California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed yet another lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday, this time challenging the EPA’s decision to submit four of the state’s vehicle emissions waivers to Congress under the Congressional Review Act. The move marks the state’s 55th legal action against the current administration, a number that tells its own story about Sacramento’s priorities.
The dispute centers on whether the EPA can reclassify California’s emissions waivers, historically treated as adjudicatory orders, as federal rules subject to congressional override. If Congress can review and overturn those waivers, it could strip California of the special authority it has long wielded under the Clean Air Act to impose vehicle emissions standards stricter than federal requirements.
For California, that authority is the engine behind its aggressive push toward electric vehicle mandates. For the rest of the country, it has functioned as a backdoor regulatory regime that shapes what cars Americans can buy, whether they voted for it or not.
Earlier this month, the EPA submitted four California waivers covering vehicle emissions and lawn and garden equipment to Congress under the Congressional Review Act, Fox News Digital reported. The CRA allows lawmakers to overturn certain federal regulations with a simple majority vote in both chambers and a presidential signature, a tool Congress has used sparingly but effectively to roll back executive-branch overreach.
The EPA said in a press release that it was “committed to promoting consumer choice and ensuring affordable vehicles for all Americans, while following the best reading of the law.” The agency declined to comment on the litigation itself.
California’s lawsuit takes the opposite view. The filing argues that the EPA lacks the power to retroactively transform waiver decisions into rules that Congress can then discard.
“No agency has the power to wave a magic wand and transform an action that was finalized as an adjudicatory order into a rule, and certainly not without a public process in which the agency acknowledges and explains its change in position.”
That language from the lawsuit captures the legal core of the fight. California contends the waivers were never classified as regulations, and the EPA cannot simply relabel them to hand Congress a veto.
This is not the first time California has gone to court over the CRA and its emissions authority. Last year, President Trump and congressional Republicans used the Congressional Review Act to overturn California’s electric vehicle sales mandates and diesel engine rules. California challenged those actions in court as well.
The broader context makes the stakes clear. California’s waiver authority under the Clean Air Act has allowed the state to set emissions standards that other states then adopt. The result has been a patchwork regulatory system in which Sacramento, not Congress, not the EPA, effectively dictates vehicle standards for a large share of the national market. Critics have called it a “back-door federal EV mandate,” as Daniel Turner of Power the Future told Just The News, one “that working families didn’t want.”
That framing resonates with the numbers. EV sales in California have stalled at roughly 24 to 25 percent of new car sales for three years, well short of the 35 percent target required by the end of 2026 under the state’s own mandate, and a far cry from the 100 percent goal by 2035. Nationally, EVs made up only about 8 percent of new car sales in 2024.
The auto industry itself has largely welcomed the waiver’s repeal, a fact that undercuts Sacramento’s claim to be defending consumer interests. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a major industry group, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the current lawsuit.
Rob Bonta has turned his office into something closer to a political war room than a state law enforcement agency. The 55 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration represent a staggering volume of litigation, and a deliberate strategy to use the courts as a check on federal policy that California’s elected officials oppose.
California’s broader legal posture extends well beyond emissions. The state has fought federal efforts to audit its voter rolls, resisted DOJ pressure on election records, and clashed with Washington on immigration, spending, and regulatory authority.
Bonta has not been shy about the political dimension. In a separate case earlier this year involving Trump’s signing of resolutions that blocked California’s 2035 gas-powered car ban, Bonta announced a federal lawsuit before the signing ceremony had even concluded. Ten other Democratic-led states joined that suit.
“The federal government’s actions are not only unlawful; they’re irrational and wildly partisan. They come at the direct expense of the health and the well-being of our people.”
That quote, from AP News reporting on the earlier case, captures the tone Bonta has struck throughout. Governor Gavin Newsom was even more direct, calling Trump “a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.”
The rhetoric is heated. But the legal questions are real. The U.S. Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian both found that the Congressional Review Act cannot legally be used to block California’s standards, the AP reported. If that interpretation holds, it would represent a significant constraint on Congress’s ability to use the CRA as a tool against state-level environmental mandates.
The emissions waiver lawsuit is only one piece of a broader conflict. Seventeen states, led by Democratic attorneys general, have also filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s February directive to halt $5 billion in EV charger infrastructure funding allocated under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Newsmax reported. Of that total, $3.3 billion had already been distributed before the freeze.
Newsom called the funding halt “illegal” and warned it would “kill thousands of U.S. jobs, ceding them to China.” Bonta described the withheld funds as critical to “shape the future of transportation.”
The pattern is consistent. California and its allied states are using every available courtroom to preserve a regulatory and spending framework built during the Biden administration, a framework that assumed EV adoption would accelerate far faster than it has. When the market fails to cooperate, the fallback is litigation.
Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, have raised their own concerns about California governance. One federal prosecutor labeled the state a “fraudster’s paradise” and warned that state officials could face charges, a reminder that the legal pressure runs in both directions.
The current lawsuit raises questions that go beyond California’s emissions rules. If the EPA can submit state waivers to Congress under the CRA, it opens a pathway for elected lawmakers, rather than unelected bureaucrats or state attorneys general, to decide which environmental regulations survive. That is exactly what California fears, and exactly what proponents of the move believe the law allows.
The case also tests the limits of California’s unique position under the Clean Air Act. No other state enjoys the same waiver authority. The arrangement has allowed Sacramento to function as a shadow regulator for the national auto market, and other states have adopted California’s standards over the years, amplifying the effect far beyond the state’s borders.
Whether that arrangement survives may depend on courts that have become the primary battleground for federal-state disputes across the board. Federal judges have blocked Trump administration policy changes on everything from food assistance to immigration fees, and the administration has vowed to keep fighting.
California has filed 55 lawsuits and counting. The state’s attorneys seem to believe that if you can’t win at the ballot box or in the marketplace, you can always try to win in court.
At some point, voters in Sacramento and beyond may ask whether their attorney general is protecting their interests, or just running up the legal bill to preserve a regulatory empire that the people who actually buy cars never asked for.
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