Last week, the Senate passed three Congressional Review Act resolutions overturning Bureau of Land Management (BLM) resource management plans. What would have been called an earth-shattering precedent not long ago was this time hardly noticed except by those who closely follow Interior and energy issues. The Biden-era resource management plans were designed to lock up millions of acres of public lands from the “multiple uses” required by law.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) was part of a small business package signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It provided a tool Congress sometimes uses to overturn federal regulatory agency actions. It requires agencies to report any new rules to Congress and provides special procedures under which Congress can disapprove them. It applies to “major rules, non-major rules, and interim final rules” very broadly, even including agency actions that have not been subject to traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking, such as “guidance documents and policy memoranda.”
When agencies report to Congress that they have adopted any new rules, Congress has 60 days to disapprove the rules before they go into effect. To disapprove a rule, both chambers must pass a joint resolution, which the president must sign.
In passing the latest resolutions, the Senate used the CRA in an entirely new way. It had never been used to rescind land management plans, which some might have claimed are not “rules” under the CRA’s definition. Yet there was no major fight about it on the Senate floor, unlike the battle earlier this year when the CRA was used against California’s ban on gas-powered cars to cancel Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “waivers” that had allowed California to ban them. Normally, states cannot impose environmental regulations that are stricter than federal standards, except if the EPA grants “waivers,” which EPA had done for California under Biden.
When the Senate passed CRA resolutions disapproving the EPA waivers, Democrats in Congress, environmental leaders, and others cried foul. Both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Senate Parliamentarian entered the debate, saying EPA’s waivers were not technically “rules.” But ultimately the Senate makes its own rules, and the Parliamentarian doesn’t have a vote. The resolutions were passed anyway, effectively killing California’s national electric vehicle mandate. This time, when rescinding the BLM management plans, the Parliamentarian cleared the CRA resolutions without hesitation and they sailed through, and President Trump has already signed them into law.
That sends BLM back to the drawing board on three major plans. One was adopted by the Miles City Montana Field Office, locking up virtually all of Montana’s coal deposits in the Powder River Basin, which contains nearly 30 percent of the entire nation’s coal supply. Second was the North Dakota Resource Management Plan, which walled off more than four million acres of public land in North Dakota, prohibiting coal leasing on virtually all that state’s coal deposits, and stopping leasing on almost half of the available oil and gas acreage. Finally, the Central Yukon plan barred an LNG pipeline and other economic activity on approximately 13 million acres in Alaska, which already has 58 million acres of designated wilderness (and many other off-limits areas), more than all the other states combined. All three have now been disapproved of by Congress.
Heads are turned and feathers are ruffled throughout the federal regulatory agencies, but in truth they ought to be getting used to Congress weighing in on such bureaucratic overreach. The CRA has been on the books for 30 years and has now been used by Congress to overrule regulatory agencies 35 times. The current Congress has enacted 15 CRA resolutions into law during 2025, the most ever. One such resolution was adopted during George W. Bush’s first term in 2001, overruling a Clinton-era ergonomic workplace regulation. But 16 CRA resolutions were enacted during Trump’s first term in 2017, three during Biden’s term, and so far, 15 in Trump’s second term. It has been used by majorities of both parties and has become a useful tool for Congress because CRA resolutions require only simple majorities and are not subject to the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.
CRA resolutions have overturned vastly unpopular Energy Department rules banning gas water heaters and restricting refrigerators and other appliances. The EPA has been overturned five times this year, and Congress has used the CRA to rein in the National Park Service, Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as BLM.
Opponents claim this process undermines ordinary governmental procedures. But what is more “ordinary” than Congress making the rules?
This article was originally published here.
