House Republicans’ Use of Little-Known Law to Strike Down Public Land Plans Could Be Pandora’s Box Moment

When the U.S. House of Representatives invoked a little-known law to roll back three plans for managing public lands, it was an unprecedented move. 

The resource management plans by the Bureau of Land Management for Montana, Alaska and North Dakota collectively guide decisions on over 166 million acres, shaping oil and gas leasing, renewable energy, grazing and habitat protections.

The House’s Congressional Review Act resolutions, passed last week, still require Senate approval. But the act was intended to be used to overturn recently enacted federal regulations. Undoing resource management plans would chart new territory that legal experts, land managers and conservationists warn could fundamentally reshape how America’s public lands are managed.

It would give Congress the final word on documents that have historically been crafted through years of federally mandated public comment, tribal and stakeholder consultation, on-the-ground land manager input and environmental review intended to balance multiple uses, such as grazing, energy development, recreation and conservation.

“It just creates another pendulum that swings back and forth depending on the political environment, and that is no way to run federal public lands,” said Susan Jane Brown, staff attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center. Brown joined 31 other legal experts in signing an open letter opposing the resolutions. “Political timescales are not the ones on which nature operates,” she said.

Reversing Past Plans Restrains Others in the Future 

A major concern is the CRA’s “substantially similar” clause, which prohibits agencies from issuing new rules that are too much like those Congress has rejected using the act. The legal scholars who signed the open letter note that the term is so poorly defined that it could paralyze agencies: an RMP could be struck down without explanation, and the Bureau of Land Management might then be unable to draft a new plan for fear it would be deemed substantially similar to the one that was rescinded. 

Proponents, including Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, say this process will be more balanced when it comes to weighing resource extraction with other uses. Murkowski is co-sponsoring the resolution in the Senate, introduced by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).

“Last year’s final plan included too many administrative restrictions and infringements while failing to lift Public Land Orders,” Murkowski’s office told Inside Climate News in a statement, referring to the Central Yukon Resource Management Plan. That plan doesn’t lift longstanding federal orders that bar certain activities in the area, such as new mining claims or development. “Reopening this plan will allow BLM to go back, do this right, and select a more balanced option.”

But such uses of the CRA also creates a potential black box, where Congress isn’t required to explain the basis for its disapproval, critics warn. This type of action would also nullify years of public engagement, tribal consultation, local comment and research, which can be tossed out with a floor vote that is not subject to the filibuster, legal experts and environmental watchdogs caution. 

RMPs provide stable “rules of the road” for federal land managers, and without them, management decisions can swing on short-term politics rather than long-term ecological and economic realities. 

“When people come together for over a decade to create plans that help wildlife thrive for future generations, and then Congress comes in and wipes those plans off the map in one fell swoop, the result is chaos where everyone suffers,” said Cooper Freeman, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity. 

Alaska Native tribes spent more than a decade shaping the Central Yukon plan, he noted, which protected core habitat for caribou, Dall sheep and spawning salmon but could be lost in a single vote, undercutting tribal sovereignty and erasing Indigenous approaches to land stewardship. 

RMPs are often the only tool agencies have to limit development that would compromise ecological integrity. According to Freeman, they are also one of the only ways local communities can say no to projects that would harm landscapes and wildlife. 

“If we’re no longer allowed to say no, then we’re no longer allowed to do things like protect old-growth forests that store carbon,” he said. “We would have to say yes to unbridled fossil fuel development.”

Rollbacks Introduce Uncertainty for Industry, Too

Brown, with the Western Environmental Law Center, said the timing isn’t a coincidence, nor are the states involved. Montana, Alaska and North Dakota are major fossil fuel producers. While the RMPs that would be rolled back didn’t prohibit energy production, they did place limits on it. 

Because RMPs weren’t formally sent to Congress until the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled they qualified as “rules,” plans finalized last year still fell within the CRA review period. Brown argues that created “the perfect storm: timing, subject matter and a Congress that’s highly motivated to expand resource extraction.”

But RMPs don’t just benefit species and resources that need protection. They also serve industries that depend on the lands the plans manage. Ranchers, for instance, need the type of long-term planning promised by RMPs.

RMPs are also the frameworks that designate where utility-scale wind, solar and geothermal energy can be sited. When they’re subject to rescission through the CRA, Congress introduces a level of uncertainty into clean-energy projects that are planned and already underway. 

Clean energy companies are even less likely to invest when the ground rules for development can change in a partisan floor vote, further undercutting an industry already destabilized by the Trump administration’s decision to refuse permits for wind or solar projects.

“This action via the Congressional Review Act to kind of throw public lands management into chaos and uncertainty is really bad for everybody’s bottom line—oil and gas companies, grazers, timber harvesters but also the renewable energy industry in general,” said Justin Meuse, government relations director for climate and energy for The Wilderness Society. While the administration has voiced support for geothermal development on public lands, he noted that the CRA maneuver could undermine those projects, too. “Anything that creates uncertainty for industry actors, regardless of the industry, I think drives those industries away from public lands.”

Federal land holds vast clean-energy potential: roughly 44 million acres for utility-scale solar, 43 million acres for wind and 27 million acres for geothermal, much of which is under BLM management. RMPs are frameworks that determine which of those acres are open for renewable energy and which are off-limits, which could shift in Congress’ hands. 

The GAO has, in several opinions since 2017, classified land-use plans as “rules” subject to the CRA, but legal experts point to Supreme Court precedent holding that such plans are not binding regulations, setting up a clash over whether they should be treated as enforceable rules or broad planning blueprints. 

“This action via the Congressional Review Act to kind of throw public lands management into chaos and uncertainty is really bad for everybody’s bottom line.”

— Justin Meuse, The Wilderness Society

If the GAO’s latest interpretation stands, more than 100 RMPs finalized since 1996 that would now be considered rules subject to the CRA, could be thrown into question, along with the leases, drilling permits and rights-of-way issued under them. 

“It just kind of opens up any authorization on public lands currently to a mountain of litigation,” said Meuse. “It really could have incredibly broad implications for a number of different industries.”

Experts see this as a Pandora’s Box moment that, if the resolution makes it through the Senate, opens the door for public lands to be managed more by political whims. Future Congresses could toss out any plan, either extraction-heavy or conservation-focused, rather than landing on the balance of multiple uses baked into the process of creating an RMP. 

Having already cleared the House, the CRA resolutions overturning the three RMPs now move to the Senate, which has 60 session days to act under the CRA’s expedited procedures.

“We are supporting good-paying jobs, protecting critical state revenue, and ensuring we are putting our nation back on the path to energy dominance,” said U.S. Rep Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, in a statement after the resolution passed. 

The cost, critics say, is stability for those jobs, revenue streams and energy developments, as well as for resources like water and timber, wildlife habitat and recreational opportunities.

“That is a death knell for rational planning,” said Brown. “And no way to steward the nation’s public lands.”