President Joe Biden may be projecting confidence that he will be reelected in November, but his administration is hedging its bets against the possibility that former President Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office alongside Republican majorities in Congress.

According to the Federal Register, the Biden administration has finalized more than 300 regulations in the month of April. These regulations have been in the works for months and even years but are only just now being put into effect. But the reason for the rapid pace these regulations have been finalized is a 1996 law that is generally ineffective, except in the first few months after the White House changes hands.

The law in question is the Congressional Review Act, which was passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. The statute affords Congress a 60-day window in which it can pass a resolution that “disapproves” of an executive branch agency regulation through an expedited process. But because the disapproval resolution still requires a presidential signature, the vast majority of CRA bills that pass both chambers of Congress are promptly vetoed by the president. In fact, before 2017, the only president to sign a CRA resolution was George W. Bush, who signed only one: a repeal of a Department of Labor rule shortly after taking office in 2001.

But that all changed in 2017. That year, Trump took office with Republican majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, giving the GOP unified control of the executive and legislative branches for the first time since 2006.

With its new power, the unified Republican government went to work quickly repealing 16 regulations that were enacted by the Obama administration during its last few months in office. The nullified regulations included a pair of environmental rules from the Department of Interior, a Department of Education rule on teacher preparation, a Department of Labor rule on workplace injury reporting requirements, and a Federal Communications Commission rule that related to consumer privacy.

The push to repeal the regulations was so successful in undoing Obama-era rules that in May of that year, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation alongside then-Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) to repeal the Congressional Review Act. But four years later, it was the Democrats’ turn, as Biden took office in 2021 with Democratic majorities and signed three CRA resolutions that nullified regulations enacted in the last months of the Trump administration.

With Election Day six months away and the presidential inauguration eight months away, the prospect of successful CRA resolutions is once again on the table. Keenly aware of this, the Biden administration is feverishly working to finalize its most onerous and controversial rules before the end of May so that only the current Congress can review its most unpopular regulations.

Any regulations that are finalized after that could be repealed by the next Congress because of how the Congressional Review Act counts the 60-day period a regulation is subject to the act. Only days that Congress is in session count for the total, and if there are fewer than 60 days left in the current Congress, the days reset when the new Congress is sworn in after an election. With roughly 12 legislative days per month and two entire months off between now and December, any regulation that is not finalized between now and May 22, assuming Congress does not add legislative days to its calendar, could be quickly repealed early next year.

The number of rules that the administration is implementing right now is in line with previous years, but the policies that are contained within them are the administration’s most controversial and least popular initiatives. The rush to finalize them is an expressed attempt to ward off the possibility that the people of the United States will elect new leaders in November. Without the threat of the Congressional Review Act, these regulations could take years to undo as the regulatory process is a costly and time-consuming initiative.

At the Department of Education, a rule redefining sex discrimination under Title IX has been years in the making and was finalized in April with the Congressional Review Act looming. The final rule on “Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance” was published in April and will take effect on Aug. 1 and is nothing short of the most radical revision of Title IX civil rights protections.

The rule redefines sex to include gender identity and sexual orientation. Any institution that receives federal funding will be required to allow a person to use any sex-separate facility or service that corresponds to his or her stated gender identity, rather than his or her biological sex. Effectively, a school will be required to allow a high school-aged boy who simply claims he is a girl to use the female locker room and changing facilities and even sports teams. The regulation also significantly rolls back due process protections for those accused of sexual harassment or abuse in school settings, effectively reinstating a kangaroo court system that was prevalent during the Obama administration and forced hundreds of students to sue their institutions after they were expelled on dubious grounds following a sexual harassment allegation.

The origin of this rule dates back to the early days of the Biden administration when Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona announced that he intended to initiate rulemaking on the subject after the Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had implemented their own rule that was finalized in 2020. Cardona and Biden’s Title IX regulation was unveiled in June 2022, but the department was inundated with hundreds of thousands of comments from the public that prolonged the finalization process for more than a year. If it were not for the pending Congressional Review Act deadline, the regulation could very well have been delayed even further.

A tidal wave of comments also delayed the finalization of “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities,” a Department of Health and Human Services regulation that will require all hospitals and doctors to provide sex-change surgeries and cross-sex hormones to any person who identifies as transgender and requests it. Failure to do so could result in litigation or a loss of access to federal funds, including Medicare and Medicaid.

This HHS rule was first proposed in August 2022, and the public comment period ended in October of the same year. The proposed rule elicited nearly 74,000 public comments, with many people concerned that the department would not provide adequate conscience protections for doctors or faith-based healthcare institutions such as Catholic hospitals. In late April, with the Congressional Review Act clock ticking, those fears were realized as the department finalized the rule.

Among the most expedited regulations came from the Office of Personnel Management, a little-known agency that can be best described as the federal government’s human resources department. In September 2023, this agency issued a new regulatory proposal titled “Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles” and opened up a 60-day public comment period that expired in November.

This innocuous-sounding regulatory proposal was actually drafted with the expressed goal of guarding career federal bureaucrats against the return of Trump, who, during his first term in office, had sought to reclassify thousands of federal workers as at-will employees who could be fired without cause by the executive branch. Trump administration officials have argued that the so-called Schedule F initiative is necessary to rein in unaccountable bureaucrats who hampered efforts to enact the president’s preferred policy.

While the Title IX and HHS rules took nearly two years to be finalized, the OPM regulation received more than 4,000 public comments during its proposal period and was quickly finalized by the agency in early April, a mere five months after the public comment period closed and well ahead of the Congressional Review Act’s estimated end of May deadline.

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Biden and the officials in his administration are only racing against the clock imposed by the Congressional Review Act because they fear that the electorate will vote them out of office. The president, who has billed himself as the defender and guardian of the democratic order, is expressly taking steps to protect his administration’s policies from the very democratic order he swears to uphold.

The Congressional Review Act was enacted by Congress to ensure that the representatives of the people had a say in the executive branch rulemaking process that effectively writes the policies enforcing laws that members of Congress themselves passed. And while there will certainly be regulations enacted after the end of May, Biden is ensuring that the most unpopular elements of his agenda are the ones most protected from democratic accountability and insulated behind the walls of the bureaucratic state.

Jeremiah Poff is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.