Harriet Hageman, who represents the entire state of Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives, brings a lifetime of experience in natural resource law and property rights to her role in Congress.
A University of Wyoming law graduate and daughter of a rancher, she has spent over three decades fighting federal overreach as a nationally recognized attorney. Hageman previously worked with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, where she challenged unlawful regulatory actions and defended constitutional freedoms. Now, as chair of the Republican Study Committee’s Article One Task Force, she leads a campaign to reassert Congress’s legislative authority.
“Congress has largely abdicated its responsibility for legislating and turned a lot of that responsibility over to the administrative agencies,” Hageman says.
She points to broad delegations of authority in laws like the Clean Air Act, where agencies are given discretion to write sweeping rules. “You can drive a Mack truck through that,” she notes, criticizing how secretaries of agencies pursue their own agendas, not necessarily Congress’s original intent. This, she argues, has led to aggressive pushes like eliminating coal-fired power plants and banning gas stoves.
Hageman estimates that federal regulatory overreach now imposes an annual economic burden of $2.1 trillion on Americans, calling it a “hidden tax that people don’t even realize they’re paying.”
She traces the explosion of the modern regulatory state back to the Clinton administration, especially after Democrats lost the House in 1994. “He started expanding the regulatory agencies exponentially,” she says, citing the Roadless Rule as one of the most damaging examples.
That regulation—still among the largest in U.S. history—restricted access to 58.5 million acres of land. “It’s why we’ve had such terrible, catastrophic forest fires in the West,” Hageman adds, blaming the regulation for insect outbreaks, habitat destruction, and the collapse of the timber industry.
The problem, she says, is systemic mismanagement of federal lands, which total over 600 million acres nationwide. “They don’t do a very good job of managing it,” she says, referring to agencies like the BLM, Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service. “The national forests were created to provide a continuous supply of timber and a continuous supply of water. They are failing at doing both.”
In Wyoming alone, she says, 3.2 million acres of forest have been designated as “roadless,” severely limiting access and harming both ecosystems and the economy.
To fight back, Hageman is leading the Article One Task Force to restore congressional power. Her goal is to reclaim the lawmaking function and reduce the ambiguity that enables regulatory overreach. “We need to become better at writing laws,” she says, criticizing the Legislative Counsel for advising members to remove specific definitions from bills to give agencies more flexibility. “That’s bad advice,” she argues. “They’re actually building in ambiguity into the legislation itself.”
Hageman believes that well-drafted laws should be “self-effectuating” and not require extensive regulation. “If you want the speed limit to be 75, you write the bill to say the speed limit is 75,” she explains. “You don’t direct the Department of Transportation to write regulations that the speed limit is going to be somewhere between 60 and 90.”
The task force she leads also educates fellow lawmakers on administrative law and due process issues, partnering with outside legal experts to improve Congress’s understanding of regulatory dynamics. “The only circumstance under which you have to have interpretation is when we draft a bill that is not specific enough,” Hageman says. “Everybody is entitled to know what the law is.”
One major initiative she’s introduced is the Seventh Amendment Restoration Act, which would allow individuals and businesses targeted by regulatory enforcement actions to move their cases from administrative courts to Article III courts. “Agencies like the SEC have stood up their own court system… they win their cases against us 95 or 98 percent of the time,” she says. “In front of Article III judges, they only have about a 65 percent success rate. So you're going to see fewer enforcement actions and fewer wrongheaded enforcement actions.”
Another priority is cracking down on what she calls “regulatory dark matter”—guidance documents that carry de facto legal force without undergoing formal rulemaking. “They are not supposed to have the force and effect of law, but they do,” Hageman warns. She recalls stopping a USDA mandate that would have forced livestock producers to use RFID tags, costing the industry up to $1.9 billion, based solely on a two-page online post.
The stakes are personal for Hageman, who spent much of her legal career representing farmers and ranchers. She recalls defending a Wyoming farmer who faced $65 million in penalties for moving an irrigation ditch. “They claimed that that irrigation ditch was a navigable water of the United States,” she says, even though the definition came from a guidance document, not Congress or a regulation.
Her hope is that Congress reclaims its rightful constitutional role. “If we do better at writing laws, we don’t even need the courts to interpret them,” Hageman says. “They should be enforced as they’re written.”
