What is the Congressional Review Act?

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is a 1996 law that gives Congress a way to review, modify, or overturn rules issued by federal agencies. Lately, it has become a Trump-era tool for targeting California’s authority to set its own clean air standards—the same standards that protect millions of people from vehicle pollution. 

Here’s how the CRA works, and why a piece of 1990s procedure is suddenly being weaponized against the air Californians breathe.

What does the Congressional Review Act do?

The Congressional Review Act gives Congress a 60-day window to review and overturn new rules issued by federal agencies. If both the House and Senate pass a joint resolution of disapproval and the President signs it, the rule is invalidated before it can take effect. It was passed in 1996 as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act to give Congress more oversight of federal agencies.

The CRA is extremely powerful: Any rollbacks to rules through the CRA not only undo the existing rule, but also prohibit any future action on the issue. The federal agency is barred from issuing any rule that is “substantially similar” ever again, unless Congress explicitly authorizes it. This means that using the CRA could permanently close the door on an entire area of policy.

How does the Congressional Review Act work?

When a federal agency like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalizes a new rule, it must submit that rule to both houses of Congress and to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) before the rule can take effect. From there, Congress has 60 days to introduce a joint resolution disapproving it.

A disapproval resolution needs only a simple majority in both the House and the Senate—it cannot be filibustered. Once both chambers pass it, the resolution goes to the President. With a signature, the rule is dead, and the agency can’t try again with a policy that’s substantially similar.

Since its introduction in 1996, Congress has used the CRA to overturn 43 federal rules. Of those, 39 reversals—90% of all CRA uses—happened during a Trump presidency. Between Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025 and April 27, 2026, a record-breaking 23 rules have been repealed under the CRA.

For most of its history, the CRA was understood to apply to ordinary federal regulations, not to decisions about a state’s authority to protect its own residents. That understanding is now being tested as the Trump administration leverages this little-known rule to target California.

Why does the Congressional Review Act matter for California?

California has a unique authority under the Clean Air Act. With a massive population and unique air flow patterns, California and the people who live here are uniquely impacted by air pollution, especially from vehicles. Our state has been regulating air pollution from vehicles since the 1950s—twenty years before the federal Clean Air Act was signed into law. 

According to the American Lung Association, nearly nine in ten Californians live in counties affected by air pollution. Much of that pollution comes from transportation and “pollution magnets” like warehouses, ports, and railyards. Diesel pollution raises the risk of asthma, heart attacks, cancer, lung and airway damage, and early death. Those harms are also part of California’s affordability crisis: emergency room visits, prescriptions, and missed days of work and school all carry a cost. Cleaning up vehicle pollution is one of the most direct ways to improve California’s air, public health, and cost of living.

Because of California’s unique history with air quality regulations and community impacts, the state has been granted “waivers” from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set stronger vehicle emission standards than the national floor. These include the Advanced Clean Cars I and Advanced Clean Cars II Waivers—some of the biggest clean air and public health victories in the past decade. Over more than 50 years, across Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the EPA has granted California more than 75 of these waivers so we can have state-level regulations that are more comprehensive than the low standards of the federal government.

Once the EPA grants a waiver, other states are allowed to adopt California’s standards too. Our Clean Car standards have been adopted by 17 additional states; together with California, this means more than 40% of the country is protected through our strong air quality regulations.

But the clean air regulations we benefit from are now in the crosshairs as the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress target California. The CRA was written to let Congress review federal agency rules, but California’s Clean Air Act waivers have never been treated as federal rules—the EPA itself has consistently classified them as “orders,” a different kind of agency action. Both the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the U.S. Senate Parliamentarian have said plainly that these waivers are outside the scope of the CRA’s authority.

What happened to California’s clean car standards in 2025?

In 2025, Congress used the CRA to revoke three Clean Air Act waivers the EPA had granted California, including the waiver for Advanced Clean Cars II—the program to phase in zero-emission vehicles and get more electric cars on the street. The House passed the resolutions to overturn these Clean Air Act waivers in late April and early May, the Senate followed on May 22, and President Trump signed all three into law on June 12, 2025.

Congress moved forward even though the GAO and the Senate Parliamentarian had both determined the waivers weren’t valid targets for the CRA. Because of how the CRA works, the disapproval doesn’t just pause these standards—it prohibits California from enforcing them, stops the eleven other states that had adopted Advanced Clean Cars II from doing the same, and similar laws are permanently blocked unless this action is overturned by the Supreme Court. 

California did not let it stand. On the same day the resolutions were signed, California and a coalition of ten other states sued in federal court, arguing that the CRA applies only to federal rules and cannot be stretched to cancel a state’s authority. That case is still working its way through the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Update: What’s happening now in 2026?

The fight has escalated. On June 12, 2026, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the EPA was sending four more California clean air waivers to Congress for CRA review—this time reclassifying long-standing waivers, some dating back to 2009, as “rules.” The waivers now at risk cover California’s 2009 greenhouse gas standards for passenger vehicles, the Advanced Clean Cars I program, the 2022 reinstatement of that program, and standards for small off-road engines like lawn and garden equipment.

On June 22, 2026, California responded by filing a new lawsuit—this one in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia—challenging the EPA’s attempt to redefine decades-old waivers as rules. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has argued that an agency cannot simply relabel a settled order as a rule years after the fact to open it up to congressional review. The state estimates that losing these standards could cost Californians an estimated $45 billion in preventable health care costs.

In July of 2026, the Trump Administration took it a step further by reclassifying two more of California’s Clean Air waivers as ‘new rules’ to make them eligible for the Congressional Review Act. 

They are proposing to roll back the At Berth and Commercial Harbor Craft regulations, our state’s plans to cut emissions associated with shipping. In SoCal ports alone, we receive around 1/3 of all shipped goods in the U.S. which also means tons of emissions from this sector. Aside from the ships themselves, we need vehicles to move things on and off ships, and from the ports to the rest of the supply chain where goods move via truck and rail to the rest of the country. These regulations have been around since the 2000s and are estimated to prevent ~$2.3 billion every year in adverse health impacts. Without them, 9.7 million Californians are at risk from elevated levels of air pollution, especially in the frontline Black and brown communities that have historically borne the brunt of port pollution. 

The throughline across both rounds of Congressional Review Act misuse is the same. These time-tested protections are built on authority California has held for half a century to protect our communities from toxic air pollution and major health impacts. Using the CRA to undo them while ignoring nonpartisan objections and clear standards sets a precedent that could reach far beyond cars—into agency decisions on everything from oil and gas leases to mining permits.

What is California doing to fight back?

California’s leaders are hearing the calls to action from concerned voters across the state as California’s communities rally for their air to be protected. The Attorney General is challenging both rounds of Congressional Review Act misuse in court. The Governor has committed to working with the coalition of 10 states that adopted California’s clean car standards. And state legislators are exploring pathways for emissions protections that don’t depend on federal approval, so the state’s clean air progress isn’t left at the mercy of a single vote in Washington.

This has been a hard stretch for clean air in California—but the fight forward is already in motion. The right to breathe clean air shouldn’t come down to the misuse of a 1996 oversight law, and California is making that case in court and in the Capitol.

EnviroVoters is holding the line and defending California’s right to protect its own communities. Will you sign our petition urging California’s Congressmembers to defend our clean air?