The Equal Access to Justice Act is doing its job. That’s why they’re attacking it.

Rep. Gosar’s hearing targets attorney-fee reimbursements, but that’s a distraction from the core problem: a government trying to shield federal agencies from public accountability.

Photo: DNY59 from Getty Images Signature

Rep. Paul Gosar has scheduled yet another political performance disguised as congressional oversight. This time, he’s reviving a long-running grievance of the livestock lobby and extractive industries as a whole: the idea that environmental groups are “abusing” the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) when they sue federal agencies that break the law. Tomorrow, the House Natural Resources Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee will convene a hearing on EAJA’s payment of attorney fees, where Gosar will posture as a guardian of taxpayer dollars while ignoring the far larger subsidies, giveaways, and underpriced grazing leases flowing to the same ranching interests for which he is shilling.

EAJA is simple. When the federal government violates federal law –whether the Endangered Species Act, NEPA, the Clean Water Act, or its own regulations – and citizens have to go to court to seek justice, the government can be required to reimburse reasonable legal fees if it loses. Congress passed the law in 1980 to level the playing field. Agencies have vast budgets and enormous legal resources; without EAJA, ordinary people, small nonprofits, and local conservation groups would be unable to challenge unlawful government decisions. EAJA is not a subsidy; it is a remedy. It only becomes relevant when the federal government has broken the law.

Gosar and his allies prefer to frame it as a jackpot for environmentalists. The facts tell a different story. In 2024, the Department of the Interior paid out just eleven EAJA awards totaling $2.2 million. The Forest Service, under USDA, paid the same number of awards—eleven—totaling $1.5 million. Commerce paid out five awards for $1.4 million. These wildlife- and land-management related cases are a sliver of all EAJA activity in the federal government. The vast majority of all other EAJA payouts—roughly 96 percent—go to Social Security and Veterans Affairs claimants, who use the law to force the government to follow its own benefit rules.

Gosar is staging a hearing about the four percent connected to wildlife and public lands because that’s where the ranching lobby and other extractive industries want political cover.

For years, industry groups have tried to paint conservation litigation as a scheme to “profit” from endangered species. What they omit is the reality of how these cases arise. Agencies refuse to update science. They ignore statutory timelines for evaluating species in trouble. They authorize destructive projects without the requisite analysis. They rubber-stamp grazing permits on lands failing their own land-health standards.

The Equal Access to Justice Act also has strict safeguards. Courts only award fees if the plaintiff actually prevails and the government’s position is not “substantially justified.” The hourly rate is capped. The expenses must be reasonable. Many successful cases recover nothing at all because settlement negotiations often don’t include fees; Gosar’s data don’t include the hours of attorney time environmental groups donate to successful litigation efforts. EAJA does not pay for the years of staff work, field monitoring, document review, public comments, expert declarations, or scientific analysis that nonprofit conservation groups rely on to even reach the point of litigation. If Gosar understood how much work goes into holding federal agencies accountable for wildlife protections, he might drop the talking point that EAJA is some kind of ATM.

What actually concerns him is the thing he won’t say out loud: EAJA helps the public challenge illegal decisions that cater to extractive industries. It opens the books on grazing authorizations, predator-control programs, mining permits, logging projects, and endangered species failures—areas where Gosar’s political allies depend on agencies to look the other way. EAJA is a threat because it enables transparency in corners of federal land management that prefer to operate without it.

Ironically, this transparency is something Congress already strengthened. After the Trump administration created an EAJA payments database, lawmakers from both parties—including Republicans who now hand-wring about the law—codified government-wide reporting requirements in 2019. Thanks to that statute, the public can now see exactly how much money is paid, for what purpose, and by which agency. Far from a clandestine pipeline of cash to environmental groups, the program is documented in plain detail. Nothing about it is secret.

But transparency only matters if the public understands what is being attacked. When Western Watersheds Project wins a case requiring the Forest Service to analyze grazing impacts, or when environmental groups compel the Fish and Wildlife Service to review whether a species warrants protection, EAJA can reimburse a portion of the legal cost. That’s not abuse. That’s accountability. Without EAJA, agencies could violate environmental laws with near impunity, knowing few groups could afford to challenge them.

The livestock industry’s war on EAJA is part of a larger strategy to limit checks on federal agency abuses when it comes to public lands grazing. The industry benefits from some of the most heavily subsidized use of public lands in the nation, with grazing fees set far below market value and decades of agency deference to ranching operations even on degraded landscapes. Litigation exposes that imbalance. EAJA helps reimburse some of the costs of holding federal agencies accountable for the messes they make when they violate their own regulations. Gosar’s hearing is a pre-packaged attempt to delegitimize both.

The public would benefit from a different hearing: one examining why agencies repeatedly violate environmental laws, why land-health failures persist across millions of acres, why endangered species decisions are allowed to languish for years, why taxpayers should be subsidizing livestock grazing that damages lands and is the leading cause of species endangerment, and why many grazing permits are renewed without updated NEPA analysis. But those questions would require real oversight, not theatrics.

Grace Kuhn is the digital director for Western Watersheds Project.