The federal plan governing logging across 1.3 million acres of western Oregon forestland was never approved by Congress — and is therefore void. That’s the argument Cascadia Wildlands made when it sued the U.S. Department of the Interior on June 24.
The environmental nonprofit, represented by Silvix Resources, filed the lawsuit against Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Department of the Interior, BLM Director Steve Pearce and Bureau of Land Management.
In the lawsuit, Cascadia Wildlands claims that the Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan (NW&CO RMP) — approved by BLM in August 2016 — is void because BLM never submitted it to Congress under the Congressional Review Act for administrative approval. This logging operation covers 1.3 million acres across Coos Bay, Eugene and Salem.
The CRA “if you boil it down, just requires administrative rules to be submitted to Congress, and then the president for approval, after they’re promulgated by the agency. They have to be submitted to Congress within a certain time period, which is about 60 days,” says Nick Cady, Cascadia Wildlands legal director, says.
Oregon is known for its expansive forests that cover nearly half of the state, with forests concentrated in the Cascades and southwest mountains. Oregon has around 29.7 million acres of forestland amounting to 48 percent of the state. U.S. Forest Service and the BLM manage around 64 percent of the forestland, making the forests widely public-owned.
The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 requires the BLM to authorize timber harvests only under a valid resource management plan — which serves as land management blueprints. The Government Accountability Office issued an opinion in June 2025 that RMPs meet the definition of a rule under the Congressional Review Act, subjecting RMPs to congressional scrutiny.
“Until just recently, Republicans and Congress started using the CRA to attack the natural resource management plans, which were a series of mineral withdrawals that [former President Joe] Biden had done on some public land, and areas where he was saying there shouldn’t be mining,” Cady says. “The CRA largely has been used by Republicans, because Republicans controlled Congress and wanted to go after agency rules that they felt were too protective of the environment.”
Cady says that some of the protections adopted under the Endangered Species Act or rules under the EPA have been challenged by Republican delegates and been overturned under the CRA.
Based on GAO opinions, Republican representatives worked to overturn five RMPs using the CRA. This opened millions of acres of land for mining and resource extraction from Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming,
“Republicans have been using it to attack all these different conservation-oriented plans, but there’s a whole load of agency plans that have authorized a lot of resource extraction and plans championed by Republicans — and the 2016 resource management plan in Oregon is one of those,” Cady says.
Susan Brown, the lead attorney at Silvix Resources, argues that the NW&CO RMP is void, since it was never approved by Congress. The plaintiffs claim that the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan is the only lawfully operative land use plan for BLM lands.
“It was ultimately an Obama-era plan, but it was something that has been worked on for decades to increase logging in Oregon forests,” Cady says. “And that plan was never submitted to Congress for approval pursuant to this statute which requires it.”
The suit specifically calls out the Aloha Trout Forest Management Project, which BLM authorized on March 3 at the Mary’s Peak Field Office in Salem. This plan would have harvested up to 75.5 million board feet from up to 1,305 acres. The complaint also states that BLM has authorized 2.2 billion board feet of timber sales under the NW&CO RMP since 2016.
The Aloha Trout timber sale “area has watersheds for the rivers that run through town here [in Eugene], and it’s pretty large, like a several-thousand-acre logging project and it targets mature old growth forests — areas that probably wouldn’t be logged under the Northwest Forest Plan,” Cady says.
The Northwest Forest Plan is a former President Bill Clinton-negotiated deal between timber and conservationists, and it specifically included protections for the Endangered Species Act listed northern spotted owl. This plan is still used for the U.S. Forest Service.
“That plan had numerous protections for rivers and waterways, and had more protections for rare and endangered species,” Cady says. “Roughly, I think the 2016 RMP doubled the harvest levels from that allowable in the Northwest Forest Plan.”
The requested relief is to vacate the Aloha Trout project specifically and declare that all permits, leases, right-of-ways and other authorizations under the NW&CO RMP are null and void.
“That means every resource management plan, as a rule, has to go to Congress — very few of them have,” Cady says. “So it’s going to blow up not just Oregon’s logging program, but probably oil and gas [extraction programs] all over the place.”
Eugene Weekly reached out to the Bureau of Land Management for a comment, but they have not responded to the request.
If Cascadia Wildlands wins this suit, this would call into question a decade of BLM timber authorization across western Oregon and could also set a precedent for all congressionally unapproved RMPs across the U.S.
“So the lawsuit was in essence a way to send a message to Republicans in DC, saying you need to fix this monster that you created,” Cady says. “I think what it means is that any BLM resource management plan anywhere in the U.S. is at risk of being brought under one of these lawsuits, because I don’t think any of them have really gone through congressional approval prior to 2025,”