Congressional Review Act
A 1996 statute letting Congress overturn a recently finalised agency rule by simple majority, with the president's signature.
The Congressional Review Act requires agencies to submit each final rule to Congress before it takes effect and gives Congress a window in which to pass a joint resolution of disapproval. Because such a resolution is privileged in the Senate, it cannot be filibustered and needs no cloture vote, so it passes on a simple majority.
The mechanism only bites in narrow circumstances, because the resolution still requires the president's signature. In practice it is used when a new administration and a new congressional majority arrive together and can reach back to rules finalised in the final months of the previous administration under the statute's lookback provision.
Its consequences outlast the rule it kills. Once a rule is disapproved, the agency may not issue one in substantially the same form without new authority from Congress, which makes disapproval considerably more durable than an ordinary repeal through notice and comment. That permanence is why coverage of a disapproval resolution is coverage of a long-term policy change.
What the federal government did, once a day.
One email each weekday: the rules, filings, votes and Fed decisions that actually changed something, each one linked to the document it came from.