Four short resolutions dropped in the Senate on August 6, and none of them read like automotive policy. They read like paperwork. That’s the point.
Senators Cynthia Lummis, Eric Schmitt, Pete Ricketts and Jon Husted introduced four joint resolutions under the Congressional Review Act, each one disapproving a separate EPA waiver granted to California. The targets are California’s small off-road engine rule, the Advanced Clean Cars I program, the 2013 Advanced Clean Car Program waiver, and the 2009 waiver that first let the state regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emissions. Schmitt’s resolution text goes further than a repeal — it would also bar EPA from issuing substantially similar waivers in the future. senate
That last clause is the whole ballgame, and I’ll come back to it.
The 1966 loophole nobody planned
Here’s the part most people get backwards. California doesn’t have special authority because it’s big. It has special authority because it was early.
The Clean Air Act flatly preempts states from setting their own new-vehicle emission standards. But Section 209(b) requires the EPA Administrator to grant a preemption waiver to a state that had adopted its own standards before March 30, 1966 — and California is the only state that did. One date in one subsection, written to accommodate a smog problem in the Los Angeles basin, is the legal foundation for every ZEV mandate and every “California emissions” underhood label since. gao
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The Administrator has to approve the waiver unless he finds California’s determination arbitrary and capricious, that the state doesn’t need its own standards for compelling and extraordinary conditions, or that the standards aren’t consistent with federal law. That’s a narrow escape hatch, which is why the fight moved to Congress instead. gao
Why go after rules that already expired
Advanced Clean Cars I governed model years 2017 through 2025. Those cars are built. They’re on dealer lots and Facebook Marketplace. Disapproving that waiver in August 2026 accomplishes roughly nothing on its own.
Except the CRA isn’t a normal repeal. Once a rule is disapproved, the agency can’t reissue anything substantially the same without new legislation from Congress. So the practical effect isn’t unwinding 2019 Camrys — it’s welding the door shut. If these four pass, EPA arguably can’t grant California a greenhouse-gas or ZEV waiver again, ever, absent an act of Congress or a court saying the whole exercise was invalid.
This is the finish-the-job move after last year. Three CRA resolutions disapproving California’s Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks and Omnibus NOx waivers were signed into law in June 2025. EPA has kept feeding the pipeline since: four waiver rules covering cars, trucks and lawn equipment went to Congress in June 2026, followed by two more in July aimed at ocean-going vessels at berth and commercial harbor craft. epa
The scorekeeper already ruled — twice
Before any of this, Congress asked the Government Accountability Office whether these waivers are even eligible for CRA treatment. GAO said no. Its position is that a Clean Air Act preemption waiver is an adjudicatory order under the Administrative Procedure Act, not a rule — and that even if it somehow qualified as a rule, it would be a rule of particular applicability, which the CRA specifically excludes. GAO had reached the same conclusion in a 2023 decision, and EPA itself had cited that decision in its own waiver notices before reversing position. gao
The Senate proceeded anyway in 2025. California sued again on June 22, 2026, and the complaint argues EPA relabeled settled orders as rules years after the fact. The state notes EPA has granted it more than 75 preemption waivers under administrations of both parties. CA
There’s a second front too. In March, the Justice Department sued California arguing its CO2 and ZEV rules are preempted by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act — a statute with no waiver mechanism at all. If that theory wins, the Clean Air Act argument becomes academic.
What actually changes under your hood
Short version: less than the headlines suggest, and not in the direction you’d guess.
Automakers stopped building genuinely separate 49-state and California cars for most of the fleet a long time ago, because certifying to the tighter standard nationwide is cheaper than running two calibrations, two catalyst formulations and two parts catalogs. The engineering convergence already happened. Killing the waivers doesn’t retroactively de-certify anything, and it doesn’t hand OEMs a reason to reintroduce split hardware mid-cycle.
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Where it bites is warranty coverage, and this is the number worth knowing when you’re shopping used. CARB’s warranty table shows 3 years/50,000 miles on all emissions-related parts, 7 years/70,000 miles on high-cost emissions parts, and 15 years/150,000 miles for vehicles certified to the PZEV or TZEV standard. Federal coverage is 2 years/24,000 miles basic, with 8 years/80,000 miles on catalytic converters, the emissions control unit and the OBD computer. On a decade-old SULEV-badged sedan with a dead cat, that’s the difference between a warranty claim and a $1,400 invoice. Check the underhood label before you assume. ca
Your intake is still illegal in California
This is the misread I expect to see everywhere, so let’s kill it now.
The CARB Executive Order number stamped on your cold-air intake or tune does not exist because of a federal waiver. It exists because of California state law. Manufacturers of add-on and modified parts have to apply to CARB for an exemption from Vehicle Code Section 27156, granted only when the part is shown not to increase emissions. That exemption process lives in the state vehicle code and Title 13 of the California Code of Regulations. Congress disapproving an EPA waiver for new-vehicle standards leaves it untouched. CA
And federal anti-tampering law applies in all fifty states regardless. Nobody in Wyoming gets a legal defeat device out of this.
What to watch
The CRA clock runs on days of continuous session, not calendar days, so recess math matters more than the news cycle. Watch whether the D.C. district court reaches the “order versus rule” question before the Senate votes — if a court says these were never rules, every disapproval built on that theory becomes shaky, including last year’s. Watch the EPCA case in the Eastern District of California, which could moot the entire waiver argument from a different direction. And if you’re a buyer, watch nothing at all for now: nothing pending changes what’s on the lot this year.
The bigger question is whether the thing that made California’s rules matter — one enormous market that automakers found cheaper to satisfy than to work around — survives the removal of the legal scaffolding. Market gravity and statutory authority aren’t the same force, and only one of them can be repealed by a simple majority.