13. Environmental Protection Agency · Notable
Automatically withdraw proposed CAA rules not finalized within one year
Not started
Printed page 427 13. Environmental Protection Agency
“Institute automatic withdrawal of any proposed rule that is not finalized within the statutorily prescribed one-year period.”
What has happened
- Not started
There is no automatic withdrawal mechanism. EPA has withdrawn individual proposals when it chose to, but nothing in this window makes a Clean Air Act proposal lapse when the statutory one-year deadline for finalizing it passes, and several proposals from 2025 are still pending.
No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Negative search (2026-08-27): among the EPA rules, proposed rules and notices we keep and search, none in the window establishes an automatic withdrawal mechanism for stale Clean Air Act proposals; none of the White House presidential actions we keep and search requires one.
- EPA has in fact done the opposite in one case in the ask’s spirit — withdrawing a 2024 proposal on project emissions accounting in July 2025 (#1089) — but that was a discretionary withdrawal, not the standing rule the Quote asks for. Adjacent enough to note, not close enough to count.
- Unified Agenda, read 2026-09-01. We read EPA’s full Unified Agenda on reginfo.gov (214 entries across the active, long-term and completed stages), because the Federal Register prints only the entries that need a Regulatory Flexibility analysis, and the 2026-08-27 negative was taken from that abbreviated version. No entry anywhere in the 214 provides for automatic withdrawal of stale proposals. The negative reaches the agenda as well as the Federal Register.
- Action
- withdraw
- Object
- proposed Clean Air Act rules past the one-year deadline
- ID
- 1095