This Act permanently codifies Executive Order 14292, establishing its requirements for biological research safety and security as federal law.
Tim Burchett
Representative
TN-2
The Executive Order 14292 Act of 2025 permanently codifies Executive Order 14292 into federal law. This action transforms the existing presidential order regarding the safety and security of biological research into a permanent statutory requirement. The bill ensures the established regulations for biological research maintain the full force and effect of law.
Executive Order 14292 Act Locks in Biological Research Safety Rules, Making Them Permanent Law
The Executive Order 14292 Act of 2025 is one of those bills that sounds like bureaucratic housekeeping, but it actually has a big impact on how policy gets made—and how long it sticks around. Simply put, this legislation takes the rules and requirements established in an existing presidential directive, Executive Order (EO) 14292, and converts them into permanent federal law (SEC. 2).
Turning Guidelines into Law: What Changes?
Executive Order 14292 deals with making biological research safer and more secure. When an EO is issued, it’s basically an instruction from the President to the executive branch. It’s powerful, but it’s also temporary; a future president can easily overturn or modify it. By codifying this specific order into law, Congress is giving it the full weight of a statute. This means the safety and security standards for biological research—whatever they are—are now permanent requirements that can only be changed by Congress passing a new law, not by a stroke of a presidential pen.
The Stability vs. Flexibility Trade-Off
For the researchers and labs dealing with biological materials, this shift brings both stability and potential headaches. On the one hand, if you’re running a lab, you now have certainty: the safety rules you follow aren't going to change every four or eight years. This is a huge benefit for long-term planning and compliance, especially when dealing with complex, high-risk research. The public also benefits from the assurance that these safety standards are locked in permanently.
On the other hand, permanence means less flexibility. If the technology or best practices in biological research evolve rapidly—which they often do—it becomes much harder to update the regulations. Instead of a federal agency or the President being able to quickly adjust the rules to match new scientific realities, they now have to wait for the often slow-moving legislative process on Capitol Hill. For those who found the original EO 14292 standards to be overly burdensome or outdated, this bill locks those standards in place, making relief much harder to achieve.