The Congressional Review Act (CRA) provides Congress with an expedited procedure to review and potentially overturn final rules issued by federal agencies. Despite being touted as an avenue for congressional oversight, the CRA is often deployed as a partisan tool that replaces agency expertise and democratic consideration with political maneuvers and slim voting majorities. Without meaningful debate, public participation, or scientific input, anti-regulatory members of Congress can undo years of exhaustive scientific and legal research and multiple rounds of public input in the span of a few months.
In our new analysis building off our CRA By the Numbers 2025 tracker, we take stock of the use of the CRA in the current Congress, to understand how it fails as a legislative oversight tool and how it undermines democracy and agency expertise.
Timelines are instructive in this sense: Each CRA resolution that became law spent, on average, just shy of 82 days under consideration in Congress. By contrast, each regulation repealed by CRA resolutions spent an average of almost four years (1,411.3 days) from its first identifiable milestone to the final rule publication.
During this Congress, 16 CRA resolutions were signed into law, which represents approximately 1 out of 5 resolutions introduced. Out of the 47 rules targeted, 22 are primarily environmental or climate rules, and 17 are consumer protection or financial rules — policy areas that are marked by particularly strong partisan disagreement. These two categories alone account for almost 73 percent of targeted regulations.
A closer look at the rules that were repealed significantly undercuts any serious argument that CRA supporters make that the law is a crucial tool for oversight that advances our system of checks and balances. The most controversial of the resolutions — the three California Clean Air Act waivers — are especially instructive, not least because they required an illegal expansion of the CRA’s scope to accomplish.
The CRA also opens the door for special interests to directly affect rulemaking, as they are the ultimate beneficiaries of this assault on our regulatory system. Extensive analysis of financial disclosure information from OpenSecrets.org reveals that the sponsors of this year’s CRA resolutions received significant campaign contributions from the very sectors that are set to benefit the most from these rollbacks.
Notably, the oil and gas sector was the biggest contributor, having contributed almost $8 million in campaign contributions in the past electoral cycle. Senators from states with a large industry footprint are some of the top recipients in our dataset, with all of them sponsoring CRA resolutions that targeted rules aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions from different sources.
Although this does not necessarily prove the existence of an explicit or implicit quid pro quo, the appearance of impropriety they create risks further undermining public confidence in the integrity of our governing institutions. In a context where trust in democracy is in crisis, this will only further fan the flames of skepticism that have created the conditions in which reactionary demagogues like Trump can thrive.
If leaders are serious about congressional oversight of executive branch agencies, the CRA is not the answer. Lawmakers should explore other avenues by repealing the CRA and finding better tools for supervising and checking agencies, without putting the public, the environment, and our democratic values at risk.
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Federico Holm, James Goodwin | July 14, 2025
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) provides Congress with an expedited procedure to review and potentially overturn final rules issued by federal agencies. Despite being touted as an avenue for congressional oversight, the CRA is often deployed as a partisan tool that replaces agency expertise and democratic consideration with political maneuvers and slim voting majorities. Without meaningful debate, public participation, or scientific input, anti-regulatory members of Congress can undo years of exhaustive scientific and legal research and multiple rounds of public input in the span of a few months. In our new analysis building off our CRA By the Numbers 2025 tracker, we take stock of the use of the CRA in the current Congress, to understand how it fails as a legislative oversight tool and how it undermines democracy and agency expertise.
Daniel Farber | July 8, 2025
In one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders, he eliminated a centralized system that Jimmy Carter initially set up to issue regulations governing environmental impact statements. Instead, he called on each agency to issue its own regulations, which seems to have caused the predictable amount of confusion. I’ve examined the new regulations from three agencies: the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Transportation (DOT), which happened to be the first ones that I saw. There seems to be little rhyme or reason in the variations.
Catalina Gonzalez | July 1, 2025
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.
Federico Holm | June 30, 2025
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.”
Alejandro Camacho, Robert L. Glicksman | June 30, 2025
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.
Bryan Dunning, Federico Holm | June 23, 2025
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.
Minor Sinclair | June 18, 2025
Five years ago, our board of directors instituted term limits for its members. This was a major decision for a 22-year-old organization that relied on the ongoing commitment of its five founders, all professors of law. Board members have stepped down while others have joined, and the process of renewal and transition has been healthy for the organization. In this context, we’re thrilled to announce the election of four new members to our growing board of directors — two Member Scholars and two independent members. Through each of their commitments to justice, solidarity, and democracy, they embody the deepest values of our organization.
James Goodwin | June 18, 2025
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.
Federico Holm | 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.