, 2026. We covered the mechanics of that proposal in detail. The provisions that overlap the OMB rule:

• Termination for convenience by the Secretary, on the FAR-aligned model rather than the current Uniform Guidance grounds.
• A competitive preference for applicants proposing lower or zero indirect cost rates — ED's own estimate is that this redirects roughly $45 million a year from overhead to direct program costs.
• A requirement that recipients comply with presidential executive orders as a condition of the award.

ED has signaled it intends to finalize "in late 2026."

The gap, stated plainly

The CR provision is directed at OMB's rule. Agencies proposing their own regulations are acting under their own organic authorities — NSF under the National Science Foundation Act and its appropriations, ED under the General Education Provisions Act and the statutes governing its programs. A rider that pauses OMB does not, by its terms, reach those.

The practical consequence is a scenario worth naming out loud: it is entirely possible for the substance of the OMB rule to be in force at NSF and ED in early 2027 whether or not 2 CFR 200 is ever finalized in its proposed form. Two agencies that together account for an enormous share of the country's competitive research and education grantmaking would be operating under termination, indirect-cost, and executive-order-compliance regimes imported from a rule that was, on paper, blocked.

Critics quoted in the higher education press have described this as deliberate — a way to get the policy without absorbing the political and legal exposure of the OMB rulemaking. Whether or not that is the intent, it is the effect, and the comment-volume disparity is the evidence. A proposal that touches the same provisions drew 0.6 percent of the participation when it was filed under an agency docket number instead of an OMB one.

What to do in the next three weeks

File on ED-2026-OPEPD-2542-0001 before September 23. This is the one window still open. Comment volume is not decorative — it builds the administrative record that any later APA challenge is litigated on, and an agency that finalizes over a thin record is in a stronger position than one that finalizes over a thick one. Specificity beats volume: if the indirect-cost preference would materially change your ability to run a program, say which program, at what rate, with what dollar consequence.

Read your live NSF awards against the draft GFA, not the current PAPPG. If the GFA is finalized as drafted, the operative question for continuation funding is whether your award terms incorporate the PAPPG "as amended" — most do. That is the clause through which a policy-guide rewrite reaches an award that was made under the old one.

Stop planning around December 11 as a compliance date. It is a funding date and an OMB rule date. Build your readiness calendar around the agency dockets that actually govern your awards. For most research institutions that means the NSF GFA finalization — timing unannounced, and now out of your hands, since the comment period closed — and the ED final rule expected late this year.

Model the zero-indirect-cost scenario before a competitor does. ED's competitive preference does not cap your negotiated rate; it rewards applicants who voluntarily take less. In a scored competition that is a prisoner's dilemma, and the first mover in each program's applicant pool sets the floor. Decide now, at the institutional level, what your answer is — because a program officer will ask, and the answer "we haven't discussed it" is itself an answer.

Track whether other agencies follow. NSF and ED are the two identified so far. There is no structural reason the pattern stops there, and the tell is a Federal Register notice describing a routine "policy guide update" from an agency whose grantees do not typically read Federal Register notices.

The durable lesson

The sector spent the summer fighting one rulemaking, and won a delay. The delay is real and worth having. But the win was scoped to a docket number, and the policy was not.

The next time a grant-policy fight looks like it has been settled at the top of the government, the question to ask is whether the same text has already been re-filed one layer down — under an agency's own authority, in a docket with a smaller mailing list, on a clock nobody is watching.