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 By contrast, each regulation repealed by CRA resolutions spent an average of almost four years (1,411.3 days) from its first identifiable milestone to the final rule publication.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A closer look at the rules that were repealed significantly undercuts any serious argument that CRA supporters make that the law is a crucial tool for oversight that advances our system of checks and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.
