The U.S. Senate voted this week to overturn all, or portions of, two land management plans in Montana and North Dakota and is expected to toss out a third, in Alaska’s central Yukon. The House already voted to repeal the plans, which means the decision now head to the White House for President Trump’s signature.
It’s the first time in history Congress has overturned one of these land use plans, and conservation groups say the decision potentially leaves about 166 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in limbo.
“You’re not going to see the effects of this tomorrow,” says Madeleine West, vice president for Western conservation at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “But this now has made the BLM’s job of managing our public lands for all the multiple uses like hunting and fishing and recreation much harder. And it was already pretty hard.”
The decision covers massive stretches of eastern Montana grasslands, rolling North Dakota prairie, and mountains and tundra of Alaska. The decision to overturn the plans was largely a result of Congress and this administration’s focus on increasing energy and mining production on public land, says David Willms, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate vice president for public lands.
The Miles City, Montana, vote overturned a coal leasing amendment that prevented new coal leasing on more than 1.74 million acres. The new resource management plan in North Dakota had placed new limits on oil and gas leasing and coal mining; and throwing out the Alaska plan continues to ease permitting and eventual construction of the controversial Ambler Road.
Resource management plans are one of those boring and messy processes with generational, on-the-ground implications dictating everything from what can be mined and drilled in which locations, what land should be left largely alone for species like mule deer, elk and sage grouse, and which areas are available for off-road-vehicle use or mountain bike trails. Without the new plan, the areas revert back to plans passed as many as 40 years ago — when the landscapes there looked a lot different.
“A lot of people don’t understand how important resource management plans are,” Willms says. “This creates uncertainty for everyone including hunters and anglers on how their lands could and should be managed going forward based on new priorities or new science.”
Conservationists aren’t only worried about these three plans, but also about the broader implications. The Congressional Review Act is one of those policy tools that lawmakers typically use at the start of a new session when a recent election has flipped who controls the Congress and the White House. Did a Democratic administration craft and pass an 11th-hour policy before a Republican Congress takes over? No problem, the Republican Congress can overturn it. And vice versa.
But these resource management plans don’t tend to be last-minute policy decisions, Willms says. Instead, they reflect years and years of elbow grease by locals figuring out what they want on their land. In other words, they often reflect partisan groups working together to reach a compromise. The plans also reflect changes in technology and our understanding of land use and animal movements in general.
Earlier plans often include generous amounts of “land available for disposal,” because land managers decades ago may not have understood the value of large chunks for wildlife movement and habitat and access. Now with the advent of GPS wildlife collars and precise mapping apps like onX, we understand what parcels are actually available for hunting, fishing and recreating and what stretches of land wildlife typically use the most.
Without an updated plan, it’s harder to apply on the ground. The Congressional Review Act also states that an administration can’t adopt another rule that is “substantially similar.” Who decides what constitutes substantially similar will likely become a matter for courts to decide.
But what West and Willms fear the most is, admittedly, even trickier to follow. By using the Congressional Review Act to overturn these local resource plans, Congress is setting a precedent that could potentially invalidate all resource management plans passed since 1996, when the Congressional Review Act became law.
That reality will likely be settled in a courtroom someday.
“Congress just opened a new avenue of litigation,” Willms says. “And people are already frustrated that there’s too much litigation.”
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