The Congressional Review Act went from a rarely used scalpel to the most productive repeal instrument in regulatory history during 2025: Congress passed and the President signed 22 joint resolutions of disapproval overturning prior-administration rules, the highest annual total since the act's 1996 enactment, according to Harvard Regulatory Review's February 2026 retrospective — and the cumulative second-term count reached 23 by April 27, 2026, per Ballotpedia's tracking. The total stock of CRA repeals across three decades now sits around 60, meaning more than a third of all rules ever overturned by the act fell in a single twelve-month span.
How the mechanism produced a record
The CRA's design explains the volume. When an agency submits a rule to Congress, members have 60 legislative days to introduce a joint resolution of disapproval, which passes the House by simple majority and the Senate by simple majority — no filibuster, under the act's expedited procedures. A resolution signed by the President voids the rule and, critically, bars the agency from issuing a substantially similar rule without new statutory authority. The act's lookback provision compounds the effect at presidential transitions: rules submitted in the final months of a term count as newly submitted for the incoming Congress, giving a new administration and Congress a single window to repeal late-term rules en masse. That window, plus Senate majority leadership willing to floor the resolutions, is the entire story of 2025's number.
The asymmetry, stated precisely
Legal commentary across 2026 — including analyses in the Harvard law journals and Brookings — converges on the structural point: repealing a rule requires House majority, 50 Senate votes, and a willing President; reinstating one requires the same House majority plus 60 Senate votes to overcome the filibuster, or new legislation the current President will sign. Rules voided by CRA therefore stay void through ordinary politics. The 2025 cohort — spanning labor, environmental, financial, and consumer-protection rules — illustrates what that means in practice: each repealed rule reverts the governing baseline to the pre-rule state, and agencies are statutorily barred from substantially similar reissuance.
What the aftermath looks like
Three consequences are now measurable. State-level substitution: where federal rules fall, state regulators and legislatures move — the pattern after every federal deregulatory episode, tracked by the National Conference of State Legislatures — so compliance environments fragment by state rather than simplifying. Litigation over what counts as a rule: the CRA's definition reaches beyond Notice-and-Comment rules to guidance and related agency actions in some readings, a boundary courts continue to test. And drafting caution upstream: agencies now write late-term rules with the CRA window visibly in mind, favoring earlier action in a term — one of the quiet reasons rule pipelines front-load in the Unified Agenda.
FAQ
What is the Congressional Review Act?
A 1996 law letting Congress overturn agency rules by joint resolution within 60 legislative days, with simple-majority Senate passage and no filibuster; a signed resolution voids the rule and bars substantially similar reissuance.
How many rules were repealed in 2025?
Twenty-two — the record for a single year, bringing the act's all-time total to roughly 60, with the second-term count reaching 23 by late April 2026.
Can a repealed rule be reinstated?
Not by the agency alone — the CRA bars substantially similar rules without new statutory authority, and reinstating by legislation faces the Senate's 60-vote filibuster threshold.
For more context, read September's Rule Surge: Why the Federal Register Balloons Each Fall.
For more context, read Rulemaking: How a Federal Rule Actually Gets Made.