The Congressional Review Act is the most dangerous law most Americans have never heard of. In the past year, Congress and the Trump administration have used it to permanently erase protections across hundreds of millions of acres of public land. And the word “permanently” is doing real work in that sentence.
This is the latest in our series on the laws, policies, and overlooked tools that stand guard over America’s wild places. We’ve covered other important topics like NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, the Roadless Rule, and more. Today we’re covering the law being weaponized against all of them.
In the past year, Congress and the Trump administration have used the CRA to nullify 22 federal rules. They have revoked land management plans across Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. They are moving to gut protections for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. They are targeting Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. And the Bureau of Land Management’s own Solicitor’s Office has warned that this strategy could call into question the validity of every BLM management plan finalized since 1996, along with the leases, grazing permits, and rights-of-way built on top of them.
Here is what the CRA is, how it works, how it is being used in ways its authors never intended, and what you can do about it.
The Weapon
The Congressional Review Act was signed into law in 1996 as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act. The original idea was modest. Small businesses were drowning in federal regulations they had no ability to influence. Congress wanted a procedural safety valve, a way to review and reject agency rules that went too far.
Here is how it works. When a federal agency finalizes a new regulation, it must submit that regulation to Congress. Congress then has 60 legislative days to pass a “resolution of disapproval” by simple majority in both chambers. If the resolution passes and the president signs it, the rule is dead. And the agency is permanently barred from issuing any new rule in “substantially the same form” unless Congress passes a new law authorizing it.
That permanent ban is what makes the CRA different from every other tool in the legislative arsenal. A future president can reverse an executive order. A future agency can rewrite a regulation. But when Congress kills a rule under the CRA, the door locks behind it. The only key is a new act of Congress.
For twenty years, almost nobody used it. From 1996 to 2017, Congress successfully passed exactly one CRA resolution of disapproval, striking down an OSHA ergonomics rule in 2001. The law sat on the shelf, gathering dust, a footnote in administrative law textbooks.
Then the landscape shifted. During Trump’s first term, Congress used the CRA to overturn 16 Obama-era regulations, including a rule protecting streams from coal mining pollution. Democrats used it three times against Trump-era rules when they held the majority. The weapon was out of the cabinet, but it was still being used for its intended purpose. Reviewing agency regulations.
2025 changed everything.
In a single year, Congress and the Trump administration revoked 22 Biden-era rules using the CRA. The volume was staggering. But the real escalation was a radical expansion of what counts as a “rule.”
What They Redefined
To understand what is happening right now, you need to understand what a resource management plan is.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees 245 million acres of public land. The U.S. Forest Service manages another 193 million. These agencies do not manage that land by instinct. They manage it through resource management plans, detailed documents that govern everything from where you can hike, hunt, and camp to where companies can drill, mine, and log. The plans set grazing allotments for ranchers. They designate wilderness study areas. They map wildfire management zones. They protect watersheds and archaeological sites and endangered species habitat.
These plans take years to develop. They involve scientific research, environmental impact analysis, public comment periods, tribal consultation, and collaboration with state and local governments. They are the backbone of American land management. Hundreds of millions of acres depend on them.
Nobody considered them “rules” under the Congressional Review Act. For three decades, no agency ever submitted a resource management plan to Congress for CRA review, because the plans are site-specific management decisions, not the kind of broad federal regulations the CRA was written to address.
In 2025, Republicans asked the Government Accountability Office to affirm a new interpretation. The GAO determined that certain management plans qualified as “rules” because their land-use decisions “prescribed policy.” That opinion opened the floodgates.
Congress moved fast. Here is what they’ve already destroyed.
Montana’s Powder River Basin. The BLM’s Miles City field office had finalized a plan in 2024 that ended new federal coal leasing on roughly 1.7 million acres of eastern Montana, based on analysis showing coal markets were in decline and coal-fired plants were closing or converting to renewables. The Powder River Basin produces roughly 40 percent of all coal mined in the United States. The House passed its CRA resolution in September 2025. The Senate followed by a vote of 52-47. Trump signed it. The plan is gone, and no future administration can issue anything substantially similar without an act of Congress.
Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The Biden administration’s 2022 Integrated Activity Plan had closed nearly half of the 23-million-acre NPR-A to oil and gas leasing, protecting critical habitat for caribou, polar bears, and migratory bird populations that sustain Alaska Native subsistence traditions. The plan was developed with extensive tribal consultation, including input from the Iñupiat communities who live on the North Slope. The Senate voted 52-45 to nullify the plan under the CRA, opening over 13 million acres to expanded oil and gas development.
North Dakota. The BLM’s plan had restricted access to leasing on 4 million acres of federal coal (nearly 99 percent of the state’s federal coal acreage) and 213,000 acres of federally owned oil and gas minerals. Congress revoked it under the CRA.
Wyoming. The Buffalo field office resource management plan, governing BLM lands in the Powder River Basin’s Wyoming side, met the same fate.
In every case, the plans had been built through years of environmental impact study, public meetings, and local collaboration. In every case, Congress erased them with simple majority votes. And in every case, the CRA’s “substantially similar” clause means that no future administration can restore equivalent protections without new legislation.
Thirty leading law professors warned Congress that this move could jeopardize thousands of management decisions across hundreds of millions of acres. Former BLM leaders said it would undermine the legal basis for grazing permits, timber sales, recreation authorizations, and wildfire management projects nationwide. Sen. Martin Heinrich warned his colleagues that the CRA strategy could call into question every permit on public lands, from outdoor recreation to oil and gas to grazing.
Congress ignored all of them. And then turned the weapon on two of the most beloved landscapes in the country.
The Boundary Waters
We’ve covered the Boundary Waters fight extensively. Here is the short version through the lens of the CRA.
On January 12, 2026, Rep. Pete Stauber introduced House Joint Resolution 140, invoking the Congressional Review Act to overturn a 20-year mining ban protecting 225,000 acres of the Boundary Waters watershed. The House passed it 214-208. Americans had submitted more than 250,000 public comments supporting the ban. The U.S. Forest Service’s own environmental study concluded that hardrock mining posed significant risk to the ecosystem. None of that mattered.
Stauber and his allies sold this as a national security play. America needs domestic copper to compete with China, they said. What they left out is that Twin Metals is owned by Antofagasta, a Chilean conglomerate that agreed to have its copper processed at Chinese smelters at zero cost in 2025. The minerals pulled from American public land would flow to Chinese smelters and onto world markets to enrich a Chilean billionaire family. That is the “national security” case for destroying the Boundary Waters.
The resolution now sits in the Senate, where it needs only 50 votes and could be scheduled with as little as 24 hours notice. The deadline is the end of April. If it passes, the CRA’s “substantially similar” clause means no future administration can reinstate equivalent protections without a new act of Congress.
Grand Staircase-Escalante
The Boundary Waters is a template.
In January, the Government Accountability Office ruled that the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument qualifies as a “rule” under the CRA. Utah’s entire congressional delegation is expected to support a resolution scrapping it. This would be the first time the CRA has ever been used to attack a national monument’s management plan.
We’ve written about Grand Staircase before. What matters here is the precedent. The management plan was developed over two years with input from six tribal nations, local governments, and the public. If Congress nullifies it, BLM cannot issue a “substantially similar” replacement. The monument loses its governing framework. And every national monument management plan in the country becomes vulnerable to the same attack.
Why They Use It
The Congressional Review Act is the tool of choice for a reason. The people wielding it cannot win the argument on the merits, and they know it.
A Colorado College poll released last month found that 84 percent of Western voters consider public land rollbacks a serious problem. 85 percent say public land issues are important in deciding whether to support elected officials. Of more than 600,000 public comments on the administration’s proposal to rescind Roadless Rule protections for national forests, more than 99 percent opposed the rollback. 98 percent of public commenters oppose rescinding the Public Lands Rule.
You cannot find 98 percent consensus on almost anything in American life. But you can find it on public lands.
So the architects of this strategy do not argue. They use the CRA because it requires only simple majorities, cannot be filibustered in the Senate, bypasses environmental review entirely, and moves faster than any democratic process can respond.
The speed tells the story. The Trump administration submitted a three-year-old mining withdrawal to Congress on January 6. Pete Stauber introduced his resolution six days later. The House Rules Committee approved it on January 20. The full House passed it January 21. Ten days from introduction to passage.
That 20-year mining ban was built on years of environmental study, hundreds of thousands of public comments, extensive legal and scientific review. It took a decade of advocacy to secure. Stauber’s resolution bypassed all of it in less than two weeks.
Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum refers to public lands as “America’s balance sheet” and has pledged to increase returns by extracting more oil, minerals, and timber. The proposed 2026 budget would cut public lands agency funding by more than a third from 2024 levels. About 24 percent of National Park Service employees departed in just the first half of 2025, with further cuts planned. Yosemite is operating on skeleton crews. Rangers cannot run education programs. Enforcement of visitor protections has collapsed.
The CRA fits this agenda perfectly. It is fast, permanent, and asks nothing of the public.
The Precedent That Swallows Everything
The Congressional Review Act story is bigger than any single place. When Congress treats land management plans as “rules,” they open a door that cannot be closed.
Here is where the mechanics matter. The CRA’s 60-day clock starts when an agency submits a rule to Congress. For three decades, no agency ever submitted resource management plans to Congress, because nobody considered them “rules.” Those plans were finalized, implemented, and built upon. Ranchers got grazing permits based on them. Energy companies got drilling leases. Recreation outfitters built businesses around them. Entire local economies grew on the assumption that these plans were settled.
Now the Trump administration is retroactively submitting years-old agency actions to Congress, restarting the 60-day CRA clock on decisions that communities treated as permanent. The Interior Department submitted the three-year-old Boundary Waters mining withdrawal to Congress on January 6, 2026, manufacturing a CRA window for a protection that had been in effect since 2023. The GAO ruled that Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management plan, signed in January 2025 after two years of development, qualifies for the same treatment.
If this interpretation holds, any resource management plan finalized since 1996 that was never formally submitted to Congress could be retroactively targeted. That is 30 years of land management decisions across hundreds of millions of acres, suddenly sitting on a trapdoor.
The legal chaos cuts in every direction. The CRA is a blunt instrument. When Congress revokes an entire management plan to get at a mining restriction or a drilling limit, it also revokes every other provision in that plan. The campground designations. The trail access rules. The grazing allotments. The wildfire management zones. All of it goes. And the “substantially similar” ban means the agency cannot simply reissue a new plan that resembles the old one. The land is left in a management vacuum, with no clear legal framework governing how anyone, conservationist or industry, can use it.
This is already creating real-world problems. Six conservation organizations sent a letter to BLM’s acting director warning that at least 5,033 oil and gas leases covering nearly 4 million acres may now be legally invalid because the management plans authorizing them have been nullified. When Congress revoked BLM plans in the Powder River Basin, it opened the door to new coal leasing and simultaneously eliminated the management framework that coal operators themselves depend on for permitting certainty. The same legal foundation that limited where drilling could happen also authorized where it could. Pull the foundation out and everything built on top of it starts to crack.
If a future Congress flips, the same CRA weapon can be turned against management plans that allow drilling, mining, and logging. Every authorization, every lease, every permit issued under a plan that was never submitted to Congress becomes theoretically vulnerable. The precedent is a loaded gun sitting on the table. Anyone can pick it up.
Your Move
The Senate vote on House Joint Resolution 140 could come any day between now and the end of April. It needs only 50 votes. It cannot be filibustered. When it gets scheduled, there will be as little as 24 hours notice.
Call your senators now. Do not wait for the vote to be scheduled. Tell them you oppose HJR 140. Tell them the Congressional Review Act was never intended to nullify public land protections. Tell them the Boundary Waters belongs to the American people, not to a Chilean mining conglomerate that sends its copper to China.
Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121
You can also take action through Save the Boundary Waters, which is tracking the Senate vote in real time and will send alerts when it gets scheduled.
This fight has never been won by those who waited for justice to arrive on its own. It has been won by people who refused to accept that their voice did not matter. Who showed up. Who called. Who made themselves ungovernable.
Every protected acre represents a democratic choice. A community saying this matters. A nation deciding that some things are worth more than what you can pull out of the ground and sell. When those protections evaporate through procedural shortcuts, the message is unmistakable. Your choices do not matter. Your voice does not count.
Prove them wrong.
Send this to someone who needs to understand what the Congressional Review Act is and what it is doing to their public lands. The CRA thrives on obscurity. The more people who understand this law, the harder it becomes to wield in the dark.
Until next time,
Will
Thank you for showing up. Every reader who shows up strengthens this community. Every share puts these stories in front of someone who needs to see them.
This is a big one. Exposing the CRA is huge; hopefully many eyes will be opened. This is the result of the architects of Project 2025. Can you imagine people so determined to undermine laws and procedures that safeguard our national treasures? See them pouring over laws and fine print to find the flaws and loopholes, just to give even more to those who have too much already. Let’s VOTE THEM OUT!
HUGE amounts of gratitude for the Pattiz brothers and what you do! 🙏🏼❤️
These public lands are not only on the USA's balance sheet, they are part of worldwide heritage and environmental reserve. Their importance can't be underestimated. They need Congressional protection. Thank you for all you are doing to raise awareness. 🌳🌊💚