I don’t think many people in Wyoming fully appreciate what their delegation just accomplished.
Last Thursday (Dec. 11, 2025), Rep. Harriet Hageman and Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso watched President Trump sign a bill that repeals the Biden-era Buffalo Field Office Resource Management Plan Amendment (RMPA).
In a statement on her website, Hageman explained that the “Biden administration’s Buffalo RMPA ended future coal leasing in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, threatening thousands of jobs, undermining local communities, and jeopardizing affordable, reliable energy for millions of Americans.”
More than 40 percent of America’s coal comes from the Powder River Basin, which spans eight northeast Wyoming counties and spills over into Montana and South Dakota. It holds nearly 50 billion tons of America’s coal reserves - enough to fuel the U.S. for 116 years.
The outgoing Biden Bureau of Land Management, headed by Tracy Stone-Manning, locked up nearly half a million acres with a last-minute rule imposed after the 2024 election had rejected its toxic agenda.
This is the same Tracy Stone-Manning who was involved in spiking trees in 1989, leading Sen. Barrasso to call out her collaboration with eco-terrorists. That incident proved she was willing to sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of others to accomplish her radical agenda.
In the waning days of the auto-pen presidency, she did it again.
Although the rule was approved in November of 2024, it was not officially printed in the Federal Register until September 29 of this year. Still, the looming moratorium on leasing has already worked as intended, to depress the mining industry. Who, after all, wants to invest in an industry slated for shutdown?
That’s why the Wyoming delegation has been working to repeal this rule since May, when Sens. Barrasso and Lummis sent a formal letter to the Government Accountability Office seeking a formal ruling. The bureaucrats looking to shut down the coal industry were arguing that a “Resource Management Plan” is not a “rule,” and thus, cannot be touched by the Congressional Review Act.
This is typical of the administrative state. In 1996 the American people successfully created the Congressional Review Act. This law provides a mechanism to overrule the rules of un-elected bureaucrats. In response, bureaucrats simply rename their “rules” into “RMPAs,” and exempted themselves from review.
Three weeks before the RMPA was printed in the Federal Register, Hageman called on her colleagues to subject the rule to the Congressional Review Act in order to overturn it. She told them that the BLM’s Resource Management Plans “in fact are mineral withdrawals in disguise,” which violate federal law.
Two weeks later, the Government Accountability Office issued its formal decision. In 11 pages, it took apart the arguments of the deep-staters and concluded: “The Buffalo RMPA is a rule for purposes of CRA because it meets the definition of a rule under APA (Administrative Procedure Act) and no CRA (Congressional Review Act) exception applies.”
Hageman, who said that this rule was a “sword … hanging over our coal industry’s head,” wasted no time. By October 8, she had submitted H.J. 130 to Congress, and by November 20, it had passed both chambers and was on the president’s desk.
It says that “Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Bureau of Land Management relating to ‘Buffalo Field Office Record of Decision and Approved Resource Management Plan Amendment’ (…concluding that such record of decision and approved resource management plan is a rule under the Congressional Review Act), and such rule shall have no force or effect.”
Hageman promises that this is the first of several bills that use the Congressional Review Act to stop the stealth work of radicals in the federal bureaucracy.
The U.S. Constitution was written to give the American people maximum control over their own rules and regulations. Our forefathers learned the hard way that outsourcing legislation to distant elites opened the door for corruption, graft, and nincompoopery beyond comprehension.
Their clarity of thought has been forgotten through a century of “Progressivism.” Today’s distant elites are not lords and members of Parliament. They are academics and policy wonks. But their vulnerability to graft and corruption is not thereby reduced.
The repeal of the Buffalo RMPA was a wonderful Christmas present to the people of Wyoming. Hageman, Barrasso, and Lummis preserved an entire economic ecosystem for generations to come. Without their foresight and determination to apply the law as written, the damage to our families could have been catastrophic.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
