California Dictates What Cars You Can Buy. Here’s What Congress Can Do About It.

No state should get to decide what type of car or lawn mower Americans across the country can buy. Yet that is the result of an arrangement under the Clean Air Act that allows California to seek federal waivers to impose more stringent vehicle-emissions standards than those adopted by the federal government.  

Congress now has an opportunity to challenge four EPA waivers that have expanded California’s regulatory overreach. The resolutions address the 2009 waiver allowing California to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from motor vehicles, the Advanced Clean Cars I (ACC I) waiver, the Biden administration’s 2022 reinstatement of that waiver, and California’s Small Off-Road Engine authorization. 

The 2009 waiver established the foundation for California’s greenhouse-gas regulations for new vehicles, but California wanted to go further. In 2013, the EPA granted California another waiver to enforce its ACC I program. ACC I combined greenhouse-gas limits, low-emission vehicle requirements, and escalating zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) requirements covering model years through 2025. By model year 2025, its ZEV component was designed to push qualifying vehicles to more than 15% of new sales despite negligible benefits to the climate. 

California’s Small Off-Road Engine (SORE) rules cover new spark-ignition engines of 25 horsepower or less used in equipment such as lawn mowers, chainsaws, and power washers. The rules apply to manufacturers, sellers, retailers, and distributors of new equipment sold in California. Unlike California’s motor-vehicle standards, the SORE rules cannot be adopted by other states. But they still use federal approval to let one state direct the market for widely used equipment and pressure manufacturers to redesign what they offer. 

Although these four EPA actions apply to different products and regulatory periods, they follow the same basic playbook. Government regulations steer markets toward regulators’ preferred technologies rather than allowing customers to decide which products best meet their needs. 

California alone accounts for approximately 11% of the American light-vehicle market, but the reach of its vehicle policies does not end at the state line. Once the EPA grants California a motor-vehicle waiver, Section 177 of the Clean Air Act allows other states to adopt the same standards. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted some subset of California’s vehicle standards, extending California’s regulatory influence across more than a third of the national automobile market. 

Manufacturers operate across national supply chains. When California and allied states impose a common vehicle regime, or when California’s market size makes separate product lines impractical, manufacturers must adjust broader production decisions. That gives California officials influence over products offered to consumers who never voted for them. 

Following that agenda affects affordability. A free market allows electric, hybrid, gasoline, and other vehicle technologies to compete on their merits. It also allows consumers to choose among gasoline-powered and electric outdoor equipment based on cost, performance, range, reliability, and intended use. Regulatory quotas, emissions limits, and credit systems require manufacturers to make production and pricing decisions around compliance rather than based on what customers actually want. 

Consumers who want an electric vehicle, battery-powered lawn mower, or other electric product should be free to purchase one. Families, farmers, and small businesses should also be free to choose affordable conventional products when those options better serve their needs. 

States should be free to make many of their own policy choices. But one state should not receive special federal permission to reshape national markets and export the consequences to families elsewhere. 

Federalism protects California’s authority to govern within its own borders, but it also protects Idaho and every other state from having California’s policies imposed beyond those borders. If states want to create a coordinated regulatory system with national consequences, they should negotiate an interstate compact and seek congressional approval. They should not use an EPA waiver to give one state’s regulators control over markets and consumer choices nationwide.

Fortunately, there is a solution. 

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) gives elected lawmakers a way to review and overturn federal agency actions. 

Under the law, Congress can pass a joint resolution of disapproval targeting an agency rule. If both chambers approve the resolution and the president signs it, the rule loses legal effect. The law also prevents an agency from issuing another rule in “substantially the same” form unless Congress subsequently authorizes it. Moreover, CRA determinations, findings, actions, or omissions are not subject to judicial review. Together, these provisions give a CRA resolution greater permanence than an agency’s rule reversal. 

The CRA is especially important when agencies use expansive claims of authority to make decisions with national economic consequences. It returns the decision to Congress, where lawmakers are publicly accountable to the people who bear the costs. 

Congress already demonstrated that it is able to stop California from imposing its preferred vehicle policies nationwide. In 2025, lawmakers used the CRA to overturn the EPA waiver for Advanced Clean Cars II, along with separate waivers covering the Advanced Clean Trucks program and California’s heavy-duty low-nitrogen-oxide regulations. President Trump signed those resolutions in June 2025. 

Those actions were an important victory for consumer choice, but they did not eliminate the earlier federal approvals that helped build California’s regulatory chokehold. The current package would continue that work through four separate resolutions. 

Congress should approve all four. Addressing only one or two would leave other parts of the same regulatory structure in place and give a future administration more room to restore California’s authority through overlapping approvals. Passing the full set would protect consumer choice across vehicles and outdoor equipment while making clear that national emissions policy should not be dictated by regulators in a single state. 

Americans do not need California’s regulators choosing their next car, lawn mower, chainsaw, or power washer. They need markets in which manufacturers compete to make products more affordable, reliable, and useful. 

Congress has already started dismantling California’s national regulatory agenda. Now it should finish the job. 

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