EPA Sends Four California Emission Waivers to Congress, Targeting the Clean-Car Rules

The Environmental Protection Agency did not repeal anything on Friday. It did something quieter and, for California's clean-car program, potentially more consequential: it handed Congress the paperwork to do the repealing.

The agency transmitted four California waiver rules to the Republican-controlled Congress, arguing that each qualifies as a "rule" under the Congressional Review Act and that previous administrations had skipped a step the law required. By sending them now, the EPA opens each to a simple-majority disapproval vote — the same mechanism Congress used in 2025 to strike down California's Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which aimed to phase out new gasoline cars by 2035.

The four rules on the table

The waivers are the legal devices that let California set vehicle and equipment standards stricter than the federal floor — authority the state has held, in one form or another, since before the modern Clean Air Act. The four sent to Congress are:

• Advanced Clean Cars I — the rule allowing California to impose tailpipe and evaporative-emission requirements tougher than federal standards, the engine of the state's EV push.
• Reinstatement of ACC I — the Biden-era EPA action that restored ACC I after the first Trump administration revoked it.
• Small Off-Road Engine (SORE) amendments — emission limits for lawn and garden equipment that have pushed the market toward electric mowers and trimmers.
• Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards for 2009 and later model years — the rule letting California enforce strict greenhouse-gas limits on cars.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin cast the move as procedure, not policy.

"EPA is accountable to Congress, but most importantly we must be accountable to the American people. It is important for EPA to fulfill our statutory obligation to submit these California waivers to Congress for their review pursuant to the law."

Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator

The mechanism is the whole fight

Whether these waivers are reviewable under the CRA at all is the contested ground, and it is not a small technicality. For decades the waivers were treated as adjudications, not rules, and therefore outside the CRA's reach. When the EPA sent earlier waivers to Congress in 2025, many Democratic lawmakers argued the law did not apply — a reading that, in the related Senate fight last year, both the Government Accountability Office and the Senate Parliamentarian had backed before Republicans voted to proceed anyway.

California's response was immediate and familiar. Air Resources Board Chair Lauren Sanchez said the state will not stand idle while this federal administration continues its illegal and unconstitutional actions denying Californians the right to breathe clean air. The Environmental Defense Fund called the action unlawful and said the regulations at issue would deliver cleaner air to people living with severe smog and soot.

Those aren't abstractions in California. Five of the ten most ozone-polluted U.S. cities are in the state, and roughly 10 million people in the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles basin live under "severe nonattainment" conditions, where asthma and cardiopulmonary disease run high — the kind of acute air-quality stress that a shifting climate baseline only sharpens. The state has estimated that rolling back the related clean-car rules would cost Californians some $45 billion in health-care costs — a figure that frames the waivers as a public-health instrument as much as a climate one.

What a repeal would actually move

ACC I, approved under the Biden EPA in 2022, remains in effect for now and is what nudges automakers toward cleaner electric models. Strip the waivers and the leverage goes with them: the dozen-plus states that adopted California's standards under Clean Air Act section 177 lose the federal backing that gives those standards force. The practical effect would be fewer required EV models and looser tailpipe limits in roughly a third of the U.S. car market — at a moment when the federal tailpipe rules have already been weakened and the EPA has separately moved to repeal the scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger health.

The transmittal is also one front in a wider campaign. In March, the Transportation Department sued the Air Resources Board over the state's zero-emission and tailpipe rules; Congress has stopped collecting penalties for missed fuel-economy targets, saving automakers hundreds of millions. The waivers are the next lever, and now they sit with a Congress that has already shown it will pull them.

California has lost this fight before and answered with a lawsuit and an executive order; the legal question of whether a waiver is a "rule" is heading back toward the courts regardless of how any disapproval vote goes. The deadline pressure now belongs to Capitol Hill, where the clock on a CRA resolution starts ticking the moment the paperwork lands — and on Friday, it landed.