GW’s Regulatory Studies Center announced the launch of the Congressional Review Act Dashboard, which allows users to track all federal regulations, on Aug. 7.

The 1996 Congressional Review Act allows Congress to use an expedited process to repeal any federal regulations made by the previous Congress in the last 60 working days of the previous Congress’ session in what is known as the “lookback period.” The dashboard lists all final regulations made by federal agencies starting at the beginning of this year so political scientists, journalists and other interest groups can see which regulations by the Biden administration could be repealed by the next Congress. 

Sarah Hay, a policy analyst at the RSC, said because Congress is constantly changing their meeting schedule and the “lookback period” is calculated from the 60 working days before the end of a session of Congress, researchers do not know when the lookback period for this Congress will start. 

“We have a Biden administration who’s been issuing regulations that go along with their political point of view,” Hay said. “And then if we to have a Trump administration starting in January, and we were to have a Republican Congress as well, in that case, they would be able to use the Congressional Review Act as basically a fast track procedure to overturn some of the regulations issued by the Biden administration.”

Hay said the data from the dashboard of Biden-era regulations from this year shows a spike in regulations by federal agencies in late April and early May, which Hay said is right before the earliest possible start date for the lookback period. Hay said this shows the Biden administration has been trying to pass regulations that they know cannot be easily repealed by a possible Republican Congress. 

“There’s so much data about regulation out there, and it’s exciting to package it in a way that’s easier to interpret for a general audience, or not even a general audience, a specific audience but people who don’t want to be in the data weeds but that do want to understand what’s going on,” Hay said. 

Hay said the dashboard is interactive and has the ability to cater to the interests of any given audience by allowing people to search regulations by agency and time frame. Hay said the dashboard also has “significant determinations” based on evaluations under Executive Order 12866, which mandates regulations be analyzed in terms of economic and legal impact, to inform users on how far-reaching the impact of a particular regulation is.

Steven Balla, the co-director of the RSC, said the dashboard could be useful to almost anyone because every field is impacted by federal regulations. Balla said journalists could use it to understand regulations in their field of reporting and sustainability scholars could use it to understand current environmental regulations. 

“It really doesn’t matter who you are, regulation is affecting the things that you’re working on,” Balla said. “And so I think that there’s really a wide range of researchers, journalists and regulatory practitioners who will all find this useful what we’re doing.”

Balla said the researchers made the dashboard by collecting data from the Federal Register — the official publication of federal rules and regulations — using an Application Program Interface, a tool that allows the transfer of data across electronic platforms, to get the information of all the federal regulations passed this year. 

“We were able to leverage our existing expertise in doing this kind of bulk grabbing and applied in this format, where we’re now matching the data with a outward facing, visually friendly interface,” Balla said.

Balla said the CRA is not the only way for Congress to repeal regulations made by previous administrations — it’s just the easiest. Under the CRA lookback period, the Senate does not need to meet the standard 60 vote threshold to repeal a regulation, just a majority and floor debate is limited. 

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said the dashboard’s visualization of data allows users to understand the connection between Congress and the federal bureaucracy more clearly. 

“I appreciate the data on the dashboard,” Levitt said in an email. “It’s an important topic that gets less attention than it should, and the dashboard is a very nice start to correcting that imbalance.”