Do you have a rules engine already or not?
If you're hodge-podging it all together and all the rules are implicitly defined by the code as it exists you're in a bad spot. Knowing that the rules will change every year your goal isn't to grind out this year's changes really hard for six months (and then even harder for another moth to change the final changes) and then slack off for five months.
Instead you should implement a system such that the specifics of the changes are captured in the rules. Once the new drafts come out you need to look for what all the possible new rule categories are, what additional data needs to be captured, etc. But then once things are finalized it's a matter of tweaking the rules slightly to capture the final wording of the bill.
This may not be something that applies to you, though. What area do you work in? How does the debt pile up without choices being made?