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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.

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will shine a light on the harm that abusive use of the CRA causes to the public, and why, ultimately, the CRA should be repealed.

We at the Center for Progressive Reform cannot sit idly by and watch the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the transgender community here in the United States and around the world. The Center’s staff condemns the Trump administration’s attacks on the transgender community — especially trans children.

If there were any doubts about the policy priorities of the second Trump administration, these have been swiftly clarified after the first barrage of executive orders (EOs) aimed at deconstructing environmental, scientific, and democratic safeguards. One of the most extensive EOs is titled “Unleashing American Energy,” which contains a wide array of actions aimed at boosting “America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.” This is merely coded language for doubling down on an extractive model of development poised to pump, mine, and log every possible inch of American public lands. Unsurprisingly, it is also aimed at “unleashing” only some types of energy resources: fossil fuels.

Widely available clean drinking water is something that we usually take for granted. One of the main reasons is that the vast majority of the U.S. population has access to public water systems, which are in charge of providing safe drinking water to their users. However, in many parts of the country, particularly rural communities, people rely on private wells for sourcing their drinking water, which broadly lack regulatory safeguards for public health and well-being. This is particularly striking in Virginia, where 22 percent of the population relies on water supplied by a private well, with the share of private well use reaching upwards of 80 percent of the population in the Commonwealth’s most rural counties. As we explore in a new report, there is little comprehensive information on the distribution and severity of nitrate contamination in private well systems in Virginia.

Building clean energy infrastructure quickly will be critical to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change while bolstering grid resilience and flexibility. Much of the discourse portrays infrastructure deployment as plagued by bureaucratic and legal holdups that should be eliminated or drastically curtailed in service of faster development — with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) often taking sole blame for these delays. But is that really where the problem is? Our analyses suggest that solely blaming NEPA for permitting delays overlooks other contributing factors.

Since the passage of landmark legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law during the Biden administration, we’ve repeatedly heard that we’re at a critical junction: There is a need to expand and accelerate environmental, climate, and clean energy policy implementation and opportunities to do so, but the pathway toward this goal will be plagued by significant delays. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has become a common scapegoat in this fight, with critics charging that the sometimes lengthy and complicated environmental review process NEPA requires is the main thing holding up decarbonization and the clean energy transition. This has led to calls from across the political spectrum for “reforming” the statute. This assumption, however, misrepresents what happens on the ground.

My colleagues at the Center for Progressive Reform and I recently published a report and interactive map examining how local ordinances that restrict clean energy development can impose major obstacles in our efforts toward a just clean energy transition. Among the many important findings in our report, we highlighted the high degree of variability that exists between states in the way large-scale clean energy generation is regulated. In some cases, like Illinois and Michigan, governments have empowered state authorities to override local siting measures; other states have given local governments more decision-making powers to decide if and how renewable infrastructure can be built. Among the latter is Ohio.

A profound energy transition is sweeping the United States. In addition to mitigating dangerous greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, it means new economic opportunities and a safer and healthier environment for communities across the country. A better future is certainly within reach, or at least it is for some communities, which are the ones that will be able to capitalize on the green transition. But for many others, there is no guarantee that this clean energy transition will be a just and equitable one. Why is this the case? As we explore in a new report and interactive map, it turns out that one of the biggest obstacles is self-inflicted: local ordinances that restrict new renewable energy development projects, including wind, solar, and battery storage.