[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 28 (Tuesday, February 11, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H619-H620]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  STOPPING BUREAUCRATIC OVERREACH AND RESTORING LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, what we are dealing with once again is a 
power grab tracing back to the last administration.
  President Biden's administration, before leaving office, put through 
a whole wave of last-minute regulations knowing they wouldn't have to 
deal with the consequences themselves.
  The EPA led the charge, rolling out extreme rules targeting the 
production of fuel and electricity, driving up our energy costs even 
more, hitting American industry and families hard.
  The White House also used NEPA, the National Environmental Policy 
Act, to slow down critical infrastructure and energy projects with 
excessive red tape, putting politics over progress.
  NEPA was also weaponized to stop important timber harvests, which 
would help prevent wildfire and would help prevent fires like we saw in 
southern California, if more brush and such was removed and power lines 
could be moved and upgraded. They ran into one problem after another 
with NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, et cetera, especially last-
minute ones. All through the West, there were last-minute additions to 
national monuments or wilderness areas. This means pretty much hands 
off by people going in and being able to use those areas, whether it is 
for recreation, for hunting, or for important things like timber 
management so that we don't have such horrific fires zones that come 
from Federal lands like that.
  Also, there are other important objectives, like being able to find 
more energy in our vast national reserves and the ability to continue 
with agriculture--new opportunities to store water for agriculture, as 
we see pictured here.
  With Shasta Dam, in my district in northern California, we have an 
opportunity to add to that dam and bring another 600,000 acre-feet, 
which is desperately needed. We keep running into more and more 
environmental problems brought up by that with the weaponization of 
NEPA and, again, these last-minute rules done basically at the midnight 
hour at the last of the Biden administration.
  The courts indeed are finding that these are overstepping. A judge 
recently ruled that the White House Council on Environmental Quality 
overstepped its authority with its NEPA regulations proving what we 
already knew. Biden bureaucrats had no problem rewriting the rules to 
fit their agenda.
  Congress, we, the people,--and this is the people's House--need to 
fight back. We have the ability to do that with one tool known as the 
Congressional Review Act, which would slow down the efforts of 
bureaucracies that seem to be more and more unaccountable, by Congress 
being able to push back and say: No, these rules that you made are out 
of line.
  My colleague   Andy Biggs from Arizona has brought forth the Midnight 
Rules Relief Act legislation to the floor so Congress can block 
multiple last-minute regulations instead of having to do them one at a 
time. When an outgoing administration uses a scattergun approach with 
all sorts of bad rules and things that are harmful to the economy and 
harmful to our water supply, then we need to be able to have that 
ability to move more quickly in Congress, as well. That is why the 
Midnight Rules Relief Act is going to be important.
  For example, what does this mean for individuals? We have one example 
here that my colleague Harriet Hageman from Wyoming is helping Dusty 
Johnson in South Dakota with. There is a 75-year-old fence dispute 
there on ranchland that the Forest Service is adjacent to.
  Instead of just resolving it, the Forest Service and the Department 
of Justice are coming in and threatening giant, 10-year sentences in 
prison and $250,000 fines, when the solution would be just getting a 
land survey done and solving the dispute on where the fence line is 
supposed to be. They are trying to intimidate people into giving up 
their rights on their property.
  We see time and again people with stock ponds and watering holes that

[[Page H620]]

people built many years ago for agriculture, watering their cattle and 
such. Someone comes along and decides you didn't get the right permit 
for that many years ago or somehow it is affecting a watershed, and 
they want to take it away and fine the heck out of them for that.
  With water-taking, like what is happening in my district in northern 
California, we have an emergency drought declaration, even though we 
have plenty of rainfall and snowpack these days. The drought 
declaration is still in place, harming people in Siskiyou County.
  People on the coast, in Marin County, have been bullied off their 
land by NEPA and the environmental groups are suing them time after 
time so they don't get their grazing permits they need long-term. They 
can't afford to do any upgrades if they want to do the right thing.
  Our water supply is in peril and our agriculture is in peril when you 
look at how important these crops are to the Nation, what is grown just 
in my home State of California. These things would not happen if this 
was not allowed to keep going with the weaponization of NEPA and the 
weaponization of the Endangered Species Act.
  Time and time again, people finally give up. We have seen that with 
the Point Reyes Seashore Park, where people have been bullied off their 
land using NEPA and environmental organizations suing them to death.

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