Congress Killed California's EV Mandate in an Unprecedented Vote. The Fight Isn't Over.

A genuinely aggressive state mandate met a real sales gap, and then Congress intervened

California's Advanced Clean Cars II program required 35% of new 2026 model year vehicle sales to be zero-emission, ramping up to 68% by 2030 and 100% by 2035, effectively phasing out new gas-powered car sales in the state entirely by that date. The program relied on a Clean Air Act waiver that let California set vehicle emissions standards stricter than federal rules, a decades-old arrangement other states could also voluntarily adopt (Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington all had).

The gap between mandate and reality was substantial heading into 2026: California New Car Dealers Association data showed zero-emission vehicles made up just 22% of actual 2024 sales, barely up from 21.7% in 2023, well short of the 35% requirement about to take effect. For automakers that don't exclusively sell EVs (unlike Tesla), the Alliance for Automotive Innovation reported the average was closer to just 13%.

Congress used an unprecedented legal maneuver to kill the mandate entirely

In May 2025, the Senate voted 51-44 to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to strike down the EPA waivers underlying California's mandate. This was a genuinely novel use of the CRA: the law, passed in 1996, lets Congress nullify federal agency rules with a simple majority vote, but California's EPA waivers had historically been treated as adjudicatory orders under the Clean Air Act, not "rules" in the CRA's technical sense, a distinction both the Government Accountability Office and the Senate's own parliamentarian agreed with before the vote. The Senate proceeded anyway, and President Trump signed the resolutions (H.J. Res. 87 and 88) on June 12, 2025, remarking he was "rescuing the U.S. auto industry" by ending the mandate.

Crucially, once a rule is struck down via the CRA, the underlying agency is legally barred from reissuing anything "substantially similar" without new congressional approval, meaning this wasn't simply a temporary pause but intended as a durable, longer-term block on similar future mandates.

California is fighting back in court, and the underlying legal question remains genuinely unresolved

• California's Attorney General has pursued litigation specifically arguing the CRA was misapplied, since the waivers were adjudicatory orders rather than rules, precisely the distinction the GAO and Senate parliamentarian had flagged before the vote
• There's real legal precedent for this kind of challenge succeeding: in 2017, a federal court overturned a separate CRA resolution that had nullified a methane emissions rule, specifically citing procedural errors in how the CRA had been applied
• If California's current lawsuits succeed, courts could reinstate the original waivers, effectively undoing the CRA resolution's practical impact regardless of the underlying congressional vote
• The Senate's same session also voted to block two related California rules: the Advanced Clean Trucks rule (requiring zero-emission targets for medium and heavy-duty trucks) and a separate nitrogen oxide emissions regulation targeting smog-forming truck and bus emissions

What California can still do, absent the mandate

With the binding sales mandate struck down, California officials indicated the state would likely rely on voluntary measures instead, financial incentives and rebates for both manufacturers and consumers, to continue encouraging EV adoption without a legally enforceable sales requirement. This represents a genuinely different policy tool than what existed before: incentive-based encouragement rather than a mandatory sales floor with fines for non-compliance, a substantially weaker mechanism for hitting the original 2035 target even if California continues pursuing the same underlying goal.

The core disagreement

Mandate opponents, including the Senate majority that voted to strike it down, generally argued a 35% zero-emission sales requirement was unrealistic given actual market adoption running at 22%, and that forcing automakers to comply risked higher vehicle prices and reduced consumer choice, framing the CRA vote as protecting the auto industry and consumers from an unachievable government target. Mandate supporters, including California Senator Alex Padilla, who spoke about growing up amid severe Los Angeles smog before the vote, generally argue the state's decades-long push for stricter vehicle emissions standards has been essential to improving genuinely dangerous air quality, and view the CRA's unprecedented application to a state waiver (rather than a federal rule) as a concerning legal overreach regardless of one's view on EV mandates specifically. Both sides broadly agree the underlying legal question, whether the CRA can properly apply to this type of Clean Air Act waiver at all, remains genuinely unresolved and could still be overturned in court.