Unfortunately, it's an all-too-familiar playbook. Extreme environmental and animal rights groups target a ruling or an active forest management project, file suit, emphasize a technicality and, if successful, then pocket a check for attorney fees paid for with taxpayer money. It happens over and over and over.

At issue is the Equal Access to Justice Act or EAJA, a law enacted by Congress in 1980 authorizing the payment of reasonable expenses when involved in a lawsuit against the federal government. The majority of those who received EAJA reimbursements are veterans and others seeking benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Society Security Administration. And most of those payments are just a few thousand dollars each.

However, a loophole left the door open for nonprofit groups, even those with deep pockets, to file lawsuits over just about anything ranging from endangered species and environmental issues to active forest management work and then look to be reimbursed for attorney fees.

“Any nonprofit, regardless of how big they are, how much money they have, can get reimbursed by the federal government if they're able to win on lawsuits, and that's been abused to the point where there's a number of organizations that just file suit on every single forest management activity in the forests,” Ryan Bronson, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) director of government affairs, told the Missoulian. “And when they win on a technicality, they get paid, even if there's no substance to the suit that they're involved in. And we've seen that as the major impediment to forest management.”

Citing a recent example, the environmental group Oregon Wild challenged a collaborative forest management and wildfire mitigation effort called the Grasshopper Restoration Project. The group filed suit delaying and greatly shrinking the scope of the original planned work. The U.S. Forest Service settled the case and Oregon Wild received $55,000 in taxpayer-funded attorney fees. Then, WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group based in New Mexico, announced its intent to sue over four more projects. Several weeks later, lightning sparked the Grasshopper Fire that burned homes and destroyed wildlife habitat as it roared across 94,000 acres in what has become the most destructive year of wildfires in Oregon's history.

Some organizations boast about suing the government and doing so as a fundraising ploy. Others use it as a preplanned line item on their budget. Recent testimony given on Capitol Hill showed the Center for Biological Diversity, a serial litigant organization in Arizona, pocketed $23.4 million in taxpayer funding over the last five years, an amount that equaled 13.6% of its annual revenue over that same period.

Hunt 2 Conserve (H2C), a nonprofit organization with a mission to advance the legacy of hunting and conservation, agrees with RMEF's longtime assertions that systematic abuse of the legal system needs to be eliminated. It applauds a recent announcement by the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources to launch an investigation into the activities of 19 litigant environmental organizations, specifically related to their EAJA abuse. H2C also supports proposed legislation to reform EAJA.

Litigation does not equate to conservation, no matter how serial environmental litigants frame it. An Evergreen Magazine exposé highlighted the claims of Alliance for the Wild Rockies, a Montana-based environmental group, that boasted expanding its ability to file lawsuits "protects" forests. Reality shows that the opposite is true. Using the legal system to slow down and gum up planned forest management like thinning, prescribed burning, noxious weed and other treatments leads to overly thick forests, increasing dead downfall and less native grasses and vegetation on the forest floor, negatively impacting big game and other wildlife that rely on that habitat. Kicking the can down the road also ratchets up the risk of high-intensity wildfires. From Jan. 1 to Oct. 1, 2026, about 63,000 fires burned hundreds of homes, causing thousands to evacuate and burned more than 9 million acres of forests and grassland.

“The really unfortunate thing is when these groups win, the Department of Justice negotiates the fees, but it’s the individual agency that must pay. So, in this case, it would impact the budgets of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but in other cases it could be the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management or another federal agency,” said Blake Henning, RMEF chief conservation officer. “All of those agencies are already underfunded, and this just hurts them more, which means they don’t have staff to adequately review issues, which leads to more and more lawsuits. It’s become what amounts to a ridiculous, non-stop merry-go-round ride.”

Reams of studies shine a spotlight on active forest management, its benefits for wildlife and for hunters.

“Managing our forests, getting the habitat into a condition that makes it attractive and conducive for elk and big game is an access issue because if the elk spend more time in national forests, sportsmen and our members and everyone (have) better access to those places,” Bronson told the Missoulian. “So, for us, it's active forest management in trying to make the existing public lands more conducive for wildlife.”

However, litigant environmental groups promote a hands-off preservation approach rather than hands-on habitat enhancement projects, and they go to court to force their ideals. They also do not take "no" for an answer. A federal judge recently lifted an injunction allowing the U.S. Forest Service Service to go ahead with a logging and fuels mitigation project in western Montana. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies immediately announced it would file suit. 

A federal judge in Oregon also recently denied an injunction for a project to remove dead and dying trees, as well as select live trees for operational and safety reasons. The Applegate Siskiyou Alliance and Klamath Forest Alliance announced they will go ahead with a lawsuit to stop it and, most likely, seek to be compensated for attorney fees.

And so, the game goes on. That is unless or until Congress passes a law to stop the abusive giveaway of taxpayer money.

Click here to view a compilation of recent EAJA payments.

About Hunt 2 Conserve

Hunt 2 Conserve is a 501(c)4 nonprofit organization affiliated with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Its mission is to advance a legacy of hunting and conservation by educating, activating and developing stewards and defenders of these fundamentally American ideals. For more information, go to hunt2conserve.org.