Members of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment faculty joined law professors across the country Sept. 2 to ask Congress not to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal three Bureau of Land Management (BLM) resource management plans. Read the full letter.
Resource management plans direct how the BLM manages millions of acres of public lands, including consequential decisions like which areas are appropriate for timber and energy development, and how to steward sensitive resources across vast landscapes. The plans at issue address 11.7 million acres in Montana, 13.3 million acres in Alaska, and 4.1 million acres in North Dakota. The plans update management direction up to 44 years old to better reflect current conditions, legal mandates, and management needs.
The CRA creates an expedited path for repealing regulations. Unlike the normal legislative process Congress can use to repeal regulations, CRA resolutions of disapproval rely on boilerplate language that does not explain congressional concerns or tell agencies how to proceed following repeal. More troubling, the CRA prohibits agencies from reissuing regulations in “substantially the same form”—a term the Act does not define and that can cause tremendous difficulties for an agency, like the BLM, that remains under a statutory obligation to plan for and manage public lands.
The three pending resolutions claim that RMPs must be submitted to Congress before they can take effect. But as the professors explain in their letter, Congress and federal land managers have never before subjected land management plans to CRA review. To do so now would call into question the hundreds of federal land management plans finalized since Congress enacted the CRA in 1996.
“We take no position on the management requirements contained in the three resource management plans,” said John Ruple, a research professor with the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment. “Our concern is that using the CRA in this manner could call into questions thousands of leases, rights-of-way, and management decisions across hundreds of millions of acres of land.”
That, said Ruple, “could spur litigation that would grind land management to a halt and leave all Americans worse off than they are today.”