How the National Emergencies Act of 1976 Works and Why Congress Rarely Ends One

On February 15, 2019, President Trump walked into the Rose Garden to explain why he was about to declare a national emergency on the southern border. The backdrop was a fight he had just lost. For months he had demanded billions of dollars for a border wall; Congress had refused, the government had endured the longest shutdown in its history, and the spending deal that finally ended it provided far less wall money than he wanted. So the president announced he would find the rest himself, by declaring an emergency that unlocked military construction funds and redirecting money Congress had appropriated for other purposes. In the same remarks he made an admission that his opponents would quote in court for years: he said he did not need to do it, but would rather do it faster. It was an odd thing to say about an emergency. It was also a fair description of how national emergencies in America had come to work.

In short: The National Emergencies Act of 1976 lets a president declare an emergency that switches on special powers scattered across federal law; the declaration lasts a year and is renewed by a notice almost nobody reads. Congress can end one, but since 1985 it must pass a joint resolution the president can veto, so terminating an emergency usually takes a two-thirds vote in both chambers. That is why dozens of emergencies stay in force for decades.

The emergencies nobody had ended

The story of the act starts in 1973, with a discovery that astonished the senators who made it. A special Senate committee, led by Frank Church of Idaho, a Democrat, and Charles Mathias of Maryland, a Republican, set out to catalogue the emergency powers available to the president. They found that the country was technically still living under four declared national emergencies. One was Franklin Roosevelt's banking emergency of 1933. Another was Harry Truman's declaration at the start of the Korean War in 1950. Two more came from Richard Nixon: a 1970 emergency over a postal strike and a 1971 emergency over the international currency crisis.

None of these had ever been formally ended. And because each declaration unlocked powers written into other laws, the president still had, on paper, an enormous toolkit. The committee identified hundreds of statutory provisions that granted special authority during a national emergency, touching everything from seizing property and controlling transportation to regulating private enterprise. Its report warned that the United States had in effect been governed by emergency rule for decades without most people knowing it.

The committee's bipartisan composition matters. The early 1970s were a moment when members of both parties, after Vietnam and in the shadow of Watergate, were trying to pull power back from the presidency. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the National Emergencies Act of 1976 all came out of that same impulse.

What the 1976 law says

President Gerald Ford signed the National Emergencies Act on September 14, 1976. It ended the old emergencies, after a transition period, and set rules for new ones. Its structure is straightforward.

1. Declaration. The president may declare a national emergency by proclamation. The act itself does not define "emergency" or set any test for when one exists. That choice was deliberate; Congress did not want to try to anticipate every crisis.
2. Specifying powers. When declaring an emergency, the president must say which statutory powers he intends to use. The emergency does not grant power by itself. It activates provisions in other laws that say they apply during a declared emergency.
3. Publication and reporting. The declaration is published in the Federal Register and sent to Congress, and the president must report to Congress on the money spent under it.
4. Expiration and renewal. An emergency ends automatically after one year unless the president publishes a notice continuing it. The renewal requires no justification and no vote.
5. Termination by Congress. Congress can end an emergency by passing a resolution. The act also says that each house shall meet every six months to consider whether to end an emergency.

That last instruction has been ignored almost completely. Congress does not routinely meet every six months to consider each active emergency, and courts have treated the requirement as something Congress may waive by inaction.

What a declaration actually switches on

The phrase "national emergency" sounds like it ought to unlock a single, defined set of powers. It does not. It is more like a master key for doors scattered throughout the federal code, each installed by a different Congress for a different purpose, many of them long forgotten.

Some of those doors lead to ordinary-sounding authority: the ability to waive certain procurement rules, extend enlistments, or suspend limits on the number of officers in the armed forces. Others are far more consequential. The provision the 2019 border emergency relied on, a section of the military construction laws, lets the secretary of defense redirect unspent construction money to projects that support the armed forces during a declared emergency requiring their use. The administration read that as permission to build border barriers with money Congress had given to schools on military bases and other projects. A provision of the Communications Act of 1934 lets a president, in a national emergency or threat of war, take control of or shut down certain communications facilities, language written in the age of the telegraph that legal scholars have flagged as alarmingly broad in the age of the internet.

Because the act requires a president to name the specific powers he is invoking, each declaration is narrower in practice than the full catalogue. But the catalogue is there for any president to draw from, and no court has ruled on what most of those provisions mean in a modern emergency. Researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice have spent years compiling the list, precisely because almost nobody in government had one.

The 1983 ruling that changed the math

As written in 1976, the act allowed Congress to terminate an emergency by concurrent resolution, a measure that passes both houses but does not go to the president for signature. That made ending an emergency relatively easy: simple majorities in the House and Senate could do it, and the president had no veto.

Then in 1983 the Supreme Court decided INS v. Chadha. The case involved an immigration provision that let one house of Congress overturn a decision by the executive branch. The Court struck it down, holding that Congress can make legally binding decisions only through the full legislative process, passage by both houses and presentment to the president. Chadha swept away legislative veto provisions across dozens of laws, and the emergency termination provision was understood to fall with them.

In 1985 Congress amended the National Emergencies Act to require a joint resolution instead. A joint resolution is a law; the president can veto it. That small change transformed the balance of power. To end an emergency the president wants to keep, Congress now needs either his signature, which he will not give, or two-thirds of both houses to override his veto.

The border wall fight as a test case

The 2019 border emergency showed exactly how the amended system works. Democrats, who had just taken control of the House, introduced a joint resolution to terminate the emergency. It passed the House. In the Senate, a dozen Republicans joined Democrats to pass it, a striking rebuke from the president's own party. Several of those Republicans said explicitly that they supported more border security but objected to a president using an emergency to spend money Congress had declined to provide.

Trump vetoed the resolution in March 2019, the first veto of his presidency. The House attempted to override and fell well short of two-thirds. Later that year Congress passed a second termination resolution; he vetoed that too, and again the override failed. Bipartisan majorities in both chambers had voted to end the emergency, twice, and it continued. Construction funded through it went ahead while lawsuits worked their way through the courts. On his first day in office in January 2021, President Biden ended the border emergency by proclamation.

That episode exposes the structural problem. The National Emergencies Act was designed to let Congress check a president's use of emergency powers. After 1985, the check works only when a president agrees to be checked or when his own party abandons him in large numbers. A majority of Congress opposing an emergency is not enough.

The one time Congress succeeded

There is, in fact, one modern example of Congress ending an emergency by joint resolution. In early 2023, a Republican House passed a resolution ending the national emergency declared for COVID-19 in 2020. The Senate passed it with bipartisan support. President Biden had planned to end the emergency a few weeks later anyway, and although his administration opposed the resolution, he signed it in April 2023 rather than veto it.

That exception proves the rule. Termination succeeded because the president chose not to fight. When a president does want to keep an emergency in place, the National Emergencies Act gives Congress a power it can rarely use.

Emergencies that never end

Because renewals are automatic and termination is so hard, emergencies accumulate. Dozens of declared national emergencies are in effect at any given time. Some date back to the late 1970s, including one involving Iran declared during the hostage crisis in 1979, which presidents of both parties have renewed every year since. Most of these are economic emergencies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets a president impose sanctions, block property and regulate transactions with foreign countries or persons. Many of them are uncontroversial. Sanctions programs on terrorist groups, drug cartels or hostile governments rest on emergencies that Congress broadly supports.

The trouble is less with any one declaration than with the pattern. When emergency status becomes permanent, it stops meaning emergency. And because the act does not define the term, nothing in the statute itself stops a president from declaring one in a situation that most people would not see as a crisis at all.

In 2025, President Trump declared a series of new national emergencies, including at the southern border, over energy supplies, and over trade, using the trade emergencies as the legal basis for sweeping tariffs. The Senate voted in April 2025 to end the emergency underlying tariffs on Canada, with several Republicans joining Democrats, but the House leadership used procedural rules to block similar votes there, and any resolution would have faced a veto. The courts, not Congress, became the main venue for challenging the tariffs.

The strongest case for flexible emergency powers

Defenders of the current system make a serious argument. Real emergencies do happen, and they move faster than Congress can. A pandemic, a financial panic, a cyberattack or a terrorist strike may require immediate action, and a president who has to wait for legislation could be paralyzed. That is why Congress wrote emergency provisions into so many laws in the first place. Defining "emergency" precisely in advance might leave the country unable to respond to the crisis no one predicted. And presidents of both parties have relied on emergency authorities for sanctions and national security programs that enjoy wide support.

All of that is true. But it argues for fast action at the start of a crisis, not for indefinite emergencies with no meaningful check. The reform proposals that have attracted support from both parties keep the president's ability to act quickly while restoring Congress's role over time. The most discussed version would let an emergency declaration last only a short period, often proposed as 30 days, unless Congress votes affirmatively to extend it. Under that model, a president would still have the power to respond instantly, but continuing an emergency would require a majority of Congress to agree, rather than requiring a supermajority to stop it. Senators including Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, have introduced versions of this idea, and progressive legal scholars have endorsed similar changes.

Here is where I come down. Emergency reform is one of the few structural issues where conservatives worried about executive power and progressives worried about executive power genuinely agree. Democrats who want to limit a Republican president's emergencies should be willing to support rules that will also bind future Democratic presidents. That is precisely what makes the rules durable, and it is the bargain the Church-Mathias committee struck half a century ago.

What you can do

The National Emergencies Act shows how a sensible law can be hollowed out by one court ruling and decades of inattention. Repairing it is a job for Congress, and Congress responds to constituents who show up.

• Ask your members of Congress whether they back emergency reform. Find your representative and senators, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes, and ask whether they will support requiring congressional approval to extend an emergency beyond a short initial period.
• Look for the bipartisan votes. Bills both parties passed together are tracked on the site; emergency reform is a candidate for exactly that kind of coalition.
• Follow the court cases that test emergency powers. The Court watch page carries the Supreme Court's opinions this term with its own summaries, along with its emergency docket.
• Read more about checks and balances. Our topic page on democracy and the rule of law gathers reporting on emergency powers, executive authority and the courts.

Frank Church and Charles Mathias did something unusual: two senators from different parties looked at power their own branch had given away and decided to take some of it back. The emergencies they found had lasted decades because nobody had checked. The remedy then, as now, starts with someone deciding to look.