©2026 League of Conservation Voters
The House considered Senator Dan Sullivan’s (R-AK) S.J.Res. 80, a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution of disapproval, which would reverse the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) 2020 Integrated Activity Plan (IAP) Record of Decision (ROD) for the Western Arctic. The CRA is an extreme and blunt tool that is being used by anti-environmental members of Congress who want to permanently strip away protections for our environment, communities, wildlife, and natural heritage. This IAP guides land management for the entirety of the Western Arctic, the largest contiguous unit of public land in the United States, and provides safeguards to protect wildlife and natural resources from oil and gas drilling. Spanning nearly 23 million acres, the Western Arctic includes habitat for caribou, polar bears, and many other species, along with subsistence areas critical to local and Native communities. The plan for this critical ecosystem was developed through a public process and with the input of hundreds of thousands of comments from outdoor recreation, energy development, subsistence, and conservation interests. Rather than going through the established process to update the IAP for the Western Arctic, this CRA circumvents public input and overrides science and careful planning in order to open this sacred landscape to drilling. It also potentially keeps BLM from issuing a similar IAP in the future, throwing our land management system into chaos by hamstringing the agency’s ability to issue management guidance. The House approved S.J.Res. 80 by a vote of 216-209 on November 18 (House roll call vote 296). NO IS THE PRO-ENVIRONMENT VOTE. The president signed it into law on December 5.
©2026 League of Conservation Voters