The Deregulation Supercut

• Key findings
• 16 Congressional Review Act disapprovals were enacted in 2025 — a filibuster-proof rollback of end-of-term agency rules.
• 15 of 16 have at least one model-flagged public-company winner. The one without nullified an off-road-vehicle restriction in Glen Canyon.
• The winners repeat: ExxonMobil is flagged across 4 resolutions, Chevron across 3, and Peabody, Arch, Whirlpool, ITW, PACCAR, Cummins and Ford across 2 each.
• The executive branch held many of them. The President's OGE disclosure lists positions in Exxon, Chevron, Caterpillar, Whirlpool, Coinbase and MicroStrategy, among the flagged names.
• The finding is the pattern, not a timing claim: deregulation in 2025 mapped cleanly onto a list of beneficiaries the people enacting it frequently owned.

1. Introduction: the filibuster-proof eraser

The Congressional Review Act is a procedural shortcut. Passed in 1996 and rarely used for two decades, it lets Congress overturn a recently issued federal regulation with a joint resolution of disapproval that needs only a simple majority in each chamber — it cannot be filibustered — and the President's signature. Once a rule is disapproved, the agency may not reissue anything “substantially the same” without new authority from Congress. It is, in effect, a one-way eraser for the prior administration's late-term rulemaking.

In 2025, with unified control of Congress and the White House, that eraser was used heavily and fast: 16 disapprovals enacted across the year, from a March repeal of an EPA methane charge to a December batch of public-lands leasing rollbacks. Each resolution is short and technical — it names a rule by its Federal Register citation and nullifies it. What it does not say, but what is rarely hard to work out, is who profits. This paper works it out for all 16, using the same bill-analysis model that runs across the platform, and then asks a second question the resolutions also don't mention: did the people enacting and signing them own the winners?

2. Data and methodology

We take every CRA resolution of disapproval (House Joint Resolutions of the form “providing for congressional disapproval … of the rule submitted by …”) that reached ENACTED status in the 119th Congress with a 2025 enactment date — 16 resolutions. For each, GovGreed's bill-analysis model (a structured large-language-model pass over the full resolution text plus the underlying rule, model version grok-4.1-agentic-v5.5) produces a list of winner tickers and loser tickers with a per-ticker rationale and a confidence score. We then cross-reference each flagged ticker against (a) the President's and Cabinet's public OGE financial disclosures and (b) congressional STOCK Act trades. All figures were re-derived live on June 30, 2026.

Three cautions frame everything below. First, winners and losers are model-judged: they estimate which companies a rule's removal helps, not whether any stock will rise. We say “positioned to benefit” and “the model flags,” never “will go up.” Second, the holdings are public record — OGE filings and STOCK Act reports — and reporting an overlap is not alleging a corrupt trade. Third, the strength of this paper is the aggregate, not any single line: one rule with a plausible winner is ordinary; sixteen in a row, fifteen with a winner, many held by the signer, is a pattern.

3. The supercut

Here is the full year, in order. Each row is a rule that no longer exists, the agency that wrote it, and the public companies the model flags as positioned to benefit from its removal. Read top to bottom, it is less a legislative calendar than a watchlist.

All 16 CRA disapprovals enacted in the 119th Congress with a 2025 enactment date. Winners are model-flagged (grok-4.1-agentic-v5.5) estimates of beneficiaries, not price predictions; ↓ marks a flagged loser. Verified June 30, 2026. Look up any bill on the legislation tracker.

4. The names that keep coming back

The single most telling fact in Table 1 is repetition. If deregulation were scattered across the economy at random, the winner column would be a long list of one-off tickers. Instead a handful of companies appear again and again, because the rollbacks concentrated in the industries those companies dominate. ExxonMobil is flagged across four separate resolutions — the methane charge and three public-lands oil-and-gas rules — and Chevron across three. Coal's two leasing rollbacks both name Peabody Energy and Arch Resources. The appliance cluster repeats Whirlpool and Illinois Tool Works; the vehicle cluster repeats PACCAR, Cummins and Ford.

Repetition matters because it converts a series of individual judgment calls into a structural claim. You do not have to trust the model on any single ticker to see that the year's deregulation was overwhelmingly an energy and heavy-industry event — and that a short list of incumbents was the predictable beneficiary of almost all of it.

5. Four rules, four mechanisms

The clusters are worth seeing up close, because each shows a different way a regulation maps to a balance sheet.

5.1  Crypto — HJRES.25

The first big one. The IRS had issued a rule requiring “brokers,” including decentralized-finance platforms, to report customers' gross proceeds from digital-asset sales. The April disapproval erased it. The model's flagged winners are COIN (Coinbase, which avoids a reporting and compliance burden on its core business) and MSTR (MicroStrategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder). Both, per public OGE disclosures, are names the President's filing lists. This rollback also forms the spine of GovGreed's separate crypto coverage — the same committee that wrote the rules had members trading the sector.

5.2  Vehicles — HJRES.87 / 88 / 89

Three June resolutions revoked the EPA waivers that let California set vehicle-emissions standards stricter than the federal floor — the Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks, and Omnibus Low-NOx programs. The model flags legacy and diesel manufacturers as the beneficiaries (GM, F, PCAR, CMI, CAT) and the single clean loser as TSLA — the company whose entire model assumed those mandates would tighten, not vanish. This is the rare case where the rule has a named loser as well as winners.

5.3  Energy & public lands — HJRES.35, 104–131

The largest cluster by count. The March methane-charge repeal plus the December batch of Bureau of Land Management rollbacks (coal leasing in Montana and Wyoming; oil-and-gas access in North Dakota and Alaska) all point at the same incumbents: XOM, CVX, COP on the oil-and-gas side and BTU, ARCH on coal. Several were sponsored by members from the very states whose leasing the rules govern — Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana.

5.4  Appliances — HJRES.20, 24, 42, 75

The quietest cluster, and in some ways the most revealing. Four resolutions struck Department of Energy efficiency standards for water heaters, commercial refrigeration, and home appliances. The flagged winners are the manufacturers that would otherwise have borne the certification and redesign cost — WHR, ITW, CARR, LII. No one writes a viral post about a dishwasher-efficiency standard; that is precisely why the pattern is easiest to see here, stripped of any culture-war noise. The rule had a cost; the cost fell on named companies; the rule is gone.

6. Who held the winners

The resolutions were enacted by Congress and signed by the President. Both, as a matter of public record, held positions in the companies the model flags. On the executive side, the President's OGE disclosure — the subject of our companion paper The President's Checkbook — lists holdings in ExxonMobil, Chevron, Caterpillar, Whirlpool, Coinbase and MicroStrategy, among other flagged names, in brackets ranging from under $1,000 to six figures. On the congressional side, the trade record shows bipartisan buying around these sectors: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) appears among the buyers the model cites on the vehicle resolutions, and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) among the energy buyers.

We deliberately do not attach a timing claim to any individual trade here. The disclosure brackets are wide, many holdings predate the resolutions, and managed accounts are common. What the overlap establishes is weaker than “they traded on it” and stronger than coincidence: the policy and the portfolio were drawn from the same short list.

7. Discussion

The deregulation supercut reframes a debate that usually stalls. Arguments about congressional and executive-branch trading tend to collapse into an unwinnable forensic question — can you prove this specific trade used this specific secret? — which is nearly impossible from public data and easy to deny. The CRA record sidesteps it. Nothing here is secret. The rules are public, the votes are public, the winners follow from the rules, and the holdings are disclosed. The finding is not hidden corruption; it is open alignment: a year of policy that, read as a portfolio, would have been a coherent energy-and-industrials long book with a single short in Tesla.

That alignment may be entirely lawful. The CRA is a legitimate tool; deregulation is a defensible policy choice; owning index-like baskets of large American companies is ordinary. But “lawful” and “aligned” are not in tension — they are the whole problem the reform debate is about. When the people who erase a rule are frequently the people who profit from its erasure, the conflict does not require a hidden act to matter. It is visible in the public record, which is the only place this paper looks.

8. Limitations and caveats

• Winners are model-judged. Each ticker is an LLM estimate of which company benefits when a rule is removed, with a confidence score — not a forecast that the stock rises. Confidence varies (some appliance names are low-confidence, “from general knowledge”); we present the aggregate pattern, not a buy list.
• Holdings are public and often pre-existing. OGE and STOCK Act disclosures use wide value brackets, many positions predate the 2025 resolutions, and accounts are frequently manager-directed. Overlap is not a timing claim.
• No individual is accused. Naming a member or the President as a holder of a flagged company is reporting a disclosure, not alleging an improper trade.
• Scope is the enacted set. We analyze the 16 CRA disapprovals that reached enacted status with a 2025 date; CRA resolutions that failed or that addressed non-economic rules (e.g., the Glen Canyon ORV rule, or D.C.-governance disapprovals) are excluded or carry no winner.
• The executive-holdings facts derive from the same OGE disclosures analyzed in The President's Checkbook; bracket sizes and counts are reproduced there.

9. Conclusion

Sixteen times in 2025, Congress reached for the same filibuster-proof tool and erased a federal rule. Fifteen of those sixteen times, the model can name a public company that was better off the moment the rule disappeared — and more often than not, the disclosure forms of the people who voted and signed listed that company too. No leak was required to find this; the rules name themselves, the winners follow from the rules, and the holdings are filed by law. The deregulation supercut is just 2025's legislative record, re-sorted by who got paid.

Frequently asked

References & data sources

1. Resolution text & status — Congress.gov, 119th Congress House Joint Resolutions, as tracked in GovGreed's legislation database.
2. Winner/loser flags — GovGreed bill-analysis model (grok-4.1-agentic-v5.5), bill_llm_analysis; per-bill output on each bill page.
3. Executive-branch holdings — OGE Form 278 disclosures; analyzed in The President's Checkbook.
4. Congressional trades — STOCK Act Periodic Transaction Reports, in GovGreed's Congress database.
5. Methodology — GovGreed Research: sources & methods.
6. Companion papers — Who the U.S. Government Actually Pays · Government as Venture Capitalist.
7. Image credit (public domain): The United States Capitol — public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Keep pulling the thread

Not financial advice. All data from public federal disclosures.