"was recently passed" is a grammatically correct phrase and can be used in written English.
It is commonly used to indicate that something happened in the near past. Example: The new bill was recently passed by the parliament, causing a lot of controversy among citizens.
(Legislation allowing crowdfunding was recently passed).
(A similar law was recently passed in Alabama).
A proposal from a widower was recently passed along.
She was recently passed over for a permanent position, but she plans to reapply.
In the end, they did, and a new rule was recently passed.
And Connecticut, where a repeal bill was recently passed, is set to become the 17th state to abolish capital punishment.
I was recently passing through the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, where an advertised lecture on "Selection bias in dynamically measured super-massive black hole samples" got me humming the riff to Supermassive Black Hole.
(That may be true of lobbying that goes on for small amendments, but the overhaul reforms of Wall Street that were recently passed and many of which still must be enacted are on the radar of the White House, if they are not indeed driven by it).
While new laws against gender-based violence were recently passed, the criminal-justice system has been slow to respond, and young women this year turned a Facebook group on "beauty tips" into a twenty-five-thousand-member forum for sharing stories of abuse.
New privacy principles were recently passed into law which required all businesses earning more than $3m annually to disclose to customers how their information was being stored and used, however the new legislation stopped short of mandating compulsory data breach notifications for businesses who fall victim to security violations.
Yesterday, the mayor also vetoed two bills related to welfare that were recently passed by the City Council: one would create a government-subsidized employment program giving temporary jobs to 2,500 welfare recipients each year; the other would allow welfare recipients to file grievances if they encountered dangerous working conditions or other problems in their assigned jobs.
