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At the center of the Republican reconciliation bill that the U.S. Senate just sent back to the House is a renewal of President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was originally set to expire at the end of this fiscal year. Republicans have been working graveyard shifts to force a vote before the July 4th holiday to lock in even bigger tax breaks for the wealthiest five percent of Americans for the next 10 years. To pay for this, as well as increases in immigration enforcement operations, congressional Republicans are proposing an historic $1.7 trillion in cuts to healthcare, food assistance, and clean energy jobs.

Since our last update on June 17, there have been few noteworthy developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions, which is consistent with our expectations based on the timing for the consideration and voting of resolutions, as well as the ongoing negotiations on the “one big beautiful bill.”

NEPA requires government agencies to use a transparent process with meaningful public participation to consider the potential environmental effects of their actions before committing to them. It is one of the United States’ bedrock environmental protection statutes and has been so widely emulated in other countries that it has become known as the “Magna Carta” of global environmental law. In the U.S., however, NEPA has recently been the subject of withering scrutiny and attack by critics across the political spectrum. Its opponents have called for the narrowing of NEPA’s scope and the “streamlining” of its processes, charging that the Act’s core mandate to “look before you leap” has spun out of control and created unintended and massive obstacles to approval of critical infrastructure.

In a recent post, we highlighted how the Trump administration's executive orders (EOs) boosting the coal industry will likely not accomplish their hopes for “revival,” as the basic economics of coal generation cannot be modified by executive order, despite Trump’s or Lee Zeldin’s desires. What these policies will achieve, ultimately, is releasing coal-fired power plant operators from any obligation not to harm the communities where they operate.

Over the course of this series, I have explored President Donald’s Trump’s comprehensive effort to build from a scratch a new regulatory system that systematically favors his administration’s anti-regulatory agenda. As part of this campaign, he has issued several executive orders that fundamentally distort the key building blocks that comprise our regulatory system: law, science, economics, and the career civil service. In the earlier posts, I examined the executive orders specifically affecting the first three of those building blocks. In this final post, I examine Trump’s efforts to remake the civil service.

Since our last update on May 27, we have seen a slowdown in developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions, which is consistent with Senate timelines for considering and voting on joint resolutions. However, there has been one key development that closes a chapter opened on April 2, when House Republicans decided to use CRA procedures to undo the waivers issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to California.

In the first post of this series, I began detailing President Donald’s Trump’s comprehensive effort to build from a scratch a new regulatory system that systematically favors his administration’s antiregulatory agenda. As I explained, he has issued several executive orders that fundamentally distort the key building blocks that comprise our regulatory system: law; science; economics; and the career civil service. In the first post, I examined the executive orders specifically affecting the “law” building block. In this post, I examine the next two building blocks: science and economics.

During his first term, President Donald Trump encountered for the first time the modern regulatory system that Congress has slowly built up over the last century. What he found was that its commitment to rule of law principles, democratic input, and reason-based decision-making presented a formidable barrier to his administration’s agenda of rolling back protective measures that millions of us depend on to keep our workplaces safe, our drinking water free of contaminants, and our bank accounts guarded against cheats and scams. That experience clearly left an impression. With the help of Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and other White House advisors, Trump has spent the first few months of his second term issuing a dizzying array of executive orders aimed at building, piece by piece, the kind of regulatory system that he would like to have — one that is strongly biased against promoting the public interest.

There are many reasons why Senate Republicans’ recent decision to defy the parliamentarian and repeal California’s Clean Air Act waivers using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) was objectionable. But one objection that hasn’t received enough – any? – attention is how legislative gimmicks like the CRA contribute to the broader problem of congressional dysfunction.