Evidence Gap: You Know the Effective Date. You Still Do Not Know the Enforcement Posture.

You have

An effective date. Verified, cited, filed with the Secretary of State, published in the Texas Register.

You still cannot say

Whether, and how, the rule is being enforced.

Why these are different questions

A rule can be validly in effect while its enforcement posture is genuinely unsettled — pending litigation, pending interpretation, pending an agency stating what it means in practice.

Those are separate facts about the world, and they routinely have separate answers.

The most common error in regulatory writing is collapsing them. A source that reports only "effective: yes" has silently answered a question it did not investigate, and the reader acts on the combined impression rather than on the evidence.

How our records handle it

Every rule record we publish carries four separate fields:

• effective — whether and when the text takes legal effect
• enforcement — a separate question, answered separately
• litigation — any pending or concluded proceeding bearing on the record
• verification — what our review has not confirmed against the primary source

The fourth is the one we would keep if we could only keep one. It is the difference between a record that knows where its edges are and one that has edges it cannot see.

A concrete case

The total delta-9 THC threshold.

The text is verified — dual-sourced against the adopted rules and the Texas Register adoption notice. The calculation basis is settled by the rule text and is no longer the open question.

The enforcement posture is open. We record it as open rather than resolving it in either direction.

That extends into the product: our COA check returns NEEDS_REVIEW on this rule rather than a pass or a failure, because a pass would assert something the record does not establish.

What this costs, and what it buys

It makes our pages less quotable. A hedge is harder to put in a headline than a conclusion, and some readers experience precision as evasion.

What it buys is that when one of our records does say something without qualification, that carries information.

A source that never says "under review" is not being more rigorous than one that does. It is hiding the shape of what it does not know — and the reader has no way to tell which parts those are.