The Federal Register published this morning an executive order that defers the federal excise tax on diesel fuel for the rest of the year. Executive Order 14435, signed October 5 and filed for publication on Thursday, directs the Secretary of the Treasury to determine within five days whether relief is authorized under 26 U.S.C. 7508A and, if it is, to defer payment of the diesel taxes incurred between October 5 and December 31, 2026, without penalty, interest, or addition to the tax. The order states its own reason in the first paragraph: “Restricted global diesel supply has led to rising prices, and these key industries have been particularly hard hit.” It further directs the Secretary to “explore avenues, including legislation, to eliminate the obligation to pay the amounts deferred,” which is the difference between a delay and a forgiveness. The remainder reaches the fuel itself: the Internal Revenue Service is to announce that it will not penalize the highway use of dyed diesel during the same period, and the Secretary of Agriculture is to coordinate with cooperatives and rural distributors to keep dyed diesel moving into high-demand areas. A tax deferred into the first quarter of a new year is a bill the same farmers and truckers will meet again.

The administration and the rule of law

The two-day window produced 222 documents: one presidential document, 24 rules, 11 proposed rules, and 186 notices. The presidential document is the diesel order.

Among the rules, the Justice Department placed O-desmethyltramadol in Schedule I by correction and removed the exemption status of inactive butalbital products, two changes to the controlled-substances schedules that turn on how a drug is packaged and whether it is still marketed. The Food and Drug Administration classified three device types into class II with special controls: a system for detecting non-viral sexually transmitted infections from home-collected specimens, an infant pulse rate and oxygen saturation monitor for over-the-counter use, and a hematopoietic cell enrichment kit. Classification is the agency’s ordinary route for a device whose risk is understood and whose controls can be written down, and three in one morning is volume rather than a single decision. The Department of Education amended the Impact Aid Programs regulations for grammar, statutory citations, cross-references, and mailing addresses, a technical rule that changes no requirement.

Two comment-period actions say something about pace rather than substance. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation extended the comment period on its proposal on extensions of credit to insiders from October 5 to November 4, and the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service cancelled the public hearing on a proposal to treat the refunded portion of certain refundable tax credits as a federal public benefit under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. A cancelled hearing is not a withdrawn proposal, and that rulemaking remains open on the record.

On energy and public lands, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management published the proposed notice of sale for Gulf of America Lease Sale 4 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the Interior Department added a categorical exclusion for wintertime oil and gas exploration in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The Air Force gave notice of intent to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement for the Sentinel missile deployment and the decommissioning and disposal of the Minuteman III.

The rest of the Register was the usual mass: air plan approvals, airworthiness directives, fisheries quota transfers, and repatriation and inventory-completion notices from the Interior Department. Two items in it are worth a line. The Food and Drug Administration withdrew approval of 37 abbreviated new drug applications at the applicants’ own request, on the ground that the products are no longer marketed. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control removed persons from the sanctions list and published updated identifying information for others who remain blocked.

The courts

Neither the Supreme Court nor the D.C. Circuit filed an opinion in the window. That is a quiet two days, not a gap in the record.

The District Court for the District of Columbia took nineteen new docket entries on October 8. Thirteen are numbered as civil cases; six are magistrate entries covering three criminal matters, each of which appears twice in the feed. The civil captions name the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the Army Corps of Engineers, the ACLU against the Department of Defense, and Judicial Watch against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, alongside Ali Saleh v. Blanche, De Zayas Munoz v. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Yi v. Immigrant Investor Program Office, Muppalla v. Mullin, Bradley v. Velasquez, Bromley v. United States, Ortiz-Ferrari v. Max Mobility, Quetel v. TB Loudoun, McWilliams Ballard, Inc. v. 1128 Tenth Street NW, and Saba Ilac Sanayii ve Ticaret AS against the Food and Drug Administration. The collector carries captions and docket numbers and not causes of action, so this report does not say what any of them seeks.

Two of the three watched dockets recorded filings. Beatty v. Trump, the Kennedy Center case, took four entries on October 8: three minute entries and ECF 102. Phang v. Blanche, the Epstein files case in the district court, took ECF 55 and 56. The consolidated appeal of that case in the D.C. Circuit recorded nothing in the window.

Markets

The three index quotes carry Thursday’s close, because the collector ran before Friday’s open. The S&P 500 stood at 7,765.36, down 36.41 points or 0.47 percent; the Nasdaq Composite at 27,193.34, down 345.35 points or 1.25 percent; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 51,231.64, up 51.77 points or 0.10 percent. A Dow that gains while the Nasdaq loses more than a percent is a rotation rather than a direction, and the morning quotes carry October 9 stamps: the VIX at 15.24, down 0.17; the dollar index at 102.194, up 0.056; gold at $4,205.20 on the front month, up $48.20 or 1.16 percent; and West Texas Intermediate at $90.70, down $0.79 or 0.86 percent.

The 10-year Treasury note yielded 5.255 percent on that morning stamp, up about 2 basis points. The Treasury’s own daily curve for October 8 put the 2-year at 4.75 percent, the 10-year at 5.22 percent, and the 30-year at 5.60 percent, leaving the 2s10s spread at positive 47 basis points, narrower than the 51 basis points the curve recorded for October 7, so the curve flattened on the day.

Total public debt outstanding stood at $40,284,036,147,367 as of October 7, an increase of $11,011,568,148 over the prior business day. Of that total, $32,439,260,138,550 was held by the public and $7,844,776,008,817 was intragovernmental.

The economy

The collector’s three labor and price series carried no new observation in this window, so the newest readings are the same ones that stood the day before. The consumer price index for all urban consumers was 334.980 in August, against 333.918 in July and 333.952 in June. The unemployment rate was 4.2 percent in September, a tenth of a point above the 4.1 percent of August and July. Total nonfarm payrolls were 159,044 thousand in September, against 159,015 thousand in August and 158,882 thousand in July, so the monthly gain slowed from about 133,000 to about 29,000.

Read together, the three say that prices rose in August after a flat July, that hiring slowed sharply into September, and that unemployment ticked up a tenth of a point. That is a labor market cooling rather than breaking, and it is one month of data rather than a trend.

Elections and the midterms

On Polymarket, the balance-of-power market put a Democratic sweep of both chambers at 62.5 percent on $80,223 of 24-hour volume, a Republican Senate with a Democratic House at 28.5 percent on $151,872, a Republican sweep at 8.5 percent on $78,596, and a Democratic Senate with a Republican House at 0.9 percent on $253,952. The House market gave the Democratic Party 90.5 percent on $152,902 against 9.5 percent for the Republican Party on $184,793, and the Senate market gave the Democratic Party 62.5 percent on $79,312 against 35.5 percent for the Republican Party on $97,904.

Three state races carry books large enough to read. In the Texas Senate race, James Talarico stood at 62.5 percent on $128,248 and Ken Paxton at 37.5 percent on $123,820; the previous morning’s edition of this report recorded the same pair at 66.5 and 33.5, so the four-point move ran against the Democratic candidate. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed stood at 70.5 percent on $47,477 against Mike Rogers at 30.5 percent on $18,922. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown stood at 62.5 percent on $35,095, and in Iowa, Josh Turek at 43.5 percent on $52,082.

These are the venues’ prices, not this site’s view of the races, and they resolve around November 3. The distance between the House market’s 90.5 percent and the sweep market’s 62.5 percent is the Senate, which the same venue prices as a substantially closer question than the House.

The world

The President said late Thursday that the United States will not attack Iran before the midterm elections, and that the naval blockade will remain in place. In a post on Truth Social he wrote: “I want to make it clear to everybody that, while Iran is in very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily, and while the Blockade will remain in full force and effect…we will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections.” He added that “We are having productive discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The post followed a Thursday surge in oil prices driven by reports of possible new strikes, and crude fell back Friday morning.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Tehran is reviewing the American reply to its seven-day plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and will respond within the “next few days,” with negotiations continuing through mediators, according to Iran’s Tasnim news agency. Iranian media reported explosions in the southern reaches of the strait, and the Fars news agency, citing unnamed military sources, said tankers using “unauthorised” routes may have struck sea mines. The Revolutionary Guard’s commander-in-chief, Ahmad Vahidi, said through the same agency that his forces were ready to answer any unauthorized passage, and the United States Central Command called the claim that the waterway is closed false.

The traffic through the strait is the measure that matters, and it is thin. Ship-tracking figures reported by Dawn put transits at seven vessels on Tuesday, the lowest in more than two months, and ten on Wednesday, with crude crossing the strait down 27 percent from a wartime high the previous week to at least 10.1 million barrels a day. Iran’s atomic energy chief, Mohammad Eslami, said that enrichment is inseparable from the nuclear process and that Iran will neither abandon it nor hand over its uranium.

The prediction markets price the blockade rather than the rhetoric. A market on an American announcement ending the Iranian blockade stood at 9.5 percent for a resolution by October 15 on $390,001 of volume, and 19.5 percent for one by October 31 on $279,046. A market on the ceasefire continuing stood at 93.7 percent through October 12 on $186,157, and 76.5 percent through October 31 on $223,286. A third put an American invasion of Iran before 2027 at 15.5 percent on $222,701. The venue’s two largest books this morning, Brazil’s presidential election and the Nobel Peace Prize, are not reported here, because this edition fetched no story behind either.

Sources

Fetched for this edition

Federal Register documents

Court dockets

Market and election prices

Data

  • Bureau of Labor Statistics, public data API, series CUUR0000SA0, LNS14000000, and CES0000000001.
  • The U.S. Treasury daily yield curve, the Treasury’s debt-to-the-penny figures, and the CNBC quote service. These three carry no link in this edition: their endpoints were read by the collector, which did not record a URL for them, and this report does not construct one.

PRH | [huffmanwrites.org] | © Philip Huffman