The Weaponization of the Congressional Review Act in 2025

In 2025, a little-known law played an unprecedently large role. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) grants the U.S. Congress an effective opportunity to disapprove agencies’ recent regulations during a limited time-window. Our empirical analysis of all CRA resolutions signed into law in 2025 shows how congressional Republicans pushed an expansive interpretation of the CRA’s scope that significantly undermines the limitations that the text of the CRA imposes. This expanded approach violates the law, threatens to disrupt countless long-settled agency actions moving forward, and imperils the stability of agency action and the reliance interests of regulated entities.

Our analysis also leads to three other important conclusions. First, the vast majority of disapproved actions were environmental, showing the focus of Republicans in Congress and providing useful information for a subsequent Democratic administration deciding whether to issue regulations late in a presidential term. Second, our analysis shows the unfortunate negative consequences of litigation brought by advocacy groups seeking to compel agencies to issue late-term regulations. Finally, our analysis underscores the success of the approach by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) during the Biden Administration in managing the regulatory flow to minimize CRA disapprovals.

Enacted in 1996, the CRA requires agencies to submit new rules to Congress for review. Congress may then choose to invalidate submitted rules through joint resolutions of disapproval. If a CRA resolution passes both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and is signed by the President, the targeted rule is invalidated.

The CRA includes some special features that make it a powerful deregulatory tool. CRA disapproval resolutions are subject to a special “fast track” process in the Senate. As a result, CRA resolutions can pass the Senate with a simple majority vote—rather than the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. And when a resolution passes both chambers and is signed into law, the agency is barred from issuing a rule that is “substantially the same” as the disapproved rule at any point in the future, unless the agency is “specifically authorized” by Congress to do so.

But the CRA also includes two important limitations. First, CRA resolutions can only disapprove rules, not other agency actions such as adjudicatory orders. Second, at least one of the two congressional chambers must introduce a joint resolution of disapproval within 60 legislative days after the agency submits it to Congress for review. And for the fast-track process to apply in the Senate, the Senate must vote on the resolution within those 60 legislative days.

There is a special exception when Congress adjourns before this 60-day period ends, which restarts the full 60-day period during the following congressional session. The practical effect is that, when a presidential administration changes, an incoming Congress can act to invalidate rules introduced by the outgoing presidential administration within the final 60 legislative days of the previous congressional session—often referred to as the “lookback” period. For this reason, it is during presidential transitions where the incoming President’s party also controls both congressional chambers that the CRA has historically been impactful.

During the CRA’s first 20 years, it was invoked to invalidate a rule only once, with Congress invalidating a late-term Clinton Administration regulation in 2001 during the George W. Bush Administration. But in 2017, President Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans invalidated 14 rules issued by the outgoing Obama Administration. They also invalidated an additional two actions from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), one of which was issued during President Trump’s first year in office. The other CFPB action dated back to 2013, but Republicans were able to disapprove it due to a ruling in 2017 by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the action was a rule subject to the CRA—a method used at a far greater scale in 2025. And in 2021, President Joseph R. Biden and congressional Democrats in turn invalidated three of the outgoing Trump Administration’s rules—the first time that a Democratic administration invoked the CRA.

In 2025, Congress passed and President Trump signed a record 22 CRA resolutions disapproving agency actions from the Biden Administration. A few insights become apparent from the list—both from what is represented and what is not.

Slightly more than half of the 2025 CRA resolutions—13 out of 22—disapproved rules in the traditional way: Following their issuance, the agency submitted them during the “lookback” period of the final 60 legislative days of the 118th Congress—the end of the Biden Administration—and the 119th Congress moved to disapprove them, with the Senate acting within the 60-session-day window for fast-track procedures in early 2025.

Nine disapprovals, however, did not involve actions submitted to Congress in the traditional way.  In these disapprovals, Congress deviated in two major ways from the standard approach to the administration of the CRA. First, Congress adopted an unprecedently broad view of what constitutes a “rule” subject to the CRA and pushed forward despite the objections of its own referees—the GAO and the Senate parliamentarian, which is the Senate’s official advisor on its own rules. And second, Congress—in collaboration with the GAO—began reaching backwards and invalidating agency actions issued outside the normal CRA review window that were never submitted to Congress because, consistent with longstanding practice, the issuing agency did not consider the actions to be rules subject to the CRA.

In early 2025, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Trump submitted to Congress three preemption waivers that the Biden-era EPA granted to California allowing it to set more stringent vehicle emissions standards than the federal government’s under the Clean Air Act. The EPA granted two of these waivers in January 2025, just before the change in presidential administrations, but had granted the third back in 2023. The Biden-era EPA did not submit any of the waivers to Congress for review because—in line with historical practice—it did not consider them to be rules subject to the CRA, a position the GAO confirmed in 2023.

Instead, EPA viewed these waivers as adjudications of a request directly affecting only California. But after the Trump Administration submitted the waivers to Congress, congressional Republicans introduced resolutions to disapprove all three, despite the conclusions of both the Senate parliamentarian and the GAO—a second time—that the waivers were not rules subject to the CRA. Rather than respect the opinions of these internal congressional referees, Republicans bulldozed ahead, passing the resolutions and sending them to President Trump, who signed them into law.

The Senate’s choice to defy the parliamentarian’s ruling further weakened the filibuster, a prospect that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) recognized early in 2025 before reversing his position in the spring. And Congress’s decision to use the CRA to invalidate the waivers—categorically not subject to the CRA—violated its own law.

Although congressional Republicans ignored the GAO with respect to the California waivers, they relied on it elsewhere to significantly expand the CRA’s reach. Beginning in the summer of 2025, congressional Republicans sent six Biden-era resource management plans from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to the GAO, requesting an opinion on whether the actions were rules subject to the CRA. The GAO determined that the plans were rules, and the Senate’s fast-track clock then started as of the date of the GAO’s determination. Congress ultimately passed resolutions disapproving all six plans and sent them to President Trump, who signed them into law.

The oldest plan disapproved was issued by BLM in 2022, but there is no logical stopping point—other than perhaps 1996, when the CRA was enacted. This approach allows Congress to reach indefinitely far back to disapprove previous agency actions, so long as they were not submitted for congressional review because the agency did not at that time consider them to be rules. And the treatment of some BLM land use plans as rules calls into question the validity of all other land use plans—and many other agency actions—issued since the CRA’s enactment and not submitted to Congress, with potentially serious negative consequences for public lands management, including existing oil and gas leases. This approach may encourage future administrations—including a subsequent Democratic administration succeeding the Trump Administration—to seek GAO opinions on significant numbers of long-past agency actions with the intent of disapproving as many as possible, even if the actions were never submitted to Congress because the agency had no reason to believe they were subject to the CRA.

The expanded scope of CRA use in 2025 raises serious concerns about the stability of federal administrative agencies’ actions. Unlike normal legislation, CRA resolutions are designed to move quickly, without extended time for deliberation or debate, and to delete an agency’s rule; their statutorily set form appears not to allow Congress to craft more nuanced amendments. This process does not encourage thoughtful legislative consideration. And, if read broadly, the CRA’s provision barring agencies from ever issuing another rule that is “substantially the same” as a disapproved rule threatens to permanently strip agencies of areas of their regulatory authority. The scope of this provision has yet to be definitively determined by the courts, although a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit offers an initial, narrow reading that would limit the provision’s effects on agencies’ regulatory authority. Our organization recently argued in an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that CRA resolutions do not enable Congress to disapprove general regulatory approaches and that the “substantially the same” bar should be read narrowly.

The vast majority—18 out of 22—of the agency actions disapproved by the 2025 CRA resolutions related to environmental issues, which gives a clear indication of the focus of congressional attention. The resolutions disapproved six actions each from the EPA and the BLM, four from the U.S. Department of Energy, and one each from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and National Park Service. Future administrations should pay close attention to this precedent.

Another lesson from the 2025 CRA resolutions relates to “deadline suits” brought to force an agency to issue a rule. Five of the 13 CRA resolutions targeting rules submitted to Congress in the traditional way involved rules that were subject to court orders resulting from litigation with deadlines for issuing a final rule late in the presidential term, well into the lookback period, which began on August 16, 2024. These included three rules by the Energy Department and one each by EPA and the National Park Service. In each of these cases, the litigation was brought by groups seeking to force the agency to issue a specific rule. The eventual fate of these rules indicates that the groups’ litigation victories were Pyrrhic. They successfully got the agencies to issue the regulations they sought. But not only were the rules then disapproved by Congress, the respective agencies are now subject to the “substantially the same” provision limiting their ability to issue similar regulations in the future.

The outcome of these rules suggests that, in the future, groups focused on deadline suits to force agency action should reconsider their litigation strategy on rule-issuance deadlines near the end of presidential terms.

Importantly, the highest profile Biden Administration priorities are not represented on the list. The Administration had successfully undertaken an ambitious effort to protect its most important policy priorities, including environmental priorities, from possible CRA disapproval by finalizing them early in 2024 to avoid doing so during the “lookback” period. For example, on the environmental front, the Biden Administration’s regulations of the greenhouse gas emissions of vehicles and power plants were protected from CRA disapproval. Indeed, even prominent Republicans acknowledged that there were “a low number of consequential regulations” available for CRA disapproval. As a result, the CRA resolutions mostly targeted less significant initiatives, including a rule restricting motor vehicle use in a single national park.

Further examination of the rules on the CRA list reinforces the value of OIRA’s active management. Five of the 13 CRA resolutions submitted in the traditional way had not been submitted to OIRA for its review and therefore were not subject to OIRA’s process for managing the timing of rules. Consistent with longstanding practice—changed by the Trump administration in early 2025—the three rules issued by independent agencies, two by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and one by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, were not subject to OIRA review. Neither was a rule issued by the Internal Revenue Service, which was exempted from OIRA review under a memorandum of agreement signed by the agencies in 2023. And the remaining Energy Department appliance efficiency standard rule and BOEM’s rule, which protected marine archaeological resources, were not deemed “significant” rules under Executive Order 12,866, which governs OIRA review, and as a result these rules were not subject to OIRA review.

Only two rules on the CRA list were subject to OIRA review and released during the lookback period—an EPA rule setting waste emissions charges for methane releases from oil and gas installations, implementing a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, and another EPA rule constraining the reclassification of pollution sources under the Clean Air Act’s hazardous air pollutant provisions. This analysis underscores the success of OIRA’s process for determining whether rules should go forward in the lookback period, which involved an assessment of the likelihood of CRA disapproval. Of the more than 100 major rules issued during this period and not subject to consent decrees—which included significant environmental rules such as EPA’s rules limiting permissible levels of lead dust in housing and requiring the replacement of lead service lines in public water systems—only these two were disapproved.

The universe of what the CRA can reach expanded significantly in 2025, both in the types of agency actions that resolutions can disapprove and the timeframe of actions that they can reach. By defying the Senate parliamentarian and GAO with respect to EPA’s California waivers while simultaneously relying on the GAO’s expansive definition of “rule” to reach agency actions outside the CRA’s review windows, the 119th Congress effectively weaponized the CRA into a deregulatory tool that ignores statutory limits. Although the Biden Administration’s strategic management through OIRA successfully protected its most significant policy achievements from disapproval, Congress’s aggressive targeting of environmental regulations, along with the unintended consequences of litigation-imposed issuance deadlines, illustrate the high stakes of regulatory timing. This Congress’s irresponsible abuse of its oversight powers bodes ill for regulatory stability in both the short term and the long term.

Jack Jones is a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. 

Richard L. Revesz is the AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York University School of Law and served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from January 3, 2023, to January 20, 2025.