It's Time to Refocus on the Boundary Waters and the Congressional Review Act
The Senate is back in session this week, let's tell them to oppose H.J. Res. 140
In the past two weeks, Congress has been in recess for the Easter and Passover holidays, and the Trump administration hasn’t been sitting around idly during that time. With all House Representatives and Senators back home, they’ve certainly seized the opportunity to try to wreak all kinds of havoc on our public lands and waters.
As a recap of the past two weeks, here are the most consequential actions undertaken by the administration while Congress was away:
Tuesday, March 31: MAGA “God Squad” waives Endangered Species Act restrictions in favor of oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico, putting the Rice’s whale on a path to extinction.
Tuesday, March 31: Bureau of Land Management (BLM) opens a shockingly short public comment period for a proposal that would reopen public lands in the Great Chaco Region to drilling and other development, an action that’s straight out of Project 2025.
Tuesday, March 31: Forest Service outlines “sweeping restructuring” plans to move its headquarters to Utah, close nine regional offices, and shutter 57 research stations, sending waves of outrage through the public lands and conservation community.
Thursday, April 2: Interior Department announces another round of deferred resignations and voluntary retirements, aimed at “aligning national park positions to visitor-facing roles” and away from behind-the-scenes science, monitoring, maintenance, and data analysis.
Friday, April 3: Trump administration releases its Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Proposal, which, just like last year, includes gigantic cuts to the budgets of the Forest Service, National Park Service, Environmental Protection Agency, and other conservation-oriented agencies.
Friday, April 3: Interior Department announces the creation of the “Marine Minerals Administration,” which consolidates two crucial agencies, the separation of which has ensured there hasn’t been any major offshore oil spill since Deepwater Horizon.
Monday, April 6: BLM cancels a mining ban in New Mexico’s Pecos River watershed that protected 160,000 acres of pristine public lands from mineral leasing.
Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Doug “Drill Baby” Burgum has been touring the West last week. His travels included a visit to Las Vegas on Tuesday, April 7, where he met with Republican Governor Lombardo and Bureau of Land Management officials.
One of Secretary Burgum’s priorities, according to KTNV Las Vegas, was ensuring Nevada developers that his department was working really hard on opening up BLM-managed public lands for “affordable housing.”
While overlooking the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area—which is, indeed, managed by the BLM, and encompasses one of the country’s most spectacular desert landscapes and scenic drives—Burgum said that, with the exception of conservation lands and national parks, all other public lands are “for multi-use.”
“It was meant for mining and grazing and timber and housing,” Burgum said. “It was meant for those things. It’s America’s balance sheet and we’ve got to get the appropriate return on it.”
When taking literally—as it should be—that means that only conservation areas, wilderness areas, and national parks are safe from development. Put differently, that means that the vast majority of Forest Service and BLM land is viewed as a commodity.
I know this is nothing new, but it continues to be pretty shocking to hear those words coming out of the mouth of the Secretary of the Interior over and over again.
It’s also important for all conservation-minded Americans to realize that public lands are much less protected than you might assume. And that’s something we’ll really need to work on in the near future.
Public lands are not the same as protected lands—at all.
The United States has 640 million acres of public lands, which is about 28% of its land mass. But, according to 2024 data reported by the World Bank, only 12.9% of its land mass actually enjoys any meaningful protection.
In other words, more than half of our public lands don’t have any protections whatsoever. Those are the lands Burgum keeps talking about. Within certain legal boundaries, and while they’re technically still public, they’re essentially up for grabs for private use.
In terms of terrestrial protected area as a percentage of total land area, the United States, with its 12.9% of protected land, ranks 139th in the world (in a list of independent nations and autonomous regions/territories).
139th.
America is behind Nigeria (13.9%), Mexico (15.3%), South Sudan (15.4%), China (15.6%), Ukraine (16.8%), Saudi Arabia (18.5%), and Mongolia (19.8%).
And it’s way behind Mozambique (29.5%), Brazil (30.6%), Bolivia (30.9%), New Zealand (33.4%), Germany (39.3%), Tanzania (40.0%), Bulgaria (44.3%), and yes, Venezuela (56.8%), which is the third most conservation-minded country on the planet.
This is all to say that, if we’re truly serious about actually protecting our public lands for generations to come, we have a ton of work to do.
And that work continues tomorrow, Monday, April 13, when Congress will get back in session at 2:30 p.m. EST.
Our first course of action should be telling our Senators to oppose H.J. Res. 140. Remember that one? It’s about Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and the copper sulfide mine that’s proposed in its headwaters.
There are rumors that there’s been a new push to get that bill, which passed the House on January 21, on the Senate floor this upcoming week.
Republicans in Congress are trying to use the obscure Congressional Review Act (CRA) to get this passed, which, if it does, will have massive consequences for all public lands.
The rules of the CRA stipulate that it must be used to overturn a federal regulation within 60 days. There are now only two weeks left in that period. So, Senate Republicans may really try to push this through this week or next week.
If it makes it through the Senate in the next two weeks, it won’t just weaken protections for northern Minnesota. It will fundamentally change how easily protections for any public lands and waters can be erased.
Crucially, once used, it also blocks agencies from issuing a “substantially similar” rule again without explicit congressional approval.
If this works, it establishes that any administrative land protection—mineral withdrawals, watershed safeguards, logging limits, future climate-driven protections—can be wiped away through procedural shortcuts in Congress, so long as the votes line up at the right moment.
And remember, the company that wants to establish a mine there is a Chilean mining conglomerate. The copper will be shipped to China for processing and sold on the global market. The only thing American taxpayers get is the cleanup bill.
Additionally, elsewhere in the country, Republican Senator Mike Lee and Republican Congresswoman Celeste Maloy, both from Utah, are trying to use the CRA to overturn the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. That deserves an entire (reminder) article on its own, which I’ll write in the following few days.
The attempted use of the Congressional Review Act is the most serious threat to the future of our public lands at this moment. It requires all our attention.
In fact, it’s such a grave threat that even Theodore Roosevelt’s own descendants spoke up about it in an open letter.
“It sets a very bad precedent for other public lands,” they wrote. “Using the CRA in this fashion, which has never been done before, would put at risk other public land withdrawals across America to similarly irresponsible actions.”
“Frankly, TR would be appalled at H.J. Res. 140 and the misguided and harmful effort to revoke a sound and necessary mineral withdrawal in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters.”
This is the time to put our foot on the gas again on this issue. The Senate returns tomorrow and they only have two weeks to get this passed. We only have two weeks to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Please take a minute this week to contact your Senators and tell them to vote “no” on H.J. Res. 140.
Call your Senators via the Senate switchboard number: (202) 224-3121
Send a message directly via this form provided by Save The Boundary Waters
Thanks for helping to protect our public lands and waters!
See you out there,
Bram
Top image: Boundary Waters - Credit: Dudley Edmondson