Republicans in Congress are increasingly turning to a little-known law to overturn federal public lands decisions.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA), passed in 1996, allows Congress to roll back certain federal agency rules with a simple majority vote and the president’s signature.
Until recently, the law had rarely been used in the context of public lands. But that’s now changing.
Last year, President Trump signed several “resolutions of disapproval” under the CRA to invalidate Biden-era Bureau of Land Management resource management plans in Montana, Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota. Lawmakers are now targeting a mining ban near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and could attempt to unwind land-use plans for Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Supporters of the strategy say overturning the plans could open the door to increased energy production, mineral extraction or other resource development. They also argue the CRA provides a check on executive power.
“The way [federal agencies] have been using a lot of public land orders, land management plans, guidance documents, they really kind of overstepped what Congress should have given them the power for,” said Joe Luppino-Esposito, federal policy director at the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation. “No matter who's the president, Congress needs to be the ones doing the legislation.”
However, critics argue that the approach is unprecedented because Republicans are targeting agency actions that historically were not thought of as rules. They warn the strategy could put a growing range of public lands decisions at risk.
“The agencies are really the ones who are supposed to do the day-to-day management, because it's not supposed to be political,” said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities. “Politicizing public land management like this is a really concerning step.”
The Trump administration has also begun submitting previous agency actions to Congress, restarting the 60-day clock and opening up older decisions to potential nullification.
Groetzinger said the move skirts public opinion, as many of the plans were developed through years of public meetings and comment periods. Critics also say the recent use of the CRA creates uncertainty, as it’s unclear what happens to rights for grazing and mining once a plan is invalidated. A key provision of the CRA bars agencies from replacing overturned rules with ones that are “substantially similar.”
New threats to monuments
A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) opinion has expanded the CRA’s reach further, potentially allowing Congress to scrap management plans that underpin national monuments, too.
Last year, Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) asked the GAO to determine whether the resource management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument qualified as a rule under the CRA. This month, the GAO said it did, which clears the way for Maloy or other members of the Utah delegation to introduce a resolution of disapproval.
Maloy told The Deseret News that she’s been clear in her opposition to the current management plan.
Environmental groups say this could set a precedent for other national monuments. Resource management plans are a blueprint for where activities like recreation and livestock grazing are allowed in order to protect the environment or cultural resources.
The 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was established in 1996 to protect geological, ecological and archaeological resources in southern Utah, and is sacred to many Native tribes. Trump significantly reduced the monument's size in his first term before Biden restored the boundaries.
Erik Stanfield, an anthropologist with the Navajo Nation Heritage and Historic Preservation Department, said work on the resource management plan took two years and involved extensive tribal consultation and compromise among diverse interests.
“The Congressional Review Act throws all that out the window,” he said.
Members of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition said they would oppose using the CRA to overturn the plan.
“Without a clear roadmap for protection and conservation that the resource management plan provides, our ancestral lands and many important cultural sites within the monument would be at greater risk of looting, vandalism, graffiti, and degradation,” the group wrote in a press release last week.
Stanfield said one of the most significant elements of the resource management plan is an objective to collaborate with tribes on stewardship of the monument.
“We like to think that the commitments from the federal government, and all the work that we put into trying to help co-steward and partner with the land managers, that those mean something,” he said. “I think if we find out that they don't, then what message is that really sending to tribal communities.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
