Every final rule a federal agency issues has to be sent to both chambers of Congress and to the Government Accountability Office before it can take effect. That requirement, and the fast-track procedure attached to it, is the Congressional Review Act of 1996, 5 U.S.C. §§ 801–808.
Submission starts a clock: roughly sixty days of session in which a joint resolution of disapproval can move under expedited procedures — limited debate, no filibuster, a simple majority in the Senate. Signed by the president, the resolution voids the rule and bars the agency from issuing another in substantially the same form unless Congress authorizes it by statute.
That bar, rather than the repeal, is what makes the Act a different instrument from ordinary legislation. Congress does not merely undo the rule; it takes the subject off the agency's table.
A disapproval resolution goes to the president like any other joint resolution, so it becomes usable exactly when one party holds both chambers and the White House — the months after an election that changed the executive. The lookback provision sharpens the timing further: rules submitted too late in a session for the full review window get a fresh one when the next Congress convenes. That is why the fight is always over rules issued in an administration's final months.
The record follows the arithmetic. The Act was used once in its first twenty years, against an ergonomics rule in 2001. Sixteen times in 2017. Three times in 2021. In bulk again through 2025.
It is a veto over individual rules, exercised after the fact, one at a time, inside a window measured in weeks. It gives Congress no standing ability to read a rule before it lands, price it, or judge it against the statute it claims to implement.
Congress built that capability for the executive branch when it created the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and never built the legislative counterpart. Until it does, the Congressional Review Act is the whole of Congress's regulatory toolkit, and the tool only works in one narrow season of the calendar.
Five years as the Senate's point person on regulatory reform and the Congressional Review Act, at the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.