CRA By the Numbers 2025: Update for June 17, 2025

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.

However dispiriting the federal pullback of critical climate funding currently feels, it’s essential to play the long game and continue to develop effective strategies for an ongoing clean energy transition.

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.

North Carolinians are facing more threats to our clean energy future at both the state and federal levels.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and like-minded thinkers advanced the idea of publicly owned utilities as a “yardstick” against which private utilities’ performance could be measured. When private utilities fell short, the threat of public power would discipline these entities into better behavior, or would result in full-out replacement by utilities owned and controlled by municipalities, state entities, or the federal government. This theory animated an impressive array of New Deal efforts at rural electrification, in which the government directly built out large-scale public electricity generation and funded communities to create their own local power systems in areas of the country that private utilities refused to serve.

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.

Never before in our lifetimes has the rule of law felt so tenuous. These are not normal times for a research and advocacy organization dedicated to “harnessing the power of law and public policy to create a responsive government, healthy environment and just society.” Many of the policy ideas that we have championed — for example, worker safety protections, a fair regulatory system, climate actions that address equity concerns — have been adopted in some form. And today, these policies, as well as the democratic institutions which enforce them, are under threat.

Since our last update on May 19, we have seen some critical developments regarding  Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. In addition to the relentless progression of some resolutions towards becoming law, the most troublesome was the decision in the Senate to vote on the CRA resolutions ending Clean Air Act waivers issued to California. As James Goodwin said in a recent blog post on the matter, this represents a clear example of Senate Republicans “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."