A single logging project in western Oregon has become the test case for a legal theory that, if it holds up in court, could put the management of hundreds of millions of acres of federal public land in question.
Cascadia Wildlands, a Eugene-based grassroots conservation organization, filed suit against the Bureau of Land Management on June 24, 2026, in federal court, over the Aloha Trout Timber Sale, located roughly 15 miles southwest of Corvallis near Alsea. The case, filed by attorney Susan Jane Brown of Silvix Resources, names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and BLM Director Steve Pearce as defendants. The group’s argument doesn’t focus on the trees themselves. It focuses on paperwork: whether BLM’s underlying 2016 resource management plan for the area ever took legal effect at all.
Lawyers have a term for what the complaint asks the court to find: void ab initio, void from the beginning. Not struck down, not repealed, but treated as though the plan never existed in the first place.
The Congressional Review Act
The Congressional Review Act has existed since 1996 and gives Congress 60 working days to void new federal regulations. For most of its history, lawmakers rarely touched it. That changed during Trump’s first term, when Republicans used it to overturn 16 regulations, and it has accelerated in his second term, with 23 rules struck down so far, covering everything from water heater standards to tire manufacturing rules.
Until last year, no one treated BLM and Forest Service land management plans as “rules” under the act. Agencies have issued well over 100 such plans since 1996 without submitting a single one to Congress for review. That assumption shifted when Republicans asked the Government Accountability Office to weigh in. The GAO agreed that certain plans “prescribed policy” and were therefore subject to congressional review, opening the door for lawmakers to revoke plans in Alaska, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. The president signed those resolutions into law on December 11, 2025, erasing plans that took years and millions of public comments to build.
Cascadia Wildlands is now turning that same logic against the government. If Congress can strike down a land plan because it was never submitted for review, the group argues, then every plan finalized since 1996 that was never submitted is already invalid, whether Congress has acted on it or not. If land management plans are subject to the CRA, then no land management plan adopted after 1996 is in effect unless and until it has been submitted to Congress, the Cascadia Wildlands suit is arguing.
Warnings From Every Side
Many understood the Pandora’s Box (as Brown describes it) that the Trump administration was opening by using the CRA to overturn regulations. In September 2025, more than thirty law professors, organized by John Ruple of the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center, sent Senate leadership a letter warning that treating land plans as CRA rules would call every BLM plan since 1996 into question, along with every lease, grazing permit, and right-of-way built on top of them. The timber industry, oil and gas industry, tribal governments, and conservation organizations also raised alarms.
BLM’s own Solicitor’s Office raised the same concern internally, and former BLM directors warned publicly that voiding resource management plans would undercut energy developers, ranchers, and recreation permit holders alike. In November 2025, a coalition of conservation groups sent BLM a letter documenting more than 5,033 oil and gas leases, covering close to 4 million acres, issued under plans that fall under Congress’s new theory. By that count, close to seventy percent of all BLM land open to oil and gas leasing sits on post-1996 plans that were never sent to Congress. This leaves decades of federal land authorizations without legal footing.
The Lawsuit
The complaint challenges BLM’s Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan, approved in August 2016 to govern roughly 1.3 million acres across the agency’s Coos Bay, Eugene, Salem, and Roseburg districts. Since that plan took effect, BLM has authorized roughly 2.2 billion board feet of timber under it, and Cascadia Wildlands argues that all of it, along with the timber contracts tied to those sales, rests on a foundation that was never legally there.
The complaint points to the Aloha Trout Forest Management Project as its central example. BLM authorized the sale on March 3, 2026, through its Mary’s Peak Field Office, and it would harvest up to 75.5 million board feet from as much as 1,305 acres of Coast Range forest near Alsea, land that holds pockets of legacy trees more than 130 years old. Honey Grove and Seeley creeks run through the project area and carry coastal coho, Chinook, steelhead, and Pacific lamprey. Residents around Alsea have opposed the sale since 2024.
The complaint also argues that the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, adopted two years before the CRA existed and still used by the Forest Service on Oregon’s national forestlands, remains the only lawfully effective plan for BLM’s western Oregon timberlands. Everything approved under the 2016 plan that replaced it, in the group’s view, was never legally approved at all.
The lawsuit mirrors a tactic Republicans used to unwind Biden-era mining restrictions in Minnesota. “Congress undermined management of public lands around the country by using the CRA in this way, and we are simply following the path established by Congress in order to protect the priceless old-growth forests, waterways, and wildlife of Western Oregon,” Brown is quoted as saying on Cascadia Wildlands’ blog post announcing the suit.
The case, Cascadia Wildlands v. Burgum, is now before the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. A ruling in the group’s favor wouldn’t just settle the fate of one timber sale near Alsea. It would hand every stakeholder in the West, conservationists and industry alike, a new tool to challenge decisions made under land plans that were never sent to Congress.
Cascadia Wildlands and Brown say their goal is to push Congress to fix the underlying problem: amending the Congressional Review Act to exempt public land management plans from its reach. Until that happens, or until a court rules otherwise, the legal status of federal land management across the West remains an open question.
Photo: Exploring Alsea Falls, Oregon.
