Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee is vowing to run the committee his way: That means fewer mega-packages and consideration of bills one by one.
The desire from the Utah Republican to return to “regular order” at ENR is part of Lee’s philosophy on how Congress should work. He made that stance very clear recently.
“I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure we work differently under my chairmanship,” Lee said during a committee markup in September. “We’ll meet more often, move bills individually wherever we possibly can, we’ll provide a venue where senators can bring amendments, raise objections and vote on specific pieces of legislation, not on bloated packages stitched together to manufacture leverage.”
That philosophy, however, is running up against lawmakers’ wishes for a new lands package. Such packages are a committee hallmark and often contain a series of bills too small to be considered on their own. A major package, which has not passed since 2019, presents a test for Lee’s ability to both hew to his own preferences of committee leadership while also meeting the needs of his committee’s members.
Another test for any deal is the tense relationship between Lee and ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who has accused the chair of running the committee “unilaterally.”
Some senior lawmakers on the committee are thirsting for a lands package — or at least to have their long-stalled lands bills finally pass — including Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), both of whom formerly served as ranking member and chair of ENR, respectively.
“We haven’t had a lands package in forever,” Cantwell lamented recently when asked about work on the committee. “When you think about all that stuff that gets bottled up, there’s really policies that are important to get done.”
During the September markup, Murkowski implored Lee to consider packaging more lands bills together so they see the time of day on the Senate floor.
Floor time is precious in the Senate, with the upper chamber often flooded with nominee votes and unable to advance large swaths of bills in one voting session, as is common in the House. That dynamic could be loosened with new Senate rules adopted to advance nominees en bloc.
“I think we recognize as we look to the individual bills that we’re working through, so many of them are so very very parochial and unique to our districts,” Murkowski said. “But I do recognize that for many, they look at this and say this is small-ball stuff, this doesn’t merit the time certainly on the Senate floor.”
And she told Lee that she appreciated “what you’ve shared about how packaging can be kind of awkward. … I wish there was an easier way to advance it.”
Murkowski underscored that point in a recent interview. “I want to encourage the chairman to, again, make sure that we’re getting our bills through with regular order. I think some of them we can do that way, [but] some of them we’ll have to package up.”
At the markup she pointed to several bills she’s seeking to pass. She mentioned legislation to resolve land entitlements in Cape Fox, Alaska; S. 2016, the “Chugach Alaska Land Exchange Oil Spill Recovery Act of 2025”; and S. 2554, the “Alaska Native Landless Equity Act.”
“They may be small ball in the construct of the United States Senate,” Murkowski said. “But for our communities, for our regions, it’s everything.”
Lee’s lands bills
Lawmakers have a host of bills that could find a home in a lands package. Colorado’s delegation wants to pass the “CORE Act,” a long-stalled package to advance outdoor recreation and conservation in the state.
Lee and his fellow Utahn Sen. John Curtis, a Republican, have introduced several public lands bills, including one that would transfer Forest Service land to a ski resort town and a series of bills that would increase off-highway vehicle use on public lands, including Capitol Reef National Park. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) is pushing a land transfer around Las Vegas and a wildfire bill.
That’s to say nothing of Lee’s pursuit of public land sales, an idea that generated intense, bipartisan blowback and was later dropped from the GOP’s tax and spending bill.
The land sale proposal did not get a hearing in his committee before being inserted into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Lee has given mixed signals on whether he’ll continue to pursue the idea.
Louis Geltman, vice president for policy and government relations at the Outdoor Alliance, said lands packages are typically the vehicle used to move bills that are too small to be considered on their own.
“There’s certainly a pretty long backlog of bills that have made some degree of committee progress over the last couple of Congresses,” Geltman said. “Members on both sides of the aisle have bills they wanna get done, [and] certainly a lands package has been the way that’s gotten done in the past.”
“I don’t know how that intersects with Mr. Lee’s ambitions of doing things in regular order,” Geltman said. “If Mr. Lee’s members start wanting to see their things done badly enough, maybe his calculus changes on how he wants to see things get done procedurally.”
Lee’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He further declined to be interviewed on Capitol Hill, telling POLITICO’s E&E News he is on “hiatus” from speaking to POLITICO-affiliated outlets. At the September markup, however, Lee said he would allow a “similarly situated clump of bills” but was trying to avoid popular bills being attached as a rider to a more controversial, must-pass piece of legislation for leverage.
Lee said that can be avoided by passing “lesser, less controversial bills, one at a time or in small groups when they are placed together in like-minded, similarly situated categories.” But he did not indicate how large he would be willing to go on a package.
‘I do agree with Mike’
Other senators on ENR said that there is legislation primed to move.
“My sense is, I would like to move as many bills as we can and there are bills that are ready to go,” said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.). “So that’s where I do agree with Mike, and I like the idea of advancing as many of those as you can just to get as much work done as possible.
“Now, I understand Sen. Murkowski’s argument, and that you do, in a lands package, have to have enough bills that you have substantial support. The advantage there is that if you can get into negotiation with the House, you get it through the Senate and the House and actually get a passed bill,” Hoeven added. “I still think you’ll have the critical mass to do the lands package, so hopefully you’ll get the best of both.”
In the House, Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), has also not taken any definitive steps toward a lands package in this Congress. But the House committee has passed dozens of lands bills this year, which Westerman nodded to when asked about the Senate committee.
“If you notice, we get more stuff passed out of the House,” Westerman said.
Asked if Lee could advance a lands package by regular order without packaging bills, Hoeven said it’s not possible.
“Maybe in an ideal world, but that’s not gonna happen; I think you can still allow bills to move and still have enough for a lands package,” he said.
Late last year, then-ENR Chair Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) tried to move a collection of bills but only managed to move a handful via unanimous consent before time ran out.
Among those that failed to make the cut were his and former ranking member John Barrasso’s (R-Wyo.) bill, the “Promoting Effective Forest Management Act,” which would have set minimum annual targets on the Forest Service for thinning forests through logging instead of prescribed burning, while also pushing back on the Biden administration’s definition of “old growth” forestland.
Barrasso is back this year with a modified version of the bill. The pair also tried to advance its “America’s Revegetation and Carbon Sequestration Act.”
‘Endless little small bills’
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) suggested that Lee could be trying to avoid reruns of bills he has voted against in the past. Lee voted against the 2019 lands package, which is now known as the Dingell Act, for former longtime Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), who died earlier that year. It permanently authorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, among other provisions.
“He’s someone who holds so tightly to his convictions that if there’s some little bill in a larger bill, he won’t vote for the bigger bill, so we end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” Hickenlooper said. “But I don’t think you can just have endless little small bills; I mean that’s part of his job as chair is to curate groups of bills that fit together and won’t have any one person who really hates them, any of them.”
Asked about the possibility of a lands package, Hickenlooper suggested it’s up to Lee to discover where discord exists and leave those bills out.
“There are a lot of land bills that everybody agrees to, we should get them through,” Hickenlooper said.
Lee’s Democratic counterpart, ENR ranking member Heinrich, also weighed in, arguing individual, smaller bills are highly unlikely to ever be signed into law.
“We’re not gonna have floor time for every parochial bill,” Heinrich said. “So that is why, historically, packages have been the vehicle of choice to actually get things done.”
Heinrich also warned that the knife can cut both ways and that members could hold out their vote over Lee not including a measure.
“It does open you up to anybody saying, ‘Well my thing didn’t move so I’m going to object,’ so you have to have a strategy for that,” he said.
