With the world anxiously watching the conflict in Iran, it was no surprise that the first segment in the March 1 edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes featured an interview with Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last Shah. The second segment, however, returned to a staple theme of the CBS news team. It presented a perspective on a current issue calculated to discredit the Trump administration and its supporters. [some emphasis, links added]
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If 60 Minutes offered balanced coverage, it would take a serious look at the power that just one judge can still wield over policies affecting the entire nation. There are 677 district judgeships in the U.S., as well as 178 circuit court judges.
Even though the June 2025 Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc. limited the ability of individual judges to issue nationwide injunctions, it did not entirely take away that power, nor did it diminish the ability of a single federal judge to stop major industrial projects in their tracks.
There are numerous high-profile examples of how activist judges have used their power to thwart initiatives of the Trump administration; so while the visibility of these rulings has risen, they have been around for a long time.
One of the biggest areas where individual activist judges have been able to exercise sweeping power is in the de facto partnership some have formed with environmentalists.
During the Obama Administration, environmentalist NGOs turned litigation into a business model, collecting millions by suing the U.S. EPA, which would immediately settle and pay their legal fees.
Far more costly, however, was the fact that these rulings would shortcut the normal deliberative process, fast-tracking aggressive new regulations on power plants, fertilizers, waste management, air quality, water quality, and so on.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that between 2009 and 2017, Clean Air Act regulations from the “sue and settle” scam totaled an estimated $70 billion in industry costs and, ultimately, to consumers.
The cost inflicted by environmental activist judges is not just economic. In some cases, they have also caused horrific mismanagement with catastrophic consequences for both the environment and people.
Needlessly destructive wildfires are a perfect example. The way to preserve healthy forests is to strike a balance: to the extent humans suppress naturally occurring wildfires, they must engage in other fuel-reduction means.
To neglect this balance by only putting out fires is to turn America’s forests into tinderboxes. And thanks to environmentalist litigators and activist judges, that is exactly what has happened.
A December 2025 investigative report published by the Breakthrough Institute describes the asymmetric power a handful of environmentalist litigators and activist judges can wield.
It is important to note that the Breakthrough Institute is not a “right-wing” organization. Formed in 2007, it embraces the potential of technology and innovation and is critical of typical environmentalist anti-growth ideology.
In this article, the authors provide numerous examples of how just a few attorneys have literally destroyed the responsible management of forests across the U.S., especially, of course, in California. They write:
A small but loud environmentalist minority opposes fuel reduction, instead claiming that California’s forests must be left untouched.
They use outdated environmental laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Endangered Species Act, Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and National Forest Management Act in courts to delay, and sometimes cancel, projects that would mitigate wildfires that destroy the ecosystems they claim to protect.
In a particularly amazing example, they identify one group, the “Conservation Congress,” that has sued the U.S. Forest Service dozens of times. This “group” is operated by just one person: Montana resident Denise Boggs.
Sometimes Boggs loses her cases, but she wins them often enough to stop fuel-reduction projects that are critical to forest health—projects that can’t wait until the next fire season.
While Boggs is a lone maverick with outsized influence, she is joined by powerful nonprofits that spend millions on litigation.
They include the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and many others with a national presence. Thanks to their litigation, timber harvest permits are denied or delayed, prescribed burns are stopped, and mechanical thinning is prohibited.
As a consequence, wildfires that can’t be immediately extinguished turn into fires without any historical precedent. With densities five to ten times higher than normal, trees are stressed and dehydrated because too many are competing for limited water, soil nutrients, and sunlight.
Across mountains and canyons, conifer forests that were never supposed to get so overgrown and dried out explode into superfires that can’t be contained. The environmentalists call it climate change, and policymakers ban gasoline-powered cars.
Read full post at American Greatness
Forests, fires, and ‘regulations’. Umpqua National Forest, Oregon, mid 90’s. A Sunday afternoon. Lightning strike, two ‘snags’ involved. Nothing else close to them. The Incident Commander called in, “The fire is 200 yards inside the wilderness area. Request permission to use chain saws.” That had to come from Washington! They sat and watched that fire for two hours. The reply, finally, “Permission denied.” By that time the ‘fire’ had just about burned out and it was basically a clean-up operation.
(We were volunteer “Camp Hosts” at Diamond Lake Campground for five summers. Issued a regular USFS two-way hand-held radio for communications. I wanted more coverage so we bought a ‘police’ scanner and monitored fire/ambulance frequencies for three counties plus Crater Lake National Park. Got to hear things that the general public wouldn’t.)