Throughout this series, we've documented a pattern: the Funeral Rule was enacted in 1984, revised in 1994, and reviewed without revision three times since. The question now is whether the Rule will ever be updated, or whether the window has closed.
The honest answer, as of early 2026, is that nearly every force pushing on this issue pushes against change. Understanding why doesn't require a law degree. It requires looking at three things that happened at roughly the same time.
The Supreme Court Changed the Rules for Rulemaking
In June 2024, the Supreme Court issued a decision called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. Unless you follow administrative law, you've never heard of it. But it matters to anyone who cares about consumer protection.
Here's what it did, in plain terms.
For 40 years, there was a legal principle called Chevron deference. It worked like this: when Congress wrote a law that was vague about the details, federal agencies like the FTC could fill in those details through regulations. If someone challenged those regulations in court, judges were supposed to give the agency the benefit of the doubt. If the agency's interpretation was reasonable, the court would uphold it, even if the judge would have read the law differently.
Think of it like a building code. Congress writes the code. The agency is the inspector who interprets what the code means in practice. Under Chevron, if the inspector's interpretation was reasonable, the courts backed the inspector. Builders who disagreed had to show the interpretation was clearly wrong, not just that a different reading was possible.
Loper Bright threw that out. Now, courts don't defer to agencies at all. Judges make their own independent call about what a law means. The agency's interpretation carries no special weight. The inspector's reading of the building code is now just one opinion among many.
What does this mean for the Funeral Rule? Two things.
First, the existing Rule is probably fine. It's been on the books for over 40 years. No one has successfully challenged it. Courts have generally recognized that longstanding regulations have a kind of institutional gravity. It would take an unusual case to undo the Rule entirely.
Second, expanding the Rule just got much harder. If the FTC wanted to add new requirements, like mandatory online price posting, any funeral industry group that objected could challenge the new rule in court. And the court wouldn't give the FTC any benefit of the doubt. The judge would decide independently whether the FTC had the authority to impose that specific requirement. That's a higher bar than the FTC has had to clear for the past four decades.
The bottom line: what we have is likely safe. Getting more is now significantly harder.
The FTC Has a New Boss with Different Priorities
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson took office in January 2025. His philosophy isn't a secret. He's spoken publicly about his belief that regulations, even well-intentioned ones, impose serious costs on the economy. He's described them as making it difficult for small businesses to grow, discouraging investment, and sometimes protecting big incumbents at the expense of new competitors.
In September 2025, his FTC submitted recommendations to the White House for eliminating or revising regulations across the federal government that the Commission considered anticompetitive. His FTC effectively abandoned the non-compete clause rule that the previous Commission had proposed, after a federal court struck it down.
This doesn't mean he's hostile to the Funeral Rule. His FTC has continued to enforce it. The 2024 telephone pricing sweep, which resulted in warning letters to 39 funeral homes, happened on his watch. And in March 2025, the FTC wrote a letter supporting an Oklahoma bill that would let any business sell caskets and funeral merchandise without a funeral director's license, a pro-competition, pro-consumer position.
But there's a clear difference between enforcing a rule that already exists and creating new ones. Chairman Ferguson's FTC favors going after specific bad actors one at a time rather than writing broad new regulations. Think of it as the difference between a cop pulling over individual speeders and the city lowering the speed limit. Both approaches address the problem. Only one changes the rules for everyone.
Under this administration, the chance of new Funeral Rule rulemaking, whether for online pricing, cemetery coverage, or anything else, is effectively zero.
Three Tries, Three Times Nothing
Step back from the current moment and the pattern is even more striking.
The FTC has tried to update this Rule three separate times in 25 years. Every time, the result has been the same.
The first review started in 1999. The FTC opened it up for public comment, collected input, and concluded in 2008 by deciding to keep the Rule exactly as it was.
The second review was supposed to start in 2019 but got delayed by COVID-19. It eventually produced the 2022 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, a formal document asking the public to weigh in on 22 specific questions about potential changes. Over 700 people and organizations submitted comments. The FTC held a public workshop in September 2023. And then nothing. No proposed rule. No next step. Silence.
The third review isn't expected until around 2030.
Every cycle has followed the same script. The FTC signals that it's thinking about updates. Consumer groups say yes, please. Industry trade associations mobilize to say no, not yet, not this way. And the Commission ultimately does nothing.
This isn't a conspiracy. It's a math problem. The trade associations and large funeral companies that benefit from the current rules are organized, well-funded, and present at every comment period, every workshop, and every meeting. They do this for a living. The families who the Rule is supposed to protect don't have a trade association. They don't have lobbyists. Most of them don't even know the Rule exists until they need it, and by then the comment period is over.
The people with the most at stake have the least voice in the process. That's not corruption. It's just how regulatory politics works when one side is organized and the other isn't.
So What Would It Actually Take?
If the current FTC won't expand the Rule, and the courts won't give a future FTC the benefit of the doubt, what would it take to modernize funeral consumer protection? There are really only four paths.
Path 1: A future FTC does it anyway. A different Commission, under a different administration, with different priorities, could pick up where the 2022 ANPR left off and push through a proposed rule. It would face legal challenges. It might survive them if the rulemaking record is strong enough. But there's no sign of this happening on any foreseeable timeline.
Path 2: Congress passes a law. If Congress specifically told the FTC to update the Funeral Rule, or passed its own funeral consumer protection statute, courts couldn't second-guess the FTC's authority because the authority would come directly from the legislature. This would bypass the Loper Bright problem entirely. But Congress has never treated funeral regulation as a priority, and there's nothing suggesting that's about to change.
Path 3: States do it themselves. State legislatures can move faster than federal agencies, and they don't have to worry about Loper Bright. Colorado proved this in 2024 when it passed licensing requirements for funeral professionals after 40 years without them, driven by a series of horrific scandals. Other states could pass their own online pricing requirements or extend consumer protections to cemeteries. Some already have stronger rules than the federal floor. The downside is that state-by-state reform creates a patchwork where your rights depend on where you live.
Path 4: The market does it without government. In every other industry where transparency regulations lagged behind consumer expectations, eventually the market filled the gap. Consumers demanded information. Technology made it easy to provide. Businesses that met the demand gained an edge over those that didn't. The regulation eventually caught up to what the market was already doing.
This is already happening in funeral service, slowly. More providers are posting prices online, not because anyone requires it, but because families expect it and competitors are doing it. Third-party pricing tools are emerging. New entrants are building business models that assume transparency as the starting point.
The market path isn't a substitute for regulation. A family in crisis shouldn't have to hope the free market delivers protections that a 42-year-old regulation was supposed to guarantee. But it's an honest acknowledgment that the regulatory path has stalled and may stay stalled for years.
The providers who see this clearly are the ones already posting their prices, explaining their GPLs, and treating transparency as a competitive advantage rather than a burden. They're not waiting for the FTC to tell them what the Rule should have said all along. They're already doing it.
What Comes Next
In Part 10, the final post in this series, we'll step out of the analytical frame and share BU's own perspective: what we would tell the FTC if they asked. Not as advocates. Not as lobbyists. As a funeral service that was built in the gap the Rule left behind, with a view of what families actually need in 2026.