A sweeping reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service signals that the agency is planning to lean heavily on states to help manage millions of acres of federal land, foresters across the West say.

State officials and timber industry leaders say they’ve been given scant details about the plan, which will move the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, restructure its regional management, and close scores of research stations in dozens of states.

While they wait for the dust to settle, they’re preparing for the Forest Service — with its workforce slashed by the Trump administration — to ask more of its partners under the new model.

“The Forest Service itself is unable to uphold its mission and cannot alone manage the many challenges on these landscapes,” said Nick Smith, public affairs director with the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group. “The transition from regional offices to more state-level offices is a recognition that partnerships are the future for the Forest Service.”

But many forestry veterans fear the shake-up will cause more attrition in an agency that’s already shrunk because of Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce. Some see a clear sign that moving the headquarters to Utah — a state whose leaders are often hostile to federal land ownership — is designed to undermine the Forest Service’s management of its lands.

The closure of 57 research stations, some agency partners fear, will threaten critical science that states and other forest managers rely on to learn about wildfire behavior, timber production and a host of other issues.

Some observers noted that the agency is required to seek congressional approval to relocate offices, which could trigger legal challenges to the plan if lawmakers do not weigh in.

Meanwhile, some foresters feel the uncertainty swirling over the agency will cause chaos as the West heads into a dangerous fire season amid record temperatures and drought.

The plan announced on March 31 will relocate Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz and his headquarters staff to Salt Lake City. The agency will close its nine regional offices, each of which oversee national forests across multiple states. Replacing those offices will be 15 state directors, mostly in Western states.

Many state leaders, from both conservative and liberal states, say they welcome the opportunity to deepen their partnerships with the Forest Service and play a greater role on federal lands. But they’re still anxious to see more details about the agency’s new structure and concerned that national forests remain deeply understaffed.

“There are definitely a lot of vacancies in key positions that need to be filled,” said Jon Songster, federal lands bureau chief with the Idaho Department of Lands. “I hope that a lot of that remaining expertise is not lost, but shifted to the forest level where it’s desperately needed. Hopefully with all these changes there will be opportunities to put more people in some of those key gaps.”

Scarce details

The Forest Service manages nearly 200 million acres of land, mostly in Western states. With a mandate to manage the land for multiple uses, the agency oversees timber harvests, livestock grazing, outdoor recreation and wildlife habitat.

Under President Donald Trump, the Forest Service has lost about 16% of its workforce — nearly 5,900 employees — through buyouts, layoffs and early retirements. Trump’s proposed budget for 2027 would cut billions of dollars from the agency’s funding.

Many observers view the reorganization plan as an effort to force out more longtime agency leaders. The moves are expected to affect about 5,000 employees across the various offices that are relocating.

“If this were a stand-alone proposal where the American public and the public agency employees had trust in the administration, a lot of it makes sense,” said Mike Dombeck, who served as chief of the Forest Service under President Bill Clinton and remains a vocal conservation advocate. “But the level of trust is at rock bottom.”

In its announcement, the agency said that the new state-based model will bring decision-making closer to the forest level and reduce bureaucracy. The Forest Service did not grant a Stateline interview request.

State foresters, who are responsible for managing the forests in their states, say they’ve been given few details other than the new office maps released by the agency. They don’t know when the transitions will happen, which officials will be staffing the new offices or what authority they will have.

“They’ve made the statement that they need to rely more on states,” said Washington State Forester George Geissler. “If you’re going to lean on us, it might help us to know what that means.”

States’ role

In recent years, the Forest Service has increasingly partnered with states, tribes, counties and nonprofits to carry out projects on federal lands. Foresters say agreements such as the Good Neighbor Authority have become a critical tool, allowing more work to happen in national forests even as the feds’ own capacity shrinks.

“We’ve seen some of that institutional knowledge (at the Forest Service) dwindle a little bit,” said Utah State Forester Jamie Barnes. “Building these partnerships, if you do see a decline on one side or the other, you can bridge that loss. We’re working together, making joint decisions so we can get timber off the landscape here in Utah.”

Some foresters said they welcome the chance to work more closely with the Forest Service, but they’re concerned that the agency has not recovered from Trump’s workforce cuts. Reassigning hundreds of employees to new locations could lead to more attrition.

In Wyoming, state officials are excited to have Forest Service leaders working in close proximity. But State Forester Kelly Norris acknowledged that the move could be “bumpy,” given the lack of details and ongoing workforce shortages in the agency.

“The logistics of this may be a lot harder implemented than said,” she said. “We see this as a positive for us, but I do think that this is going to be a real long transition.”

Idaho, Utah and Wyoming are among the Western states that share the Trump administration’s goal of increasing timber production on federal lands. Trump has moved to limit environmental reviews and protections for endangered species to speed up logging projects.

Some Forest Service veterans feel the move to increase states’ role will prove destructive in some parts of the West.

“We’re putting the governance of the forests more subject to states’ interests,” said Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, a nonprofit that advocates for civil employees. “I would be concerned that the values that don’t have strong lobbying groups, such as watershed integrity, may be subjugated to extractive values like timber, mining and grazing.”

Several agency veterans stressed that the Forest Service’s state directors should be career professionals, not political appointees.

HQ move

By relocating its headquarters to Salt Lake City, the Forest Service said in its announcement, the agency is moving leaders closer to the forests they manage.

But some are skeptical the move will bring stronger management to the West. During Trump’s first term, he moved the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado. Only 41 of the 328 employees subject to the transition actually relocated.

“Shaking things up is going to get people to abandon their positions, and that’s the intent,” said Chandra Rosenthal, Western lands and Rocky Mountain advocate with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that defends whistleblowers in the federal service. “It’s a long-term dismantling of the scientific backbone and staff. The theory is that the federal government will abandon a lot of the public lands and then states will be forced to fill in those gaps.”

Rosenthal and others noted that Utah’s political leaders are hostile to federal land ownership. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican, led an effort last year to sell off millions of acres of federal land, which drew widespread backlash before it was withdrawn. Utah’s state government has also sued the federal government, seeking to claim control of 18.5 million acres of federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

“Why would you move the headquarters of a public lands management agency to the state that is the most anti-public lands in the country?” said Dombeck, the former Forest Service chief.

Dombeck also noted that the Forest Service chief frequently reports to the White House, testifies in congressional hearings and coordinates national policy with other agency leaders. Moving the position out of D.C., he said, makes little sense.

In a webpage set up to respond to news coverage of the move, the Forest Service said it is a “myth” that the transition is designed to reduce its workforce or transfer federal lands to the states.

But some agency veterans are skeptical.

“It’s hard not to reach the conclusion that this is an effort to weaken federal agencies and federal management of these lands,” said Robert Bonnie, who served as undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment during the Obama administration. “You’re going to lose some good staff as part of the reorganization, as they move chairs across the deck of the Titanic.”

Meanwhile, some state leaders are concerned that the uncertainty caused by the reorganization and Trump’s staffing cuts could lead to chaos as wildfire season approaches. With record temperatures and drought drying out much of the West, foresters expect a challenging fire season this summer. The Forest Service remains the nation’s largest wildland firefighting agency, even as the Trump administration seeks to consolidate wildland fire operations into a separate service under the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“I’ve got federal firefighters, fire managers, and all they’re talking about is what’s happening at (the Forest Service),” said Geissler, the Washington state forester. “I don’t feel like having a bunch of distracted firefighters on my hands going into a summer fire season.”

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

A coalition of 21 state and local governments filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the Trump administration’s repeal of a 2024 rule that established limits for toxic air pollutants.

The regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule, limits emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants. It covers pollutants including mercury, arsenic, lead and other toxic metals, as well as acid gases.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated the rule in 2024, which proponents of the rule said followed significant upgrades in pollution control technologies. But President Donald Trump’s administration repealed that updated standard last month. 

EPA said in a statement last month that it was repealing the rule “to ensure affordable, dependable energy for American families” and that it expected $670 million in regulatory compliance costs savings from lower costs of transportation, heating, utilities, farming and manufacturing, and more reliable energy. 

The coalition of states and local governments argues that the rollback is unlawful, saying the federal agency has failed to provide a reasoned basis for it or consider the new technologies. 

The states taking part in the lawsuit are Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia, New York City, Chicago and Harris County, Texas, also joined.

“Here, we have the Trump Administration once again acting recklessly and without good reason in rolling back important emissions standards that help mitigate the potentially disastrous health effects of toxic air pollutants associated with power plants like mercury and arsenic,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, said in a statement. 

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

The U.S. government will pay a French energy firm nearly $1 billion to cancel its plans to build a pair of wind farms off the East Coast, the Trump administration announced Monday in its latest move to stymie offshore wind. 

The French firm TotalEnergies will forfeit its leases for projects off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, with the United States paying $928 million to reimburse what the company initially spent on the leases.

Under the deal, TotalEnergies will reinvest that money into oil and gas projects, including a liquefied natural gas export facility in Texas. 

President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to block the development of offshore wind projects, which many East Coast states have been counting on to meet their energy needs in the coming years. The projects canceled under the deal announced Monday would have provided power to more than 1 million homes. 

Late last year, the Trump administration invoked classified national security threats to stop work on five wind farms that were under construction, but courts have ruled that the projects can proceed. But for dozens of other projects still in the planning and permitting stages, industry experts expect little progress while Trump remains in office. 

The administration claimed in a statement that the projects were “unreliable and costly.” But New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, condemned the agreement.

“Using a pay-not-to-play scheme to pressure a company to not build offshore wind is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars,” Hochul said in a statement to The New York Times.

Environmental groups also blasted the deal, with some noting that it comes as Trump’s war with Iran has caused chaos for global oil markets.

“This deal is an outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars to prevent Americans from having clean, affordable power exactly when they need it most,” Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. 

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

In an unprecedented use of federal authority, President Donald Trump’s administration has invoked emergency powers to force a series of retiring coal plants to stay open.

Utilities, states and grid operators have said the aging plants are expensive, in bad repair and no longer needed to meet regional energy needs. But Trump’s efforts to save the dwindling coal industry have forced plant operators to continue investing in the facilities — a move that some consumer advocates fear could mean billions of dollars in added costs for customers in dozens of states.

Trump has long positioned himself as a champion of coal, making it a centerpiece of his “energy dominance” agenda. The emergency orders issued by his administration claim that the grid is at risk of energy shortfalls, and the coal plants are needed to ensure a reliable power supply.

But state officials in many places affected by the orders say that’s not true.

“Rather than allowing the realities on the ground, the regulators and the utilities to make rational decisions about how to meet energy needs, we have the Trump administration trying to do Soviet-style central planning to push an ideological agenda that will drive costs to customers,” said Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office.

Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Energy has issued emergency orders to block the retirements of coal plants in Colorado, Indiana, Michigan and Washington state. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has claimed that the power demands in various regions require the plants to stay operational.

Observers expect similar orders to be issued for most, if not all, of the dozens of coal-fired units slated for retirement during the remainder of Trump’s term. Utilities subject to the orders have said they will increase costs for ratepayers, and argue those costs should be borne by the multistate region to which they provide power, rather than just their local customers.

Despite their costs, three of the five plants being blocked from retirement haven’t produced electricity since the emergency orders went into effect, either because they need extensive repairs or because power demands have been met without them.

Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act gives the secretary broad authority to take temporary control of the U.S. electricity system during emergency situations. Until now, that authority had only been invoked during wartime or natural disasters. All of the Trump administration’s orders were issued before the war with Iran. Consumer advocates say Trump’s use of the act to overturn long-planned facility retirements is unprecedented, and likely illegal.

State officials, utilities and environmental groups have challenged all of the orders.

While such emergency orders can be issued only for 90-day periods, Wright has repeatedly renewed the orders before they expire.

The Department of Energy did not respond to a Stateline interview request.

Keeping coal online

Last May, Wright issued the first emergency order to prevent the shutdown of the J.H. Campbell Generating Plant in Michigan, just days before it was scheduled to retire. The plant has remained open since then, accruing $135 million in net costs through December. Consumers Energy, the utility operating the plant, is seeking to charge ratepayers in 11 states to recoup those costs.

Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel has appealed the order, while a coalition of environmental groups has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn it, arguing that the feds have failed to demonstrate a true emergency. That case is currently in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals awaiting oral arguments, which may take place in May.

State leaders in Colorado have appealed an order to keep a plant there open, while Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, has sued the federal agency. Environmental groups have filed a lawsuit challenging the order in Indiana. Energy analysts say the Michigan case will likely be resolved first, and is expected to have major implications for the emergency orders elsewhere.

Douglas Jester, a former state energy official in Michigan, noted that Consumers Energy has had to pay extra to bring back staff, establish new delivery contracts for coal and catch up on maintenance. Jester now serves as managing partner at 5 Lakes Energy, a clean energy consulting group.

In his emergency order, Wright said the plant was needed to ensure energy reliability and reduce the risk of blackouts. His agency, in a statement issued last month, said the coal plants kept open by the emergency orders helped keep the power system online during Winter Storm Fern.

Coal industry leaders have made a similar argument, saying that growing energy demands require more baseload power, as opposed to intermittent renewables such as wind and solar.

The emergency orders are “very much needed,” said Emily Arthun, CEO of the American Coal Council, an industry trade group, “so that we can continue to have the energy just for our day-to-day lives,” said Emily Arthun, CEO of the American Coal Council, an industry trade group. “Coal plants, baseload plants, are critical to the well-being of our grid. Coal is needed at critical moments for energy.”

Some labor unions have also praised the orders as beneficial to their workforce.

But state leaders and consumer advocates argue that utilities and regulators have already completed detailed plans to replace the power the aging coal plants provided, through a mix of renewables, natural gas plants and battery storage.

“If you were to believe the Department of Energy, you would believe that more than half the country is experiencing an emergency around the clock,” said Michael Lenoff, senior attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental group that is suing the Trump administration to overturn the orders. “It costs a lot of money to make sure that an old, decrepit coal plant is available to operate.”

Lenoff and other environmental advocates have said the coal plants ran during the winter storm because the government forced them to, not because the grid needed them to meet power demands.

Even as his administration has declared an energy shortage emergency, Trump has tried to block new renewable projects from being built, including several offshore wind farms that East Coast states are relying on to meet their power demands.

Meanwhile, the administration has also authorized power generators to export electricity to Mexico and Canada, which may happen only when regulators have determined the U.S. has sufficient energy supply to meet its own needs.

“How can you authorize the export of energy to Canada from a Western market that you just declared is in an emergency status with shortages?” said Tyson Slocum, energy program director at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit. “It’s complete incoherence.”

Aging plants

Three of the five plants being blocked from retirement have yet to even produce electricity since the emergency orders went into effect.

The plant in Colorado suffered a failure in a steam valve that was not repaired because it was on the verge of retiring. The federal order has forced the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association to invest in repairing the plant, and the costs to keep the plant operational could reach $80 million a year even if it never produces power, said Toor, with the Colorado Energy Office.

“It’s very unlikely to actually operate even with this order,” he said.

Tri-State and the other utilities that own the plant have requested a rehearing of the emergency order, saying that keeping the plant open will be costly for their ratepayers.

In Indiana, one of the two plants targeted by the feds has suffered mechanical failures that would require extensive repairs.

“(The order) doesn’t even make sense because it’s not even really open,” said Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana-based consumer advocacy group. “You don’t want to throw good money after a plant you’re about to retire.”

Unlike the Democratic-led states subject to the other orders, Indiana’s leaders have welcomed the federal intervention. Republican Gov. Mike Braun issued his own executive order soon after the Department of Energy announcement directing state officials to evaluate ways to extend the life of the state’s remaining coal plants.

Meanwhile, the TransAlta Centralia coal plant in Washington state, while remaining in operational mode, has not supplied power to the grid since January, as the state’s energy needs have been met by more affordable sources elsewhere.

Democratic state Sen. Marko Liias sponsored a bill, signed into law earlier this month, that rolls back tax and regulatory exemptions that were granted to TransAlta under a 2011 agreement to gradually phase out the plant. The compliance burden will make it economically infeasible for the plant to operate again, he said.

“It’s crystal clear to the market that we’re not going backwards, we’re slamming the door and nailing it shut,” Liias said.

Consumer costs

While some states have pushed to close coal plants due to climate goals and pollution concerns, market forces have largely driven the coal industry’s decline. According to a 2025 analysis by the financial advisory firm Lazard, electricity from coal-fired power plants costs an average of $122 per megawatt-hour. That same amount of power can be produced for $78 from natural gas plants, $61 from onshore wind and $58 from utility-scale solar.

Some energy analysts say Trump’s efforts to keep fossil fuel-powered plants open could become very costly to ratepayers. A report published by Grid Strategies LLC, a consulting firm, found that as many as 90 aging plants could be subject to similar emergency orders during the remainder of Trump’s term. The analysis found that keeping those plants open could cost ratepayers anywhere from $3 billion to $6 billion a year.

“What the Department of Energy is doing is picking losers, the uneconomical plants that the utilities, the regulators, everybody involved agreed need to retire and be replaced with something cheaper and more efficient,” said Michael Goggin, who authored the report, which was commissioned on behalf of Earthjustice and other environmental groups.

Meanwhile, some consumer advocates say the orders have created chaos for utilities and energy planners. The operators of plants scheduled for retirement in the coming years no longer know if it’s safe to cancel their coal contracts, transition their workforce or defer maintenance on their facilities. And financiers may be wary of investing in new, cheaper energy projects that could be sidelined by orders to keep coal online.

“The administration has made clear that they’re not going to allow a coal-fired power plant to retire, regardless of whether or not it’s absurdly expensive to operate, whether it’s contaminating soil, air and water in that community, they literally don’t care,” said Slocum, of Public Citizen.

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org. 

Over the past year, GOP leaders and the Trump administration have used a law known as the Congressional Review Act to push for coal mining in Montana, oil drilling in Alaska and copper mining in Minnesota, while also attempting to reverse protections for a national monument in Utah.

The rarely used act gives Congress a few months to revoke new federal regulations. Only in the past year has it ever been used to overrule land management plans.

Conservation advocates say Congress is recklessly throwing out detailed plans, which are created after years of research, public meetings and local collaboration. They fear lawmakers’ intervention could upend the long-standing management system that governs hundreds of millions of acres of public lands — with consequences that could threaten endangered species and coal miners alike.

But the fallout could be much more far-reaching than the rollback of protections for specific areas, some legal experts say. By using their review authority in a way that was never thought to apply to land management plans, lawmakers are calling into question the validity of well over 100 other such plans that were never submitted to Congress for review.

If those plans are challenged, it could create legal uncertainty for tens of thousands of leases and permits for oil and gas, mining, cattle grazing, logging, wind and solar farms and outdoor recreation.

“Using the Congressional Review Act (to revoke management plans) is really unprecedented and will have unforeseen consequences,” said Robert Anderson, who served as solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Biden administration. “There’s a huge playing field of actions that would be forbidden if none of these management plans are lawfully in place. This could bring things to a screeching halt.”

Republicans have argued that congressional action is necessary to unleash President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum frequently refers to public lands as “America’s balance sheet,” and has pledged to increase returns by extracting more resources like oil, minerals and timber.

Montana U.S. Rep. Troy Downing, a Republican who sponsored a resolution to revoke a management plan in his home state, argued during debate on the measure that Montana’s economy and energy demands rely on coal production.

“When the federal government acts recklessly, it is the responsibility of Congress to step in and course correct. … The war on coal must end,” he said.

What’s the Congressional Review Act?

The Congressional Review Act, which was signed into law in 1996, requires federal agencies to submit new regulations to Congress before they can take effect. Congress then has 60 working days to review those regulations, and may vote to revoke them.

If lawmakers reject a rule, federal agencies are barred from crafting a new one in “substantially the same form,” unless Congress passes a new law.

For 20 years, the Congressional Review Act was rarely invoked. But during Trump’s first term, Republicans used it to overturn 16 regulations, such as a rule to protect streams from coal mining pollution. Democrats used the act to revoke three rules from Trump’s first presidency.

But in 2025, Congress and Trump revoked 22 Biden-era rules.

“It seems increasingly popular from Congress as a way to get a quick win to reverse something that happened under the previous administration,” said Devin O’Dea, Western policy and conservation manager with Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, which has opposed efforts to open public lands for resource extraction. “The long-term implications are what we’re concerned about.”

Until recently, management plans for public lands were not considered subject to congressional review. Federal agencies have issued well over 100 such plans without ever submitting one to Congress. Those documents guide the work of agency officials who oversee specific areas of land, often covering millions of acres.

Created after years of public meetings and local feedback, they determine which landscapes will be leased for oil and gas drilling, protected for endangered species or open for off-road vehicles, along with a multitude of other uses.

But last year, Republicans asked the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan advisory agency for Congress, to affirm a sweeping new view of the Congressional Review Act. The office found that certain management plans were subject to review because their land-use decisions “prescribed policy,” and determined that lawmakers’ queries had opened the 60-day review “clock” for the plans in question.

“A very long deliberative process goes into these plans,” said Justin Meuse, government relations director for climate and energy with The Wilderness Society, a conservation nonprofit. “These plans are so broad and multifaceted and deal with so many different things. This is taking a hatchet to something that should be done with a scalpel.”

Using this new tool, Republicans have revoked plans that restricted mining and oil production on federal lands in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. Meanwhile, House Republicans voted in January to overturn a regulation that blocked development of a mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, a move that now awaits a vote in the Senate.

And GOP lawmakers from Utah are seeking to overturn the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in that state.

Conservation leaders say the rollbacks are unprecedented.

“It’s very surprising,” said Autumn Gillard, coordinator with the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of tribal nations working to protect the monument. “The (resource management plan) is created as a set of advisement points to land managers to reflect on when making decisions. It’s not a direct set of rules.”

In Minnesota, advocates for the Boundary Waters wilderness area say it is treasured for its pristine lakes, where paddlers can fill their water bottles straight from the surface. They fear efforts to allow a copper mine near the headwaters of the area will irreversibly pollute the most popular wilderness in the country.

“We weren’t expecting the Congressional Review Act to be on the table in this way,” said Libby London, communications director with Save the Boundary Waters, a coalition seeking to protect the wilderness area. “It sets a really scary precedent that undermines decades of land management decisions.”

Officials at the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management did not grant interview requests. Staff at the House Committee on Natural Resources did not grant an interview with U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican who chairs the committee and who has championed using the Congressional Review Act to allow more mining and drilling.

Legal questions

Environmental groups have condemned Republicans’ use of the act to push for more resource extraction. If Trump wants more mining and drilling, they say, then federal agencies should take the time to draft new management plans using the same rigorous process.

But perhaps more concerning to some public land stakeholders are the potential implications for a whole host of other lands. None of the plans issued by federal land managers over the past 30 years were ever submitted for review, because no one at the time considered them to be rules.

In other words, hundreds of plans covering millions of acres of land could be deemed invalid under the new congressional interpretation that they qualify as rules.

“That right there is chaos,” said Peter Van Tuyn, a longtime environmental lawyer and managing partner at Bessenyey & Van Tuyn LLC. “Those (plans) go across the full spectrum of what land managers do: conservation and preservation, mining approvals, oil and gas drilling, resource exploitation, public access and recreation. There’s a very real chance that a court could say that a resource management plan was never in effect and all the implementation actions under the umbrella of that plan are invalid.”

In a letter to the Bureau of Land Management late last year, The Wilderness Society and other organizations identified more than 5,000 oil and gas leases that could be legally invalid, as they were issued under management plans that were never reviewed by Congress.

Public lands advocates say the same logic could be applied to mining leases, grazing permits, logging, outdoor recreation and many other activities covered by agency planning documents. Many industries that rely on public lands, such as hunting and fishing guides, could be thrown into chaos.

“Let’s say you’re operating as an outfitter,” said Ryan Callaghan, president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. “Having something like an entire resource management plan rolled back would be a huge curveball, and something you’d have an absolute inability to plan for as a business owner. It’s very reasonable to have a lot of questions as to what the ramifications are.”

Industry concerns

Some industry leaders are also worried about the precedent Congress is setting by wiping out plans that were created after years of local input and consultation.

“I’m fairly concerned about that,” said Kathleen Sgamma, a longtime oil and gas advocate who now serves as principal for Multiple-Use Advocacy, a consulting group focused on federal land policy. “It’s not unreasonable to think about a future day where there is a Democratic trifecta and they would be able to (revoke) old plans likewise.”

Sgamma was nominated by Trump to lead the Bureau of Land Management, but withdrew her nomination last spring amid fierce opposition from conservation groups, and following the publication of a memo in which she had criticized Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

She said she was less concerned with the idea that previous plans could be declared invalid. She argued that, if challenged, agency officials could submit those old plans to Congress and start the 60-day review “clock” before litigation advanced.

The greater uncertainty, Sgamma said, is the provision that agencies cannot adopt rules in “substantially the same form” as those that have been revoked by Congress. While Republicans intend to target restrictions on drilling and mining, they are using the Congressional Review Act to revoke entire plans. That could prevent agencies from issuing new plans covering less controversial topics, such as campgrounds and trails.

Van Tuyn, the environmental lawyer, shared that concern.

“If they have a plan that looks 80% like the previous plan, and a court says 80% is ‘substantially similar,’ what does the agency do? Go back to the drawing board and say 50%? You used to have all this public access and now you can’t?” he said.

The Public Lands Council, which advocates for ranchers who operate on public lands, did not respond to an interview request. Western Energy Alliance, which advocates for oil and natural gas production, did not grant an interview request. The American Petroleum Institute did not respond to an interview request. Public Lands For The People, which advocates for mining on public lands, did not respond to an interview request.

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear a significant climate lawsuit in which oil companies are seeking to avoid being tried in state court. 

The fate of several dozen climate lawsuits brought against oil companies by state and local governments could hinge on the decision, which could determine whether the cases can be tried in state court. The suits seek to force oil companies to pay billions of dollars to help governments grapple with the costs of climate-related damages, such as natural disasters, rising sea levels and drought.

Exxon Mobil Corp. and Suncor Energy Inc., which have been sued by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, argue the case should be dismissed because they followed national regulations when extracting and selling their products. Oil companies have claimed that federal rules around greenhouse gas emissions should preempt efforts to sue them under state laws.

Some oil companies have previously attempted to have climate cases removed to federal courts, petitions that have been denied by federal circuit courts and the Supreme Court.

But the roughly three dozen state and local governments that have sued oil companies in recent years argue that the cases belong in state court. Many of the lawsuits cite state consumer protection and fraud laws, along with evidence that the companies knew about the risks of climate change while downplaying it in public.

“We had hoped that the Supreme Court would let the decision of the lower courts rest, but we’re also confident in our case and looking forward for the chance to have it heard,” Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett said in an interview. “I do think it’s a significant case. If the motion to dismiss is not granted, then we can get into discovery and learn exactly what Exxon and Suncor knew and when they knew it.”

The states of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as many more cities, counties and tribes, have all filed lawsuits against oil companies over climate change. 

If the Supreme Court were to rule that the Boulder case is preempted by federal law, it would be a major win for oil companies, who have long claimed that national regulations such as the Clean Air Act should supersede state laws. Such a ruling could also prevent many of the other cases from moving forward in state courts.

The case could also be complicated by the Trump administration’s recent repeal of the endangerment finding, the scientific determination that underpinned the federal government’s regulations of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. With the feds stepping back from climate regulation, some observers believe the oil companies will have a harder time claiming that state lawsuits fall under the scope of federal policy.

In a written statement to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency prior to the repeal of the endangerment finding, a group of investor-owned electric utilities raised that concern. The Edison Electric Institute, in its letter to the agency, said that federal greenhouse gas emissions helped “protect the power sector” from legal claims by “displacing” lawsuits over companies’ role in contributing to climate change. 

“Should EPA remove its regulation of [greenhouse gases], it increases the likelihood that environmental non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, citizen groups, and other parties will seek to bring new tort suits and other litigation to test the bounds of continued [Clean Air Act] displacement of federal common law,” the group wrote.

Editor’s Note: The story has been corrected to reflect that the Supreme Court in 2023 denied oil companies’ attempts to remove the case to federal court.

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.