The federal process: Congress, agencies, the Federal Register and executive orders

Federal law reaches Idaho constantly: grazing permits, water quality standards, highway money, broadband grants, nuclear licensing at the Idaho National Laboratory. Most of it is not written in Congress. Congress passes a statute, often broad, and federal agencies turn it into regulations. Then presidents redirect those agencies by executive order, and Congress sometimes reaches back and erases a regulation outright. Four moving parts. This lesson takes them one at a time.

Congress

A federal bill must pass the House and the Senate in identical form and go to the president. Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution sets the rest:

• Sign: it becomes law.
• Veto: it goes back to the chamber where it started. Two-thirds of each house can override.
• Do nothing for ten days, Sundays excepted: it becomes law without a signature, unless Congress has adjourned and prevented its return. Then it dies. That is the pocket veto.

Revenue bills must start in the House, as in Idaho. The big differences from Boise are scale and time. Congress meets most of the year, a two-year Congress handles thousands of bills, and the Senate's filibuster rule means most legislation needs 60 votes to end debate. You can track every bill, its text, its cosponsors and its actions on congress.gov, which works much like the Idaho Legislature's bill pages.

How agencies write federal rules

The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 sets the default process for federal rules. Section 553 of Title 5 is short enough to read in five minutes, and it is worth it.

Step	What 5 U.S.C. 553 requires
Notice	Publish a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register with the legal authority, the terms or substance of the rule (or the subjects involved), and, since a 2023 amendment, the internet address of a plain-language summary of no more than 100 words posted on regulations.gov.
Comment	Give interested persons a chance to submit "written data, views, or arguments." No minimum length is set in the statute.
Final rule	Consider the comments and publish the final rule with "a concise general statement of their basis and purpose."
Effective date	At least 30 days after publication, except for rules that relieve a restriction, interpretive rules, policy statements, or good cause found and published.
Petition	Any interested person may petition an agency to issue, amend or repeal a rule (553(e)).

There are exceptions. Interpretive rules, general statements of policy and procedural rules do not need notice and comment, and an agency can skip it for "good cause" if it explains why notice is impracticable, unnecessary or contrary to the public interest. Military, foreign affairs, and matters about grants, benefits and contracts are also exempt from section 553, though agencies often use notice and comment anyway.

Comment length comes from presidential policy instead of the statute. Executive Order 12866, signed in 1993, tells agencies to give the public a meaningful chance to comment on any proposed regulation, which "in most cases" should mean at least 60 days. In practice, 30-day periods are still common for minor rules. Agencies sometimes extend periods when asked, so asking is worth a sentence.

The Federal Register and the CFR

The Federal Register is published every business day. Proposed rules, final rules, notices of meetings and presidential documents all appear there with a citation such as 90 FR 9065 (volume 90, page 9065). Final rules are then codified in the Code of Federal Regulations, which is arranged by subject. Title 40 is environmental protection, Title 43 covers public lands, and so on. The Federal Register's own search counted about 2,400 documents classed as final rules published in 2025, which gives you a sense of volume.

Regulations.gov

Most agencies run their comment process through regulations.gov. Each rulemaking has a docket with an ID usually built from the agency's abbreviation, a year and a sequence number. The docket holds the proposal, the economic analysis, supporting studies and every public comment. Comments are public records; do not put anything in one you would not want posted. Search by docket ID, by keyword or by agency, and you can download all comments for analysis.

The Congressional Review Act

Passed in 1996, the CRA (5 U.S.C. 801 to 808) requires agencies to send every final rule to both houses of Congress and to the Government Accountability Office before it can take effect. GAO reports on each major rule within 15 days. Then Congress gets a fast track to kill a rule.

• The window: a disapproval resolution must be introduced within 60 days after Congress receives the rule, not counting periods when either house is adjourned for more than three days (802(a)).
• The fast track: in the Senate, debate is capped at 10 hours and the motion to proceed cannot be filibustered, so a simple majority can pass it. The expedited Senate procedure is available for 60 session days (802(d) and (e)).
• The lookback: rules submitted near the end of a session get a fresh window in the next session, which is why a new Congress can reach back and overturn the outgoing administration's late rules.
• The effect: a resolution signed by the president means the rule "shall not take effect (or continue)," and the agency may not reissue it, or a new rule "substantially the same," without new authorization from Congress (801(b)).

For most of its history the CRA was rarely used. Ballotpedia counts 20 resolutions enacted from 1996 through 2024: one under President George W. Bush, 16 in President Trump's first term and three under President Biden. In 2025, Trump signed 22 by December 11, more than all prior years combined, including the first disapprovals of Bureau of Land Management resource management plans and three resolutions repealing EPA waivers for California's vehicle emission standards (litigation over those continued).

The fight over this is real, and both sides have arguments worth stating fairly. Supporters in Congress say the CRA lets elected members check unelected agency officials, and that an outgoing administration's late rules deserve a second look by the new Congress. Critics include Richard L. Revesz, a New York University law professor who led the White House regulatory review office from 2023 to January 2025. Writing with coauthors in The Regulatory Review in February 2026, he argued that Congress stretched the act, disapproving the California waivers even though GAO and the Senate parliamentarian had concluded they were not rules, and reaching into new territory with land management plans (which GAO did classify as rules), and that a broad reading of "substantially the same" could permanently shrink agency authority. His group counted 18 of the 22 disapproved actions as environmental. What is not in dispute: the 2025 use was unprecedented in volume and in the kinds of actions targeted, and some of it is being tested in litigation.

Executive orders

An executive order is a written directive from the president to the executive branch, numbered and published in the Federal Register. The Federal Register's records list 225 executive orders signed from January 20 through December 31, 2025.

What they can do: tell agencies how to set priorities, how to review rules and how to use the discretion that statutes already give them. Executive Order 14192, signed January 31, 2025, is a clear example. It directs that for each new regulation, agencies identify at least ten existing ones to repeal, and that the total cost of new regulations in fiscal 2025 be "significantly less than zero." Executive Order 12866, the 1993 order that set up White House review of significant rules, has been kept by presidents of both parties with changes.

What they cannot do: change a statute, spend money Congress did not appropriate, or bind people outside the government except through powers a statute or the Constitution already gives. The classic limit is Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), in which the Supreme Court held that President Truman's order seizing steel mills during the Korean War lacked authority from either Congress or the Constitution. Executive orders are also easy to undo. The next president can revoke them with another order, and agencies still have to follow the APA to change a regulation that an order targets. An order telling an agency to repeal a rule starts a rulemaking; it does not finish one.