Congress Just Voted To Break Public Lands

Republicans flirt with chaos as they move forward with plan to destroy non-partisan, multi-decade plans for land management

The first priority for House Republicans upon returning from their Epstein List-lengthened summer recess? It wasn’t to reign in the administration’s attempts to illegally deport at-risk children, or halt the illegal deployment of combat troops to Chicago. It was a vote to break the system of public land management as we know it, in an attempt to use the resulting mess as an excuse to privatize operations.

Let me make this as simple as possible.

TL;DR: For the first time ever, the Congressional Review Act is being used to invalidate Resource Management Plans. RMPs govern permitting on public lands, and are the product of broad scientific, legal, industrial, and community consensus that require decades of work from agencies like the Bureau of Land Management. The CRA is an incredibly powerful tool, which prevents the implementation of “substantially” similar regulations to replace the invalidated ones without Congressional approval. So, everything from existing oil and gas leases, to renewable energy rights of way, to ongoing wildlife conservation efforts—literally any activity on public land that requires permitting—could come to an abrupt halt, and there’d be no mechanism beyond drawn out legal battles to re-implement any of that, piece by piece. This will cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs. Frustrated in their failed attempt to sell-off public lands, Republican lawmakers responsible will likely hold up this mess as cause to privatize management of them.

What’s A Resource Management Plan? The Conservation Lands Foundation explains:

“Resource management plans are strategic processes of the Bureau of Land Management to guide the management of public lands and resources. They involve comprehensive planning that determines the best use of land and resources such as minerals, grazing, water, wildlife, recreation, and areas designated for conservation. The goal of an RMP is to balance various land uses while ensuring sustainable practices that protect the environment and meet public needs. This process includes stakeholder input, environmental assessments, and legal considerations, resulting in a plan that directs land management activities, typically over a period of 15-20 years.”

What’s The Congressional Review Act? The Wilderness Society says:

“The CRA is a blunt legislative tool that allows Congress to roll back administrative rules—and prevent similar future rules—within a certain period of an agency submitting that rule to Congress. Once a joint resolution is filed disapproving of a rule, the rule can be overturned by a simple majority vote. If a rule is rescinded through a CRA resolution, it triggers a clause that bars agencies from issuing a subsequent rule that is ‘substantially the same’ as the one overturned.”

What Just Happened: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted last night to “disprove” of three RMPs governing areas in Alaska, North Dakota, and Montana using the CRA. The measure will now go to the Senate (where I’m told the real fight will happen), and if it passes there, to the President for his signature.

Why Is This Such A Big Deal? You’ll find reporting in other outlets around some of the small picture impacts:

• The New York Times reports that the vote authorizes the construction of the Ambler Access Project, a 211-mile road through pristine Alaskan wildness that’s been the subject of intense fighting over its impacts on wildlife for years.

• E and E News reports, “The House voted Wednesday to strike down a trio of Biden-approved land use plans, arguing they were stifling oil drilling and coal mining.”

What they’re missing is that this is the first ever use of the CRA to invalidate RMPs. Signed into law by President Clinton in 1996, the CRA was only ever used once before the first Trump administration.

So yes, should this measure pass the Senate and be signed by the President, the Ambler Road will be authorized and some restrictions on extraction will be lifted. But the big picture is that the RMPs governing over 30 million acres of public land across three states will have been rendered invalid.

“Today’s votes set a dangerous precedent for the management of our public lands,” says Athan Manuel, director of the lands protection program at the Sierra Club. “RMPs are carefully crafted plans developed with robust input from local communities, Tribes, and local stakeholders—they’re examples of how our system should work. It’s concerning that House Republicans without expertise or local connections would inject themselves into this process, overrule the people most affected by the plans, and introduce chaos into the management of millions of acres of our most treasured public landscapes.”

Since this is the first time the CRA has been used like this, no one really knows what the ultimate outcome here will be. And that uncertainty will invariably lead to lawsuits. Since the activities covered by RMPs are so broad and far reaching—literally any permitted activity on the lands in question—those lawsuits will be numerous, and consequential. Look for those to take years to reach resolution, if they ever are can be resolved.

The other big issue here is the precedent this creates. Who is ultimately responsible for creating resource management plans on public lands? Is it still the agency responsible for managing those lands, or is it now Congress? How will permits be written in the future? Will each one need to be Congressionally approved?

“House members just effectively joined the administration’s efforts to dismantle and undermine federal agencies like the BLM by voting to undo decades’ worth of local planning,” says Justin Meuse, government relations director at The Wilderness Society. “Overturning land management plans in this unprecedented way could throw our public lands into chaos, threatening to expose thousands of permits, leases and rights of way to legal challenge.”

Why Are Republicans Doing This? A lot of that uncertainty is likely the point. By breaking everything from oil and gas permits for existing extraction operations, grazing permits for livestock currently turned loose on public land, and halting any existing construction, this will all create immense outcry across diverse groups of industries and individuals who operate on the impacted public lands.

And that chaos could go further. Again, this is the first time the CRA has been used to invalidate any RMPs, and its unclear if the precedent will expand to other RMPs governing permitting in other areas. In a best case scenario we again get immense uncertainty, in a worst case, every RMP written since 1996 (when CRA was signed into law), will be rendered invalid. The BLM alone permits operations netting the national economy $252.1 billion and one million jobs, annually. Nearly all of that could now be at risk.

And that level of chaos—again of the Republican’s own creation—opens the door to a sweeping fix. We already see efforts by the administration to privatize operations at the National Park Service. This could open the door to similar measures at the other land management agencies.

“This legally questionable use of the Congressional Review Act to kill resource management plans would be a gross expansion of congressional authority and could completely upend the management of public lands in the U.S,” states the Conservation Lands Foundation. “The tactic fits in perfectly with a concerted effort ongoing by the administration and legislators to destroy the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to manage public lands, so that privatizing or industrializing them are the only viable options.”

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