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The disease of authoritarianism now afflicting our democracy spread to yet another of our governing institutions the night of May 21. Do not be fooled: The debate over Senate Republicans' misuse of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) is not “inside baseball” or wonky or even complicated. Rather, it’s a simple story of legislators failing to follow the rules that they agreed to — and doing so to advance their policy agenda without heed to the rule of law wreckage they leave in their wake.

President Donald Trump has taken some dramatic steps in the name of improving use of NEPA, the statute governing environmental reviews of projects. The goal is to speed up the permitting process and make it more efficient. The reality is that his efforts will create chaos and uncertainty, with the likely effect of slowing things down.

Since our last update (May 12), we have seen some movement regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. The pace has remained high, with outlets like The Hill and Banking Dive reporting that President Trump has signed multiple resolutions into law. Oddly, no official sources (like the White House’s website or congress.gov) reflect these developments.

Since our last update (May 6), we have seen some movement regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. The pace in the Senate remained high, and we have seen lawmakers try to maximize their output before the CRA cutoff date.

In two previous posts, we discussed the major findings of the Project 2025 tracker we created along with our partners at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to implement its recommendations over its first 100 days. We also began offering some insights into making sense of these findings and how to interpret them. The basic finding was that the administration has fulfilled more than a quarter of Project 2025’s recommended executive actions affecting domestic policy. This raises a natural follow-up question: Is that a lot? In this post, we continue to provide analytical tools for answering that question.

Since our last update (April 28), we have seen some important developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. In the past week, we have seen legislators take up new resolutions for a vote, address the controversial issue of the California Clean Air Act waivers, and send new resolutions to the president to be signed into law. Things seem to be accelerating in Congress (and especially in the Senate), as legislators are approaching the CRA cutoff date.

In the first part of this series, we introduced the major findings of the tracker we built with our colleagues at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s progress in implementing Project 2025’s comprehensive policy blueprint, Mandate for Leadership. Specifically, we found that over its first 100 days, the administration pursued or completed 28 percent of the more than 530 recommended domestic policy executive actions that we included in our tracker. The post went on to provide context for these findings by tracing Project 2025’s circuitous route from obscure presidential transition report to controversial playbook for the Trump administration. Here, we provide further context for our findings by examining some factors that shed light on how significant this progress really is.

The extent of harm that the Trump administration inflicted over its first 100 days was nothing short of breathtaking. That it accomplished much of this by transforming our regulatory system into a tool of authoritarian rule speaks to the influence that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has had on this agenda, despite Trump’s half-hearted attempts to disavow the playbook on the campaign trail.

Many risks to public health, safety, and the environment are insufficiently understood. Indeed, what some scholars have referred to as “ignorance of mechanism” may be the defining characteristic of many of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. The U.S. Congress has understood the significance of this uncertainty ever since the birth of modern environmental law in the United States around 1970.