Sponsors (9)
The bill forces agencies to prune and regularly justify regulations—potentially lowering compliance costs and improving transparency—but increases administrative burdens, creates regulatory uncertainty and fragmentation, risks loss of public protections if extensions lapse, and limits judicial remedies.
Businesses, utilities, and federal agencies get clearer, narrower definitions of which rules are covered by the Act, reducing compliance uncertainty and making agency rule-review processes more predictable.
Businesses and individuals may face lower compliance costs over time because the Act requires agencies to periodically review rules and remove outdated or overly burdensome regulations.
Taxpayers and regulated parties gain greater transparency and predictability because rules that are not timely extended expire automatically, forcing agencies to affirmatively justify regulations or let them lapse.
Workers, consumers, and the public risk losing health, safety, and consumer protections if agencies fail to timely justify or extend rules and those rules lapse automatically.
Individuals and organizations cannot sue the U.S. or its officers to enforce new rights under the Act, and the Act may limit judicial review, reducing legal remedies and accountability for agency actions.
Frequent expirations and short extension windows create regulatory uncertainty that raises compliance costs and complicates long-term planning for businesses and other regulated parties.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Creates automatic sunsets and a required extension process for specified energy and resource regulations, forcing affirmative agency action to keep rules in effect.
Imposes a zero-based expiration system for certain energy and natural-resource regulations: existing covered regulations must be amended quickly so they expire one year after amendment, and new covered regulations automatically expire within five years unless the agency head finds them net deregulatory. Agencies can extend expiration dates in up to five-year increments only after a public comment process and a findings-based determination, except that amendments deemed net-deregulatory may be extended without the comment steps. If a covered regulation expires without a timely extension, it ceases to have effect and must be removed from the Code of Federal Regulations. The law applies to rules from specified parts of the Department of Energy, certain Department of the Interior bureaus, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, preserves existing statutory authority of agencies, and includes a severability clause and a statement that the Act creates no private enforceable rights against the United States.
Introduced February 17, 2026 by Craig A. Goldman · Last progress February 17, 2026