As the media scrambles to make sense of Trump’s torrent of Executive Orders, and while three-at-a-time Congressional hearings for Cabinet nominees are leaving hearing rooms half empty because Senators can’t be two places at once, a handful of Congressmen are moving quietly but rapidly behind the scenes to further a radical assault on our public lands.

They were quick out of the starting gate: as soon as the 115th Congress was gaveled into session, a fairly standard procedural rules package was introduced with an unprecedented addition that would allow Congress to sell off Federal public lands without accounting for the cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Waiting in the wings, and not to be outdone, was Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who introduced H.R. 621 and H.R. 622 last week. Chaffetz, who in his spare time is leading the charge to exert Congressional control over Washington D.C. — a city more populous than his entire Congressional district, has long advocated that public lands are a prime example of Federal overreach. H.R. 621 would require the Secretary of the Interior to sell off nearly 3.3 million acres of federally managed public land in the western States, while H.R. 622 would strip the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management of any law enforcement authority over the 440.3 million of acres of land these two Agencies are charged with managing. Both of these bills are now in committee.

Yet perhaps the most draconian maneuvers have come in recent days, as members of the Republican Congressional leadership announced their intention to take advantage of an obscure procedural law, the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which enables Congress to reject regulations issued by federal agencies while simultaneously prohibiting those agencies from putting forth any “substantially similar” rules at any time in the future. The first CRA targets include two Interior Department regulations on methane emissions at oil & gas drilling sites and toxic run-off from mining operations into streams and groundwater.

The first of these rules, the Methane and Waste Prevention Rule, regulates the nearly 3.3 million metric tons of methane released into the atmosphere by oil and gas production facilities in the U.S. each year — nearly half of that involving operations on federally managed lands falling under the Interior Department’s jurisdiction. Methane is a greenhouse gas roughly 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term; not to mention, the amount of natural gas “vented” into the atmosphere by operations on federally managed land would be worth roughly $330 million at current prices, were these facilities operated more efficiently.

The Stream Protection Rule, which emerged early on as a likely CRA target, charges the mining industry with the responsibility for ensuring streams and rivers surrounding surface coal mining operations are restored to “physical form, hydrologic function, and ecological function.” Runoff from surface mining operations, including strip mining, open-pit mining, mountaintop removal, pose a severe threat to the health of ecosystems and human populations nearby. On Wednesday the House voted 228–194 in favor of the CRA resolution to repeal the Stream Protection Rule. It could reach the Senate as early as Thursday.

And late on Monday, another whopper. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) introduced House Joint Resolution 46, joined by Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Diane Black (R-TN), Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen (R-American Samoa), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX). H.J.Res 46 similarly seeks to wield the CRA as weapon on behalf of oil, gas, and mining industries by repealing the National Park Service’s recent update to 37-year-old regulations that govern oil and gas drilling operations inside our National Parks — and preventing the National Park Service from suggesting similar rules in the future.

Source: National Park Service

Fortunately, successful use of the Congressional Review Act requires both houses of Congress to act in an extremely short window of time — and as a result, the House will ultimately be forced to prioritize only a handful of regulations to target. Nonetheless, that short window of time also requires the House to move quickly, leaving environmental advocates an even shorter window of time in which to mount a robust opposition.