It now appears that any new movement on rescheduling will have to wait until at least after Election Day.
Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius, who has been tasked with overseeing the rescheduling process under the Drug Enforcement Administration, accepted a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released last month into the court record and set a Nov. 5 end for the current stay that temporarily paused the rescheduling process.
The GAO released a report calling for comprehensive policies for how the DEA and the Department of Health and Human Services regulate cannabis on Sept. 23. In response, DUID Victim Voices, physician Kenneth Finn, and the National Drug and Alcohol Association, who all testified against rescheduling during the summer hearings, petitioned for hearings to reopen so that the GAO report could be discussed.
“The government’s own watchdog says the FDA (which is a part of HHS) and DEA have no written rules for how they schedule drugs, and the government’s response is to ask the judge not to look. That tells you everything,” said Kevin Sabet, president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana in a statement released Oct. 13. “Rescheduling marijuana would be the biggest change in federal drug law in fifty years. It cannot rest on an analysis that the agency made up as it went along and that its own watchdog says exists nowhere on paper. The judge should let this evidence in and let the parties brief it.”
The GAO, which has been actively studying the impact of potential changes to federal cannabis policy previously released a report on the ongoing struggle for cannabis businesses to access capital and financial services, which used CRB Monitor’s data to establish the scale of the industry.
Julius denied the motion to reopen rescheduling hearings, and set a deadline for the end of the current temporary stay that put the rescheduling process on pause following last summer’s series of hearings.
“If the Moving Parties now believe the record is ‘bare where it counts,’ …that argument goes towards the ultimate question of whether the Government met its burden—it does not justify reopening the hearing,” wrote Julius.
Julius also noted that it was hard to justify reopening the hearing when the government had already collected, “2,500 pages of witness testimony and multiple thousands of pages of documentary evidence.”
Julius accepted the GAO report but denied the motion to reopen hearings. Instead, all parties will have the opportunity to file briefs about the report. The briefs must be narrowly tailored to address how much weight the GAO report should carry when considering a broader rescheduling effort and how that could impact that effort.
Those briefs must be submitted by Oct. 29, while responses to the briefs must be filed by Nov. 5, at which time the temporary stay on the rescheduling process will be lifted. Beyond that, it remains unclear how much longer the process will take.
Three years and counting on rescheduling
The federal government first started the process to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III during then-President Joe Biden’s administration when HHS recommended the move in August 2023. The DEA then published a proposed rule on May 21, 2024 to reschedule, after which the process stalled out.
Under President Donald Trump, the process was restarted by a Dec. 18, 2025, executive order calling on the Department of Justice to fast-track the rulemaking process.
The DEA officially moved medical cannabis to Schedule III on April 22, 2026, while non-medical cannabis remained at Schedule I. On the same day, the DEA ordered a series of hearing to consider further rescheduling. Those hearings took place between June 29 and July 15
