The Latest Threat to Public Lands

Annita Lucchesi
September 2, 2025

As everyone in Montana knows, we love our public lands. So I wasn’t surprised earlier this summer when Montana hunters, anglers, hikers, and nature lovers spoke up loud and clear telling Congress not to sell those lands off. Fortunately, that misguided plan was quickly withdrawn, but now Congress is trying to pass another equally bad initiative that will have terrible consequences for the lands we love –  and it’s going to take all of us to speak out again to stop it. 

It’s called the Congressional Review Act or CRA. It’s a rarely used tool that – with a simple majority vote – negates rules that some members of Congress don’t like. The target this time is three resource management plans (RMP) – including the plan for Miles City here in Montana. I know this is a lot of alphabet soup to wade through, so let me give you a bit of background.

Resource management plans are developed by planners at the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in collaboration with local stakeholders like ranchers, loggers, miners, hunters, business people, and Tribal leaders. They create guidelines to balance the many uses on public lands to make sure those lands will thrive and be productive for generations to come.

In the case of the Miles City RMP, the plans made sure that coal mining wouldn’t threaten more than 8,000 acres of watersheds where we get our drinking water and a million acres of big game habitat that are culturally significant to Indigenous Peoples. These were proposals that were carefully crafted with plenty of public input to safeguard the health of the land. Those safeguards are critically important here in eastern Montana, where according to the New York Times, the town of Colstrip has the nation’s dirtiest air due to coal plant pollution. We are already breathing in a toxic mess of lead, arsenic, and mercury thanks to the existing coal industry – we need to let the folks breathing that air have a seat at the table and be heard on whether and how we continue to invest in extractive industries on public lands. 

By threatening to use the CRA to negate the existing RMP and its democratic process, Congress is choosing the political equivalent of the nuclear option. The CRA not only revokes every single guideline in the Miles City Management Plan, it could also prevent the agency from ever putting forth a management plan that is substantially similar. Having Congress repeal a management plan essentially puts Congress in charge of land management instead of the people who know these lands best. 

Managing BLM lands is complicated. There are so many different users of those lands and sometimes their needs conflict. Resource management plans are designed to keep things in balance so the lands can continue to meet the needs of all users in perpetuity. Throwing out these plans will create immediate uncertainty for all public lands users, including ranchers, hunters, miners, and loggers. And it will cause an economic upheaval for the rural communities that depend on public lands. 

I fully realize that all resource management plans aren’t perfect – but there is a better way to fix these plans than completely destroying them. Instead of voting for a harmful CRA, our Congressional delegation should instead be working with Interior Secretary Burgum to make the Miles City plan better, 

I hope my fellow Montana hunters, anglers, hikers, and general nature lovers will join me in calling Senators Daines and Sheehy and Representatives Zinke and Downing. Let them know that we won’t stand idly by and watch our public lands be destroyed by Congressional overreach. We must defeat the CRA initiative just as forcefully as we defeated the sell-off initiative.