The Republicans’ Anti-Regulatory Agenda
Public Citizen News / July-August 2025
By Elizabeth Skerry
This article appeared in the July/August 2025 edition of Public Citizen News. Download the full edition here.
The White House and congressional Republicans are pushing an anti-regulatory agenda at warp speed that threatens public health and safety as well as long standing norms of legislative and regulatory procedure. Public Citizen is exposing how this is all being done to benefit Big Business, Big Banks, Big Polluters, Big Pharma, and Big Tech at the public’s expense.
One powerful anti-regulatory tool Republicans used this Congress to advance a corporate agenda is the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The CRA allows Congress to override final agency actions, such as rules that ensure clean air and water. Under the CRA, Congress can undo rules by passing a resolution of disapproval in both chambers – which only requires a simple majority in the Senate – that is then signed by the president. Typically, bills must overcome the filibuster with a 60-vote supermajority to pass in the Senate. The CRA offers the opportunity to sidestep the filibuster.
For example, in a handout to Big Polluters, Senate Republicans in May used the CRA to invalidate Clean Air Act waivers issued to California by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The waivers have long allowed California to establish protective pollution standards for auto fuel efficiency and other measures without being preempted by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) national standards. The Government Accountability Office and the senate parliamentarian found that the waiver should not be subject to the CRA but Senate Republicans simply ignored their findings.
Public Citizen fought hard to prevent this maneuver,sending a letter along with more than 80 other allies to Senate leadership explaining how his dangerous precedent will damage our democracy for the foreseeable future. The door has now been opened for the Senate to ignore the parliamentarian on other matters and pass more harmful measures by simple majority when a 60-vote threshold should be required – namely, through the upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Public Citizen may have lost the CRA fight, but the work to prevent future harms isn’t over.
Congressional Republicans have many more anti-regulatory legislative priorities. In May, the House Oversight Committee referred two dangerous bills to the House for consideration: the Unfunded Mandates Accountability and Transparency Act (UMATA) (H.R. 580) and the Modernizing Retrospective Regulatory Review Act (H.R. 67). These bills seek to delegitimize and weaken the regulatory process that all of us rely on for protection from potential harms caused by regulated industries – like businesses that place unsafe products in the market or banks that engage in risky financial activities.
UMATA would increase the private sector’s involvement in the rulemaking process at the expense of consumers, workers, the environment, and public health and safety, and it would further delay rulemaking. The Modernizing Retrospective Regulatory Review Act would force agencies to waste resources reviewing regulations already on the books, which will do nothing to protect Americans from under-regulated or unregulated hazards. Instead, it will drown government agencies in busy work and distract them from addressing significant threats to public health and safety, such as polluted drinking water, toxins in our food and products, or workplace safety hazards. Public Citizen is pushing back against all anti-regulatory bills this Congress to ensure they never become law.
“Make no mistake: Trump’s deregulatory blitz from DOGE’s mass firings to dismantle entire agencies to gutting enforcement against corporate criminals will mean more preventable injuries and illnesses, more needless deaths, more consumer scams and ripoffs, more industrial disasters,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. “These moves will help boost CEOs’ compensation packages and further skyrocket corporations’ record profits.”
The Trump administration’s anti-regulatory agenda is nearly boundless. In February, President Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14219, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative.” EO 14219, in concert with its accompanying presidential memorandum issued in April, pushes an anti-regulatory agenda onto federal agencies by directing agency heads to identify and rescind so-called “unlawful regulations and regulations that undermine the national interest” primarily in accordance with, but not limited to, 10 Supreme Court cases.
Furthermore, the EO calls on agencies to use something called the “good cause” exception to bypass the notice and comment rulemaking process, the democratic process that gives the public the opportunity to have their voice heard as agencies are writing rules. The “good cause” exception is a carveout under the Administrative Procedure Act – the federal law governing the rulemaking process – that allows agencies to forgo notice and comment when that process would be “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.” The Trump administration is urging agencies to subjectively label rules as “unlawful” and roll them back without any chance for public input.
Public Citizen is fighting back against the Republicans’ alarming and destructive anti-regulatory agenda by fighting for a regulatory system that works in the public interest, not for corporate special interests. We’re working in coalitions and educating members of Congress to reimagine a regulatory system that is transparent, responsive to the public’s needs, and isn’t heavily influenced by corporations and their lobbyists. Our health and safety shouldn’t be jeopardized by politicians and an administration who have an anti-regulatory, pro-corporate agenda and don’t want to play by the rules.