The 119th Congress has enacted 102 public laws so far — and for 23 of them the only legal effect is to repeal a federal regulation, through a statute that until recently was almost never used

Public Law 119-5 is a law with a single purpose: to strike down a federal rule. Signed on April 10, 2025, it creates no program, funds no agency, and defines no crime. Its entire operative effect is to void a single Internal Revenue Service regulation — the rule on how brokers report the gross proceeds of digital-asset sales — and, under the governing statute, to bar the IRS from issuing a substantially similar rule again without new authorization from Congress. It is one line of subtraction. And across this Congress's record, it is not unusual. We pulled every public law the 119th Congress has enacted. The population is the complete, contiguous run of Public Laws 119-1 through 119-102 — no gaps, no duplicates — as recorded by the Congress.gov API's enacted-law endpoint, retrieved August 24, 2026. They span from the Laken Riley Act (Public Law 119-1, January 29, 2025) to the most recent entry dated July 12, 2026. Of those 102 public laws, 23 — 22.5 percent, nearly one in four — are the same instrument: a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval. A disapproval resolution is a specific legislative object. Under Chapter 8 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code, Congress may pass a joint resolution striking a federal rule; once the President signs it, the rule has no force and the agency may not reissue one in "substantially the same form". It carries the full weight of law and a full public-law number — but what it does is delete. The 23 cluster hard by policy domain: 19 strike energy, environmental, or public-lands rules. The Bureau of Land Management is the single most-targeted agency, with seven disapprovals — six of them resource-management or leasing plans, from Miles City to the Coastal Plain oil-and-gas program. The Environmental Protection Agency is next with six, of which three are California Clean Air Act waivers (Advanced Clean Trucks, Advanced Clean Cars II, and the low-NOx heavy-truck standard). The Department of Energy accounts for four, all appliance or energy-conservation standards; the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Park Service add one each. Only three of the 23 hit financial regulators — two Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules and one Comptroller of the Currency bank-merger rule — and the IRS digital-asset rule is the 23rd. For most of its life this tool sat idle. Enacted in 1996, the Congressional Review Act overturned exactly one rule in its first two decades — a 2001 workplace-ergonomics standard — before the 115th Congress used it more than a dozen times in 2017 (published counts range from 14 to 16) and the 117th used it three times in 2021, per the Congressional Research Service and independent trackers ^mmodeled. The 22 disapprovals the 119th Congress enacted in calendar 2025 alone already exceed that 2017 wave — matching, independently, Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program tally of 22 for the year. One more followed in 2026, for 23 to date.

The following is analysis, not fact. "Laws enacted" is read almost everywhere as a measure of what a Congress built — the bigger the number, the busier the legislature. Read this Congress's complete public-law record and a quieter category comes into focus: nearly a quarter of the output is not construction but demolition. Twenty-three of the 102 laws exist to remove a regulation from the books, and each one carries a law number identical in form to an appropriations act or the annual defense authorization. Two things only the whole-record read surfaces. First, the concentration: this is not scattered housekeeping. Nineteen of the 23 disapprovals land on energy, environmental, and public-lands rules, and a single agency — the BLM — absorbs seven. A count that treats each disapproval as one generic "law" hides that the repeals point overwhelmingly at one slice of the regulatory state. Second, the tempo: an instrument used once in twenty years, then a dozen-plus times in a single 2017 window, now appears 23 times in one Congress. Whatever one thinks of the rules being struck, the mechanism has moved from exceptional to routine — visible only when the enacted resolutions are lined up against the statute's own history. The tally of "public laws" weights a program-building act and a one-sentence repeal equally; tie all 102 to their form and one reading survives the full set — a large, concentrated share of this Congress's lawmaking, by count, is the undoing of executive-branch rules through a tool that was, until recently, almost never used.

The strongest objection is that a Congressional Review Act disapproval is emphatically a law, and framing it as "not lawmaking" understates it. Repealing a rule — and locking the agency out of reissuing it — is a substantive policy act with real legal force; a reader could fairly say these 23 are among the most consequential things this Congress did, not a lesser category. We report them as what the statute calls them, resolutions of disapproval, and as subtraction rather than addition; we do not claim they are trivial. Second, the 22-of-23-in-2025 timing is not incidental, and it caps how far the finding generalizes. The CRA's lookback window lets a new Congress reach back at rules finalized late in the prior term, so disapprovals bunch at the start of a Congress that changes party control. This share is a snapshot of a Congress still in session through January 2027; as appropriations, authorizations, and standalone bills accumulate, the disapproval fraction will very likely fall. The 22.5 percent is a mid-term ratio, not a final one. Third, the historical comparison rests on external counts that vary — the 2017 wave is reported as anywhere from 14 to 16 depending on the source and cutoff — so we tag that context ^mmodeled and lean only on the direction (23 exceeds any prior single-Congress total on record), not a precise gap. Our own classification rests on statutory basis, not a single title string: 21 of the 23 carry the title "congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5," and two more — the disapprovals of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules, Public Laws 119-10 and 119-11 — reach the same result under a different title but the same Congressional Review Act authority. Each of the 102 laws was read against the Congress.gov record and matched on that basis, which also sets aside a look-alike: Public Law 119-78 is a disapproval resolution, but it nullified an act of the District of Columbia Council under the Home Rule Act, not a federal agency rule under the CRA, so it is not among the 23.

From the vantage of a single signing — the way a new law is usually met, one at a time — the 119th Congress reads as an ordinary mix: an immigration act here, a defense authorization there, a run of commemorative medals and a post-office naming. That reading is accurate law by law and misses the shape of the whole. Only the complete set of 102 shows that nearly one in four is the same deletion instrument, aimed mostly at one corner of the regulatory state, at a frequency the statute had not seen in its first twenty years combined.