Congress created it to help the “little guy” face the U.S. Government in court. Instead, deep-pocketed environmental groups use a loophole to misuse and benefit from it again and again to line their pockets and stop much-needed wildlife habitat management projects.
The issue is the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA). The U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources held a December 10, 2025, hearing on its abuse. (Watch the hearing here.)
Passed into law in 1980, EAJA authorizes attorney fees to individuals and businesses that win cases against the government, but eligibility requirements apply to individuals (less than $2 million net worth) and businesses (less than $7 million net worth). On the other hand, there are no requirements applied to 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. As a result, large and well-funded litigant environmental organizations are getting paid with the taxpayer money to sue taxpayer-funded agencies to stop habitat management projects important to elk, mule deer, moose, bears and many other wildlife, bird and fish species.
From 1995 to 2019, there was no requirement to report what agencies paid in EAJA settlements. That ended in 2019 when the sportsmen-led Dingell Act created a database to track awards. Since then, the public has learned that environmental groups received more than $19 million in taxpayer dollars from the agencies that oversee fish and wildlife habitat and management, specifically the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Interior and Department of Commerce.
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is a longtime advocate of fixing the act so it is not a profit-making financial machine for litigant environmentalist organizations that continually abuse it.
“The Equal Access to Justice Act was enacted with good intentions to give small businesses and individuals the ability to fight an unresponsive government in court,” said RMEF Director of Government Affairs Ryan Bronson. “However, by letting well-funded and litigious environmental organizations get their lawyers’ fees paid, the incentive to file suits and delay important habitat management projects has only grown. Litigation is now one of the biggest barriers to wildlife habitat improvement on federal lands.”
Below are some of the comments and testimony given at the hearing:
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR): “In some regions, significant portions of land management budgets are consumed by analysis and litigation, rather than on-the-ground work, effectively sidelining other planned projects.”
Travis Joseph (American Forest Resource Council, President and CEO): “Walton Lake is an amazing place on the Ochoco National Forest in Central Oregon. The lake is the most heavily used recreation site on the forest. And for years, the Forest Service warned that large trees were infected with root rot, and they were at risk of falling without warning, posing a major risk to the public, and potentially closing this high-use recreation site.
“In 2015, under the Obama administration, to protect visitors, the Forest Service proposed a simple, commonsense project – remove the diseased dying trees and replant with ponderosa pine, which is a more resilient species. That project area was 80 acres. The Ochoco National Forest, for context, is 850,000 acres. An anti-forestry group didn’t like that project from the Forest Service, and they didn’t trust the agency’s expertise. They filed a lawsuit over a process technicality. And they got a judge to issue a preliminary injunction to stop all the work, even though the project was focused on an immediate public safety risk.
“The group was awarded a $200,000 EAJA fee that was paid by the taxpayer and the agency. The EAJA payout, that award of attorney fees, was higher than the cost of the service contract to do the work on the ground. That $200,000 EAJA award was based on a $425 per hour specialty rate for attorneys and work performed by law students at Lewis & Clark Law School. They aren’t lawyers, but the EAJA award provided $130 per hour for the students’ work.
“Undeterred by the lawsuit and the loss, the initial loss, the Forest Service went back, did more paperwork, did more process, and proposed the project again. They were sued again on the same project by the same group. This time, the Forest Service won in the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit upheld the award. That did not satisfy this group. They went to the Supreme Court. Their petition was not taken up by the Supreme Court.
“So, all of this, a decade of work, years of litigation, hundreds of thousands of dollars billed to the taxpayer to protect the public from diseased and dying trees on a high-use rec site on 80 acres, 0.001 percent of the forest of one national forest. Meanwhile, this nonprofit made a small fortune to delay a project that was ultimately implemented just 10 years after the fact. Do you think that’s defensible? Is that defensible? This makes no sense, and taxpayers, regardless of party affiliation, would be outraged if they knew that that’s how their money was being used.”
Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO): “Radical environmental groups have exploited EAJA and environmental laws to turn litigation into a business model for policy achievement. Specifically, they’ve exploited the nonprofit exemption in the EAJA statute to continuously launch frivolous lawsuits, regain attorney’s fees, whether they win, whether they lose, or whether they settle. It’s the inside lawyerly game that’s played. These groups aren’t held to the same rules everyone else has to follow. Environmental serial litigants can bypass the $500 employee cap and the $7 million in revenue limit because of the blanket nonprofit exemption.”
Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN): “I want to ask — unanimous consent to submit to the record, the U.S. Forest Service budget justifications for Fiscal Years ’24, ’25, and ’26, which show the amount of program funds used for EAJA fee payment — EAJA fee payments in Fiscal Years ’22, ’23, ’24. It’s a total of $3,720,329 for an average of $1.2 million annually paid for by the American taxpayer.”
Rep. Paul Goshar (R-AZ): “One of the most dangerous effects of these lawsuits is to lock up our forests from proper management. In my home state of Arizona, I have seen firsthand how wildfires can grow in an area where eight federal agencies were prevented from conducting activities to improve wildlife, wildfire resiliency and forest health.”
To learn more about EAJA, including several examples of its abuse, read Equal Access to Injustice, a feature that appeared in the September/October 2021 issue of Bugle magazine. The article was submitted as an informational source and added to the official record at the House hearing.
Two months ago, RMEF accepted an invitation to travel to Washington, D.C., to inform congressional staffers and aids about the issue and its negative impacts on wildlife, habitat and forest management.
(Photo credit: House Committee on Natural Resources)