The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the EPA would send three California vehicle emissions waiver rules to Congress for review under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The rules—Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks, and Omnibus NOx rules—could be repealed.
President Donald Trump signaled his intention to review California’s emissions waivers under the Clean Air Act (CAA) in an executive order issued on his first day in office. Trump’s executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” established that it is U.S. policy to “eliminate the ‘electric vehicle (EV) mandate,’” which involves terminating “state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.”
Trump has long opposed California’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from automobiles. In 2019, the Trump administration revoked California’s waiver to set auto emissions standards that covered GHG emissions through model year 2025. The Biden EPA reinstated the waiver in 2022. (See California’s Energy Transition: Auto Emissions.)
California’s Recent Waivers and Potential CRA Controversy
In December 2024, the Biden administration approved California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rule, the state’s so-called “EV mandate,” which would require the phase-out of the sale of new gasoline-fueled or diesel-fueled passenger cars and trucks by 2035. The administration in December also approved the Heavy-Duty Omnibus rule, which would establish more stringent emissions standards for heavy-duty engines. The Biden administration approved the waiver for the Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) regulation in March 2023.
“The Biden Administration failed to send rules on California’s waivers to Congress, preventing Members of Congress from deciding on extremely consequential actions that have massive impacts and costs across the entire United States,” Zeldin said in an announcement. “The Trump EPA is transparently correcting this wrong and rightly following the rule of law,” he said.
The CRA requires agencies to submit rules to both houses of Congress and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) before the rules may take effect. Congress can overturn certain federal agency actions by issues a joint resolution of disapproval within 60 days of a continuous session that begins when the rule has been published in the Federal Register and been received by Congress. Additionally, a disapproved rule “may not be reissued in substantially the same form, and a new rule that is substantially the same as such a rule may not be issued, unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized” by legislation passed after the disapproval.
The Trump administration’s actions, however, have raised the issue of whether California’s emissions waivers are subject to CRA review. The Congressional Research Service, which provides policy and legal analysis to Congress, states that California’s CAA emissions waivers cannot be reviewed under the CRA because a waiver is not a rule as defined in the CRA. The GAO also issued an opinion stating that California’s emissions waiver is not a rule “for purposes of CRA and, thus, not subject to the requirement that it be submitted to Congress and the Comptroller General before it may take effect.”