This year, Congress and President Trump have moved quickly to advance legislation on border security and national defense. We have been focused on the future, working to boost the economy and keep Americans safe. But we have not lost sight of the lingering effects of the Biden administration.

In the eleventh hour of his term, President Biden rammed through brand new rules on energy, digital currencies, emissions, and more. If unchallenged, these standards would have gained the force of law, and the former administration would not have had to answer for the regulations’ impact on our country.

The U.S. Senate has worked to keep these rules from going into effect. We have used a tool created by the 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA) to nullify last-minute power grabs from President Biden.

CRA Keeps Bureaucrats in Check

The CRA reinforces the system of checks and balances our founders established, but the process is a fairly recent addition to our politics. The act originated during my first term in the U.S. House of Representatives. Throughout the 104^th Congress, my colleagues and I pursed an agenda called the Contract with America. That ambitious plan had many goals, and one was to rein in the power of bureaucrats.

To do that, we wrote the Congressional Review Act. The law created a way for the people’s elected representatives to undo actions taken by unelected executive branch officials. It requires federal agencies to alert the House and Senate when a new regulation is published. If Congress disagrees with the agency’s decision, members in both chambers could pass a resolution disapproving the change. With the president’s signature – or the Congress’ veto override – the regulation disappears.

Until the beginning of the Biden administration, I had voted for every successful CRA. Republicans used the maneuver to reject regulations from the end of the Clinton and Obama administrations. In 2021, Democrats embraced the CRA to unwind three rules published under President Trump. Now that Republicans hold the Congress and the White House, we are able to take advantage of this tool again.

Undoing Job-Killing Regulations on Energy

At this point, lawmakers have sent two CRAs to President Trump’s desk. The Senate has so far approved two more, and a host of others have been introduced. All of them reject regulations the Biden administration had hoped to sneak in before leaving office.

Half of the Senate CRAs target rules that would have restricted America’s energy industry. One attempted to limit offshore oil and gas production. It would have required small and independent operators to conduct costly studies of the ocean floor before laying pipes or drilling – even though hundreds of thousands of nautical miles have already been surveyed. Another rejected a Biden-era regulation that amounted to a tax on natural gas. I co-led an additional CRA that would benefit Mississippi’s tire manufacturers. The Biden administration imposed an emission standard on tire production that exceeded the recommendation of its own environmental impact review.

The Senate has also voted to reject two Biden administration standards that complicated Americans’ use of digital finance tools. One piled unnecessary regulation on the “nonbank” services many enjoy, including digital wallets and convenient payment apps. Another applied to users of digital assets, such as cryptocurrency. It would have labeled certain users as “brokers,” unnecessarily burdening them with complicated Internal Revenue Service reporting requirements.

A final component of the 1996 Congressional Review Act barred the bureaucracy from republishing a substantially similar regulation once lawmakers had rejected it. As our founders intended, that provision puts Congress – not bureaucrats – in the driver’s seat for all legislation. It upholds the separation of powers that has made our government so resilient for nearly 250 years.