On March 14, 2025, the Federal Register published a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which declares that “all efforts, conducted by any agency of the federal government, to control the status, entry, and exit of people, and the transfer of goods, services, data, technology, and other items across the borders of the United States, constitute a foreign affairs function of the United States under the Administrative Procedure Act.” 

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) is a law that governs the process for how federal agencies propose, issue, and rescind regulations. The APA requires that agencies provide public notice about regulations, and provides a method for the public to give the government input about draft regulations or other regulatory changes, and generally a period of 30 to 60 days to do so. Agencies are then required to consider those comments and respond to the public’s concerns in the final version of a regulation or action. When agencies take actions that do not adhere to APA requirements, individuals and organizations can sue to stop the action or regulation in question, based on procedural violations of the APA. However if a regulation impacts ” a military or foreign affairs function of the United States,” it qualifies for an exemption from the notice-and-comment requirements of the APA. 

The APA has been used by advocacy groups to sue in federal courts to stop regulations issued by both Republican and Democratic presidents. One of the major impacts of Rubio’s declaration—which applies a broad, blanket declaration of the APA foreign affairs exception to all agencies that take nearly any type of cross-border action—would be to prevent the government from taking input on regulations having to do with immigration and trade issues (among many others), and would close off one of the main avenues for challenging the legality of federal regulations.