2025 Recent Vote
52
45
3
Issues
Senator Sullivan (R-AK) introduced 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 Integrated Activity Plan 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. The Trump administration has already taken action to reverse many of the safeguards in the 2020 plan. This CRA goes beyond that by also banning BLM from issuing any similar IAP in the future, potentially throwing our land management system into chaos by hamstringing the agency’s ability to issue management guidance. On October 30, the Senate approved S.J.Res. 80 by a vote of 52-45 (Senate roll call vote 599). NO IS THE PRO-ENVIRONMENT VOTE.