GOP-led Congress could toss Rock Springs plan in 2025 using an unprecedented move

FROM WYOFILE:

The Congressional Review Act has historically been used to overturn national rules, not federal land use plans, but the pieces are in place for a novel application.

Continued criticism of the near-final plan guiding management of 3.6 million acres of public lands in southwest Wyoming has sparked speculation that the incoming Republican-led Congress will nix the new charter through an oversight instrument that’s never been used to intrude into federal land use planning.

Worries emanating from environmental advocacy groups and retired federal government employees are that the next Congress will undo the Bureau of Land Management’s Rock Springs Resource Management Plan, nearly 14 years in the making, using the Congressional Review Act. The little-known tool establishes procedures for lawmakers to overturn final rules passed by federal agencies within the past 60 congressional working days. That period will extend into the 119th Congress and provide lawmakers in both soon-to-be Republican majority chambers an opportunity to “look back” and overturn rules.

The BLM has completed its environmental review for the Rock Springs Field Office — the plans propose balancing conservation and development — but it has yet to finalize them with a record of decision, potentially subjecting them to Congressional Review Act reversal.

“If it gets undone by [the Trump] administration, the reality is all of the work that has gone into it is for naught,” Cheyenne resident and former BLM-Wyoming State Director Mary Jo Rugwell told WyoFile. “The BLM has started over again on the Rock Springs RMP revision so many times, it’s not right.”

Wyoming’s congressional delegation — Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, and Rep. Harriet Hageman — would not confirm that they intend to pursue a Congressional Review Act resolution as the mechanism for undoing the Rock Springs plans.

According to E&E News, however, Republicans are planning to expand use of the Congressional Review Act from the start of the next congressional session.

“My team and many other teams are systematically reviewing what rules would be subject to the CRA,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told the Washington, D.C.-based publication last week.

Both Wyoming senators and the state’s representative declined WyoFile’s interview requests about the subject. In statements, though, they were upbeat about the likelihood of killing the almost-completed federal land-use plan during the second Trump administration.

“I am optimistic that with President Trump and a Republican majority in the House and Senate, we can reverse the disastrous Rock Springs RMP in 2025,” Hageman said in emailed remarks.

Hageman also sponsored a bill to prohibit the BLM from implementing its land-use plan for a region that includes the Red Desert and portions of the lower Green River Basin. Although it’s had success in the U.S. House, there hasn’t been any action on the bill in the Senate, where Democrats have held a slim majority in the current Congress.

Lummis, meanwhile, said in a statement enacting the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan would be a “catastrophic blow” to Wyoming’s economy.

“I have fought to stop this plan every step of the way and will work with President Trump to ensure the RMP is overturned,” she said.

An emailed statement from Barrasso’s office went further. BLM’s plans for its Rock Springs region, plans for sage grouse across the imperiled birds’ range, and the agency’s proposal to end coal leasing in the Powder River Basin “must be rewritten,” the senator said.

“I am confident that President Trump’s Secretary of the Interior will make energy and mineral production on federal lands an urgent and top priority,” Barrasso said.

Up until now

Dating to 1996, the Congressional Review Act has been successfully used 20 times to overturn federal rules, according to the bipartisan Congressional Research Service. The vast majority of the resolutions came about during the first Trump administration, when on 16 occasions it was employed to throw out Obama administration-era rules.

The act applies to “major,” “nonmajor” and “interim” rules, and also some agency actions that are not subject to traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking. Ultimately, the U.S. Government Accountability Office is the arbiter of eligible rules, and in response to a 2017 inquiry from U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), that office deemed federal land use plans to be under the Congressional Review Act’s purview. It wasn’t used then, however.

“It’s important to recognize that if this happens, this would be the first time that the CRA has been applied to a federal land-use plan,” said Ronni Flannery, a senior staff attorney for The Wilderness Society.

One provision of the Congressional Review Act requires that agency rules be submitted to Congress for review. To the best of Flannery’s knowledge, a federal land plan has never before been submitted under the act. If the 119th Congress takes action to overturn BLM’s Rock Springs plan, she said, it would mark a new era of unpredictability in federal land-use planning.

“Regardless of how one feels about conservation of public lands, applying the CRA to a federal land use plan would create significant uncertainty and instability,” Flannery said. “That wouldn’t be good for anybody.”

A congressional revocation could tie BLM’s hands and prevent federal officials from restarting the planning process for the millions of acres of southwest Wyoming. The field office, which includes the interchanging federally and privately owned “checkerboard” region, spans from the Utah/Colorado state line north to the Big Sandy River and from Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge and the Green River east to the Adobe Town Wilderness Study Area

“It bars the agency from issuing another rule that’s ‘substantially the same,’” Flannery said. “That’s another thing that has people in knots and up at night, because the law doesn’t define what that means.”

The statute, Flannery pointed out, also prohibits judicial review, further complicating the picture if it is used to overturn land-use plans.

Regulatory whiplash

Rugwell, the former BLM-Wyoming State Director who now presides over the Public Lands Foundation, said that the last 25 years have been “pretty tough” for federal government employees who get pulled in a 180-degree change of direction when administrations flip politically.

“The employees are excellent, and they need to be respected and allowed to do their job,” Rugwell said. “Federal employees are used to having new administrations come in and having them change their priorities.”

But BLM staffers, she said, are less accustomed to the idea that everything done under the prior administration’s leadership “must be bad and needs to be thrown away.”

Leading the BLM-Wyoming office from 2016 to 2019, Rugwell tried and failed to update the Rock Springs Field Office’s resource management plan — a planning document akin to zoning that currently dates to 1997. The version she pushed was “much more moderate” than what’s currently on the table and lacked expansive and highly protective areas of critical environmental concern.

“Trump 1.0 wouldn’t even let me put that one out,” she said. “It was much less conservation-oriented than this one, and they thought it was too conservation-oriented.”

Rugwell wasn’t surprised that the ongoing plan update became such a lightning rod. At one point during 2023, the draft revision caused outright political hysteria.

“You’ve got to find good common ground with all your cooperators, including environmental groups, but also … the state, with the governor, with the counties, so that when administrations change, there’s not such a big target,” she said.

The BLM is on pace to finalize the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan revision during the current administration and Congress. A 30-day period is underway that will allow the governor’s office to appeal the plan, but the clock will run out on Dec. 17, according to BLM-Wyoming spokesman Micky Fisher.

BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning will then get to call the final shots.

“She will then be able to reply to that [appeal] before issuing a record of decision,” Fisher said.

In an opinion piece published last week, the Bowhunters of Wyoming, Muley Fanatic Foundation, Wyoming Wildlife Federation, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Trout Unlimited urged the BLM to finish the job.

“The RMP isn’t perfect, yet we appreciate the enormous task the BLM undertook to review and respond to tens of thousands of comments,” the groups wrote. “Failing to finalize this RMP would waste the years of hard work that the [Greater Little Mountain Coalition] and many others have invested in this planning effort. Further, it would mean that the current management plan, which dates to 1997, would remain in place for an unacceptably longer period of time.”

The BLM faces tough choices on the Rock Springs RMP and other federal land-use decisions and rules, other agency watchdogs say.

“The administration ought to be thinking really strategically,” Western Watersheds Project Executive Director Erik Molvar said. “Not only because it faces the possibility that its decisions will be struck down, but also because the Congressional Review Act states that there can never again be a substantially similar rule enacted by a future administration.”

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on November 26, 2024.