Alex Brown, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Congress’ move to allow mining in a national forest near a wilderness area may have broad ramifications across the country.

The U.S. Senate voted Thursday to overturn a mining ban in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

By using an obscure tool known as the Congressional Review Act to open the national forest for mining, lawmakers have called into question the validity of every management plan issued by the U.S. Forest Service over the past several decades. That could result in legal chaos for thousands of permits covering logging, grazing, mining and outdoor recreation.

Over the past year, Congress for the first time has used the Congressional Review Act to revoke management plans for regions managed by the Bureau of Land Management, seeking to allow more mining and drilling. Such plans had not previously been considered “rules” subject to lawmakers’ review.

Under the act, federal agencies must submit new regulations to Congress before they can take effect. Because management plans, which function as high-level guidance documents, were never considered rules, federal agencies did not submit them to Congress for review.

Using a new legal theory, Republicans in Congress have opened reviews and revoked several specific plans that limited resource extraction in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. But those actions call into question whether more than 100 other such plans are legally in effect, since they are now considered rules that were not sent to Congress as the law requires.

Public lands experts say the new interpretation could create legal jeopardy across hundreds of millions of acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management, threatening any permit issued under a management plan drafted after the passage of the Congressional Review Act in 1996.

Now, for the first time, Congress has used the review tool to overturn a management decision on Forest Service land.

“There’s a huge playing field of actions that would be forbidden if none of these management plans are lawfully in place,” Robert Anderson, who served as solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Biden administration, told Stateline earlier this year. “This could bring things to a screeching halt.”

Longtime outdoors writer Wes Siler, who has written extensively about the Boundary Waters review battle, said in a post Thursday that the vote will “destroy the Forest Service’s ability to conduct regular business for the foreseeable future.” If the agency’s management plans suddenly become invalid, he wrote, “not only could this grind industrial operations on (Forest Service) land to a halt as all of this winds its way through federal court, but it could also set (the Forest Service) the task of re-doing 30 years of work.”

On Thursday, the Senate voted 50-49 to revoke a Biden-era plan that banned mining on land in the Superior National Forest. The resolution will now go to President Donald Trump for his signature.

A Chilean mining company has proposed to mine for copper, nickel and cobalt along Birch Lake in Minnesota. The planned mine would sit at the headwaters of the wilderness area’s watershed. The Boundary Waters is the most popular wilderness in the country, and advocates say the water is so pristine that many visitors fill their bottles straight from the surface of its lakes.

Wilderness proponents say such mines have a long track record of pollution, and leaks from the proposed site would flow downstream and irreversibly contaminate the treasured Boundary Waters.

U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber, the Minnesota Republican who sponsored the review action, has said the mine would bring jobs to the region. Opponents have argued that the tourism economy centered on the Boundary Waters is a larger economic driver, and noted that the mine will be run by a foreign company that will likely export the copper to China.

U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, led the effort to uphold the mining ban on the Senate floor. Following the vote, she said that supporters of the Boundary Waters would likely mount a legal challenge, questioning the use of the Congressional Review Act to revoke a public land order from the Forest Service.

“I question the legality of what Congress did,” Smith said, according to the Minnesota Reformer.

Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, also voted against the measure. Tillus also questioned the use of the Congressional Review Act.

“It’s a precedent that I think our Republican colleagues are going to regret,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The Forest Service oversees nearly 200 million acres of land, managed for multiple uses, including timber harvests, grazing, outdoor recreation and wildlife habitat. Some legal experts fear the management plans governing those activities are now in legal jeopardy.

“That right there is chaos,” Peter Van Tuyn, a longtime environmental lawyer and managing partner at Bessenyey & Van Tuyn LLC, told Stateline earlier this year.

“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,” he added. “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.”

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.”

Even as California and Washington state prepare to merge their cap-and-trade climate programs, New York’s retreat from creating a similar program has sparked renewed debates about energy costs.

After years of painstaking work, California and Washington are poised to merge their programs aimed at reducing emissions and bringing in revenue to help fight climate change. The sweeping regulatory frameworks set limits on the amount of carbon dioxide that businesses can release and charge them per ton.

Until recently, supporters expected New York to be close behind the two Western states by launching its own program. Together, the three states produce nearly a quarter of the nation’s total goods and services, potentially giving the carbon markets significant influence over the U.S. economy.

Just as important, supporters said, a New York program could help the effort spread across the country, enabling smaller states to join well-established markets stabilized by economic powerhouses. With the Trump administration’s rollbacks of federal climate policy, some backers see cap-and-trade as the best path for Democratic-leaning states to take action on climate change.

But those hopes are now very much in doubt.

Citing affordability concerns, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is seeking to delay her state’s signature climate law, which would establish a cap-and-trade program. Lawmakers and environmental groups have lambasted Hochul’s move, but acknowledge she has significant leverage as she seeks to negotiate the changes in the ongoing state budget standoff.

“This is solely out of necessity — to protect New Yorkers’ pocketbooks and economy. … (T)he undeniable fact is we cannot meet the Climate Act’s 2030 targets without imposing new and additional crushing costs on New York businesses and residents,” Hochul wrote in an op-ed in Empire Report.

With New York’s cap-and-trade regulations already behind schedule, the further delays and political concerns raised by Hochul could cause other states considering a carbon market of their own to hesitate. But leaders in California and Washington say they’ve proven that cap-and-trade can work, and that their move to merge markets will ensure a durable program ready to take on a growing national profile.

Early adopters

Cap-and-trade programs limit carbon emissions to a set amount that shrinks each year, and require businesses to bid at auctions for permits known as “allowances” for each ton they emit. States use the revenues brought in from those auctions for clean energy development, electrification of buildings and transportation, and climate mitigation projects.

A coalition of Eastern states participate in a cap-and-trade program, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, that covers only power plants.

In 2013, California became the first state to establish an economywide cap-and-trade program, four years after Congress failed to pass a bill to create a national program. No other state acted until 2021, when Washington state lawmakers passed a bill, rebranded as cap-and-invest, with a focus on helping the communities most burdened by environmental pollution and climate change.

Conservative groups pushed a ballot measure that attempted to repeal Washington’s program in 2024, with a campaign focused on gas prices, but voters overwhelmingly opted to keep the carbon market running.

Since then, California and Washington have been working through a complicated series of legislative and regulatory maneuvers to legally merge their programs. California’s program is already linked with the Canadian province of Quebec, which would make Washington the third government to come on board.

State leaders say combining the programs will create a more stable market, while making it easier for multistate companies to comply under a single regulatory program.

Last month, the three governments released a draft linkage agreement, a key step in merging their carbon markets. Lawmakers say they’re still seeking public feedback and ironing out details, but they expect the programs to be formally merged next year.

“Our goal was never to just reduce emissions in the state of Washington,” said Washington state Sen. Marko Liias, a Democrat who serves on the Environment, Energy & Technology Committee. The Trump administration’s hostility toward climate action, he said, “only underscores the need for this kind of regional and subnational cooperation.”

Even for opponents of Washington’s cap-and-trade program, the agreement with California and Quebec is a welcome development. The latest auction under Washington’s program sold allowances at $60.43 per ton of carbon emissions, while credits sold at California’s auctions have held at closer to $30.

Conservative groups have said Washington’s aggressive emissions reduction targets have created a bidding war for limited credits, driving up energy prices for consumers. They welcome the merger, which will make California’s and Quebec’s larger pool of credits available to Washington businesses under a combined auction.

“Essentially what happens is that California will subsidize us,” said Todd Myers, vice president for research with the Washington Policy Center, a free market think tank in the state that has opposed the program. “I think it’s a good move.”

The Western States Petroleum Association, an industry group with members in both states, has conducted modeling that shows the merger will increase prices in California, said Jessica Spiegel, a vice president with the association. Her group is urging Washington lawmakers to issue more carbon allowances.

Liias, the Washington lawmaker, said that while affordability is a key concern for many Americans, voters in his state are also worried about the costs of wildfires driven by climate change and high asthma rates caused by pollution.

The California Air Resources Board, which administers the cap-and-trade program in that state, did not grant an interview request.

Delays in New York

While California and Washington prepare to join forces, cap-and-trade supporters in New York are fighting to keep their program alive.

Unlike the other states, New York’s carbon market did not come from a detailed piece of legislation. Instead, state agencies were tasked with crafting it to comply with New York’s 2019 climate law mandating steep emissions reductions by 2030.

But state officials missed a 2024 deadline to issue regulations for the carbon market.

“They had the regulations ready to go after this huge process and stakeholder engagement, and then they just didn’t,” said Justin Flagg, director of communications and environmental policy for Democratic state Sen. Liz Krueger, who chairs the Finance Committee. “The governor pulled the plug, and they did not release the regulations.”

Environmental groups sued Hochul for delaying the program, and a judge ruled last October that her administration had failed to comply with the law. The state has appealed that ruling.

Hochul’s office did not respond to an interview request.

Last month, Hochul asked lawmakers to delay the entire climate law, pushing back deadlines to reduce emissions and casting doubt on the cap-and-trade program. Once a champion of cap-and-trade, Hochul now argues that it will drive up costs for consumers.

Hochul blamed President Donald Trump for opposing renewable energy projects, as well as starting the war in Iran that has driven up global fuel prices.

But environmental advocates argue Hochul is attempting to retaliate for the lawsuit seeking to force her administration to issue cap-and-trade regulations.

“We have a real backtracking from the governor on the climate law at large, and particularly her own proposed cap-and-invest program,” said Liz Moran, New York policy advocate with Earthjustice, a nonprofit group that litigates environmental issues. “It certainly plays into this false narrative that climate action and affordability run against each other, when in reality we see them as running hand in hand.”

While the showdown in New York drags on, leaders in other states will be watching closely.

Lawmakers in Maryland have introduced a bill that would direct state agencies to conduct a study for a potential cap-and-trade program.

Oregon lawmakers have come close to passing cap-and-trade bills in recent years, with efforts stymied by Republican walkouts in 2019 and 2020. Key players revived the conversation last year, citing the program in neighboring Washington.

And in Rhode Island, some lawmakers have proposed a fee on carbon that would apply to all fossil fuels sold in the state, with revenues directed to renewable energy and climate resilience projects.

The sponsors of those bills did not respond to interview requests.