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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to regulate carbon emissions from power plants have had a tortuous history, and we’re about to go through another round, with a rule from a Democratic administration being repealed and replaced by a Trump rule. The last time this happened, the Trump EPA said that its interpretation of the statute required an extraordinarily narrow substitute rule. Because of intervening legal changes, it won’t find it as easy to make that argument this time. In the end, the Trump substitute rule will undoubtedly be weak but not as weak as last time.

As of Monday, March 10, legislators have introduced 57 Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions, including several that were introduced before the specified time cutoffs. We have continued to see some movement around some of the resolutions.

If you were looking for data-driven regulatory policy, you’re not going to find it in this administration. On the contrary, President Trump has marginalized economic analysis and wants to bulldoze environmental science. Thus, we are likely to get policies that are bad for the environment without being cost-justified while ignoring policies whose environmental benefits outweigh economic costs.

As of February 28, legislators have introduced 45 Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions, including several that were introduced before the specified time cutoffs. As expected, we have started to see some movement around some of the resolutions.

The U.S. government is attempting to dismantle itself. President Donald Trump has directed the executive branch to “significantly reduce the size of government.” That includes deep cuts in federal funding of scientific and medical research and freezing federal grants and loans for businesses. He has ordered the reversal or removal of regulations on medical insurance companies and other businesses and sought to fire thousands of federal employees. Those are just a few of dozens of executive orders that seek to deconstruct the government. More than 70 lawsuits have challenged those orders as illegal or unconstitutional. In the meantime, the resulting chaos is preventing the government from carrying out its everyday functions.

On February 25, we launched the Center for Progressive Reform’s CRA By the Numbers 2025 tracker. With this tool, we will monitor every Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution and document the threats they pose to our public protections, as well as the benefits that would be lost if they pass. The data presented in the tracker will shine a light on the harm that abusive use of the CRA causes to the public, and why, ultimately, the CRA should be repealed.

I could tell you what Trump’s latest executive order on “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative” says. I could tell you that it purports to give the illegally constituted “DOGE Team Leads” assigned to every agency nearly unchecked authority to choose which of the agencies’ existing rules get to remain on the book and whether and what kind of the regulations the agency may issue in the future. I could also tell you that it is now official Trump administration policy that existing regulations that are too inconvenient for the business community – no matter what kind of benefits they deliver – will no longer be enforced, purportedly rendering them a dead letter. I could tell you all these things, but they wouldn’t convey what the import of what this order actually means.

On February 18, President Donald Trump issued another seemingly technocratic executive order regarding the structure of our government. This one purportedly asserts presidential control over so-called independent regulatory agencies — or administrative offices that Congress has intentionally designed to be insulated against direct day-to-day control from the president.

President Donald Trump seeks to halt Congress’ support for tax credits, grants, and loans that are supporting a transition to clean transportation, a transition necessary to achieving public health standards and reducing the transportation sector’s substantial contribution to increasingly catastrophic climate change. It will be up to Congress to stand up to the president’s pressure and preserve its support for critical environmental and economic investments.