The Congressional Review Act Lets Congress Veto a Rule, if It Moves in Time

Congress owns a fire extinguisher, and for its first twenty-one years almost nobody could find the pin. That is the short history of the Congressional Review Act. It sat in the statute books from 1996, used successfully exactly once, until a flurry of use in 2017 showed what it could do. It has a stopwatch attached, and the stopwatch is the whole story.

If you want to understand how a legislature can still check an administrative state that writes thousands of rules a year, you have to understand this one law. It is short, it is odd, and it is the only fast lane Congress has built for itself.

Why it exists

Start with the problem. Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution vests "all legislative Powers" in Congress. Yet agencies now publish thousands of binding rules a year. The Federal Register printed 3,248 final rules in 2024 and 2,441 in 2025. Congress passes a few hundred laws in a typical year, and many of them are ceremonial. The arithmetic says that most of what binds Americans is written by agencies.

For a while, Congress had a tool for dealing with that. It was called the legislative veto: a clause in a statute letting one or both chambers cancel an agency decision without the President's signature. The Supreme Court ended it in 1983. In INS v. Chadha, the Justices held that such a veto was an exercise of legislative power and therefore had to pass both chambers and be presented to the President under Article I, Section 7. The story of that decision is told in INS v. Chadha Killed the Legislative Veto and Left Congress Fewer Tools.

The Congressional Review Act, passed in 1996, is Congress's answer to Chadha. It was part of the legislative package that followed the 1994 elections, enacted as a subtitle of a law about small-business regulatory enforcement and signed by President Clinton on March 29, 1996. Its approach is cleverly obedient to the Court. It does not give Congress a veto. It gives Congress a fast-track procedure to pass a joint resolution of disapproval, which, like any bill, must be passed by both chambers and signed by the President.

How a rule reaches Congress

Here is the mechanism, which is codified in Title 5 of the U.S. Code, sections 801 through 808.

1. Submission. Before a rule can take effect, the agency must send a copy to both the House and the Senate and to the Comptroller General at the Government Accountability Office, with a report that includes a classification of the rule as major or not.
2. Major rules wait. A rule is "major" if the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs finds that it will likely have an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more, or cause a major cost increase for consumers or industries, or significant adverse effects on competition, employment, investment, productivity or innovation. A major rule cannot take effect until 60 days after it is submitted or published, whichever is later.
3. The clocks start. From that point, the legislative branch has a limited time to act. Rules not submitted at all are a loophole of their own, as we will see.
4. Disapproval. If Congress passes a joint resolution of disapproval and the President signs it, or it is passed over a veto, the rule has no force or effect.

What happens if Congress does nothing is the reason the Act is largely unnoticed. The rule takes effect, and the opportunity passes.

The windows

The Act uses three overlapping clocks, and the details are what make it work or fail.

The introduction window. A member has 60 days of continuous session, counted from the date the rule is received by Congress and published in the Federal Register, to introduce a joint resolution of disapproval. "Continuous session" skips days when either chamber is adjourned for more than three days, so the calendar days can stretch well beyond two months.

The Senate action window. After the rule is received, the Senate may use its special expedited procedure for 60 session days. A session day is a day the Senate is actually in session, not a calendar day. Congress is not in session on weekends, during recesses or in August, so 60 session days can last more than half a year.

The expedited procedure itself. This is the prize. Ordinarily, getting a bill to the Senate floor takes the cooperation of the majority leader, and then a supermajority of 60 votes to end debate. The Review Act changes both rules for these resolutions. If a committee has not reported the resolution within 20 calendar days after the rule is received, a petition signed by 30 senators discharges the committee and puts the resolution on the calendar. Any senator may then move to proceed, and the motion is not debatable. Debate on the resolution is limited to ten hours, and the resolution cannot be filibustered. It passes by simple majority.

In practical terms, thirty senators can force a floor vote, and 51 can carry it. In a body that rarely lets any measure pass on a simple majority, that is extraordinary. The House has no equivalent special rule in the statute. There the majority controls the floor through the Rules Committee as usual, so a resolution reaches a vote when House leaders want it to.

The lookback

The lookback is the provision that decides when a new Congress can reach back into the old one.

The problem it solves is the end-of-term rush. Outgoing administrations tend to finalize rules in their final weeks. If the Act's clocks ran out before the new Congress could act, the previous President's last rules would be beyond its reach. So the statute says: if a rule is submitted within 60 legislative days (House) or session days (Senate) before Congress adjourns for the year, the clocks reset. The rule is treated as having been received on the 15th session or legislative day of the next session of Congress, and the full windows run from then.

The effect is that when party control of the White House changes, the new Congress can take a backward look at the last months of the old administration's work, usually going back to rules submitted in roughly the second half of the previous year. That is how the Act did its largest work in 2017: the lookback let the Congress elected in November 2016 reach rules finalized in 2016. It is also a tool that works only when the political stars align, because the same Congress must agree with the new President about the rules to be undone.

First use: the ergonomics rule

For its first five years the Act sat unused. Congress had a hard time getting a majority to overturn a rule while the President who issued it still held office, and a President will not sign a resolution disapproving his own regulation.

The first success came in 2001. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had finalized an ergonomics standard in November 2000, in the final weeks of the Clinton administration. It required employers to address repetitive-motion injuries and covered a very large number of workplaces. The new Congress passed a resolution of disapproval, and President George W. Bush signed it on March 20, 2001. The expedited procedure mattered, because the Senate resolution could not be filibustered.

The ergonomics episode set the template: a rule finalized late, a change in party control, a fast-track vote, a signature. It also created the central legal puzzle of the statute, which is next.

The bar on reissuing

If Congress disapproves a rule, can the agency just issue another one next month?

The Act says no. Under 5 U.S.C. § 801(b)(2), a rule that Congress has disapproved may not be reissued in substantially the same form, and a new rule that is substantially the same may not be issued either, unless a law enacted after the disapproval resolution specifically authorizes it. That is a powerful provision. It means a successful disapproval does not merely cancel a rule; it blocks the agency from trying again unless Congress passes a new law.

What counts as "substantially the same" is not defined in the statute, and, to the frustration of many practitioners, the Act also bars judicial review of its operation. Section 805 provides that no determination, finding, action or omission under the Act is subject to judicial review. The courts have generally read that provision as meaning a court will not second-guess Congress's own procedural choices. The practical result is uncertainty. After the 2001 ergonomics disapproval, OSHA did not reissue a comprehensive standard of the same kind. Agencies since then have been careful about anything resembling a disapproved rule, and the safest reading of the phrase is that the agency must find a materially different approach, or ask Congress.

That uncertainty cuts both ways. Critics of the Act call the bar a trap, since an agency may be unable to regulate in an area for years. Supporters answer that a bar is the point: if Congress has said no, a bureaucracy should not be able to say yes in different words.

The signature problem

There is one more constraint, and it is the biggest. A joint resolution of disapproval is a law, and therefore, under Article I, Section 7, goes to the President. A President who does not want to see a rule overturned can veto the resolution, and overriding a veto needs two-thirds of each chamber. A President who opposes a disapproval resolution can be expected to veto it.

That is why the Act has worked best at a single moment: the first months of a new administration, when Congress and the White House agree. It has been much weaker as a tool for checking a sitting President from the other party, since that President will simply veto the disapproval. And a Congress that changes hands in the middle of a presidency faces the opposite problem: it holds the votes, but not the pen.

This is the mismatch that matters for voters thinking about the next two years. A change in congressional control does not make the Act a general check on an administration. It is a tool for a Congress that works with the President, not against him. What a divided Congress can do about rules it dislikes is explored in Why a Democratic Congress Cannot Easily Undo a President's Deregulation, and the harder, structural answer is in Make Congress Vote on Every Major Rule, and Watch Accountability Return.

What happened in 2017

After 2001, nothing. The Act was used once in twenty-one years. Then, in the spring of 2017, the 115th Congress and a new President aligned for the first time in the Act's history, and the lookback opened the previous administration's final months to review. More than a dozen disapproval resolutions were signed into law in a matter of weeks, covering rules issued under the previous President on matters ranging from federal contractors to land management to financial and workplace regulation. In spring 2018, Congress also used the Act on a consumer financial guidance bulletin after the Government Accountability Office opined that the bulletin counted as a rule under the statute, an important precedent for the argument made in Guidance Documents Are Rules That Skipped the Line, and Families Pay for It that guidance can be a rule in all but name.

The lesson of 2017 is that the tool had been available for two decades. Congress had never moved quickly enough, and never cared enough, to use it.

The best objection

A fair critic will say the Act is a blunt instrument. A disapproval resolution is all-or-nothing: Congress cannot fix a rule's problems with an amendment, because the resolution is not amendable. The Act can scrap a sensible rule along with a bad one, and the bar on reissuing can leave a gap that harms the very people the rule was supposed to protect. Worse, the critic adds, the Act lets a transient majority erase months of careful agency work because of a partisan realignment, which invites a policy whiplash that makes planning impossible.

I take the point about bluntness seriously. The Act is not a precision tool. But there are three answers.

First, the Act's bluntness is the price of Chadha. The Constitution requires that Congress act by law. The shortcut had to be a bill. A narrower tool would have been struck down.

Second, the alternative is not a careful, deliberative review. It is no review at all. When a rule never gets a vote of any elected body, the "careful agency work" is carried out by officials the voters did not choose and cannot remove. Whiplash from elections is the cost of self-government. It is better than stability achieved by taking the voters out.

Third, the Act's blunt edges are exactly why it should be paired with a better design. If Congress used its ordinary legislative powers to define rules in advance, instead of delegating blank checks, the Act would have less to undo.

What a family can do with this

You cannot file a resolution. But you can use the Act as a map. Every agency rule that is submitted to Congress gets a record, and the Government Accountability Office publishes a database of rules and major-rule reports that is open to the public. If a rule affects your business, your farm or your school, you can find its submission date, work out the clocks, and tell your representative and senators before the windows close. The windows are public, and the lawmakers who need the push are, too. Pairing that with the page on red tape lets you see what rules are pending, and the oversight page shows who is supposed to be watching.

A republic is not self-executing. The Framers gave the legislature the power of the purse and the power to make law, and they expected it to use them. A fire extinguisher on the wall only works if somebody pulls the pin before the fire is out.

The case in brief

1. The Congressional Review Act of 1996 is Congress's one fast-track tool against agency rules, built to comply with INS v. Chadha by requiring a joint resolution that the President must sign.
2. Rules must be submitted to Congress; major rules wait 60 days; the Senate can act under an expedited procedure for 60 session days with a 30-senator discharge petition and no filibuster.
3. The lookback resets the clocks for rules submitted late in a Congress, which lets a new Congress reach a prior administration's last rules.
4. Disapproval bars reissuing a rule in substantially the same form without new legislation, and the Act is shielded from judicial review.
5. The President's signature requirement means the Act works best when Congress and the White House agree, and poorly as a check on a President of the other party.

What you can do: look up one rule that affects your work or family in the Federal Register, note its submission date, and write to both your senators before the 60-session-day window closes asking whether they will support a resolution of disapproval or a better statute.