On the surface, not much appears to be happening in federal policy. Congress appears unable to coalesce on any significant legislative initiatives and the administration cycles through tariffs, war, and elections. But that can be deceiving. There are two stories that have caught Eakinomics’ eye recently.

The first is a simple change in the methods used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to calculate the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index — the Fed’s preferred measures of inflation. As nicely laid out by The Wall Street Journal, the BEA will alter the way it calculates the indices for the cost of investment management, software, and legal services. These are seemingly inconsequential components of the core PCE, but the BEA has come to the conclusion that its current methods can be improved. The new approach will be used for the August data (published September 30) and included in revised data for the past five years.

More important, core PCE inflation is expected to be about two-tenths of a percentage point lower than under the old formula. At this juncture in the Fed’s inflation-fighting efforts and with the formation of a Federal Reserve task force on measuring inflation, this will get a lot of attention — and probably a lot of misinformation. Don’t be fooled.

The other development is an Office of Management and Budget proposed rule — Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance — that proposes deep revisions to the way grants are awarded, administered, and overseen by federal agencies. Among the things it proposes is that “sometimes program goals or Federal agency priorities may change in response to new direction from politically accountable leadership.” Needless to say, this has gotten the attention of the research community, many of whom view it as a political hijacking of scientific research.

There has been an enormous response to a request for comments on the preliminary rule. Tech Policy Press summarized it this way:

So, how did the public respond, and how effective were these campaigns? To find out, we analyzed every comment on the docket with an open-source pipeline we built for reading public comments at scale. We downloaded all of the comments from regulations.gov, including the text of attached letters and PDFs, and used an LLM to process each one and record its position on the rule, the specific concerns it raised, and what kind of person or organization submitted it. A second pass double-checked those labels, while a separate step grouped near-identical submissions into form-letter campaigns, and another linked each comment to the sections of the rule it cites. The results feed the interactive dashboard we draw on below.

Between May 29 and July 9, roughly 51,000 comments were posted to regulations.gov (and over 200,000 more had been received but not yet published). The verdict on public sentiment is clear and lopsided: about 94 percent oppose the proposed rule and only 6 percent support it, with fewer than one percent marked as unclear. The opposition is overwhelmingly grassroots rather than orchestrated. Form letters make up only about 16 percent of all comments (roughly 8,400 comments across 210 distinct campaigns), and only about one in eight opposing comments came from a form-letter campaign. Support for the rule, by contrast, was almost entirely organized: nearly nine in ten supportive comments (about 2,500) came from a single form-letter campaign. Opponents mostly wrote their own comments; supporters mostly signed the same form-letter.

The comment period has now closed, and the rule may be finalized. If it is, buckle up.

It turns out that no matter what the surface waters look like, there is always something going on.