The Senate has not been in any rush to confirm the Obama Administration nominees. Still, despite the uncertainties, the board might be less tempted than others to push out new regulations.

Other agencies with heads who will leave office when President Obama vacates the White House, such as the Treasury Department, could succumb to the temptation to speed up the rulemaking process.

"There is a little bit of a spike," Amit Narang, a regulatory policy analyst at Public Citizen, a group that pushes for strict regulations, said.

The phenomenon is not new, according to Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum, a conservative organization.

"People have been pushing out … [these] policies for a long time," he said.

For months, Republicans have been issuing warnings about the phenomenon known as midnight regulations. And there is some evidence that suggests government-wide, there is a rush to regulate at the end of an administration.

In a 2012 report, the Congressional Research Service said during the first six months of 2008, agencies published 31 major final rules. During the second six months, agencies published 63 rules – a 103% increase.

A similar pattern occurred earlier, in 2000, when the number of rules issued in the final six months of the year jumped by 73% compared to the first six months of the year.

Some members of Congress are attempting to keep the Obama Administration from repeating what they did during past administrations.

For instance, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) has introduced legislation known as the Midnight Rule Relief Act. The bill would bar the issuance of major rules between Election Day and the inauguration of a new president.

"Given the Obama administration's tendency to overregulate and overreach, the American people can expect to see a surge of last minute regulations in the president's waning days in office," Walberg said when the legislation was introduced.

A companion bill has been introduced in the Senate by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

Anticipating that there might be a flurry of rules toward the end of 2016, Howard Shelanski, the head of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, asked agency heads to issue rules as early as possible this year.

"To the extent feasible and consistent with your priorities, statutory obligations and judicial deadlines, however, agencies should strive to complete their highest priority rulemakings by the summer of 2016 to avoid an end-of-year scramble that has the potential to lower the quality of regulations that OIRA receives for review and to tax the resources available for interagency review," Shelanski said in a December memo.

However, the NCUA is not required to submit its rules to OMB's OIRA because it is an independent agency. And independence is a big factor in whether an agency will issue a flurry of rules at the end of a presidency.

"Unlike executive regulatory agencies, they do not significantly increase their regulatory activity during midnight months (measured by the number of major rules published)," Perez wrote in his recent study. "It supports the hypothesis that the different institutional arrangements of these agencies makes them less susceptible to pressures to wrap up regulatory activity at the end of a presidential administration."

Batkins agreed regulatory bodies like the NCUA are less susceptible to the need to issue rules at the end of a president's term.

"There's generally less of a concern with independent agencies," he said.

He added the need to rush rules depends on who wins the White House.

"It's entirely dependent on the election outcome," he said.

If former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is elected, there's likely to be less of a rush to issue rules than if Donald Trump is elected.

"I don't think President Obama is worried about what Secretary Clinton would do," he said.