Safari Club International (SCI) is calling for commonsense reform to ensure taxpayer dollars are used to advance conservation—not to bankroll litigation that delays meaningful progress on wildlife and habitat management.
SCI commends Representative Mike Rulli (R-OH) for introducing legislation to reform the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), a law originally intended to help individuals and small entities challenge government overreach. Despite its laudable intent, EAJA has been exploited by wealthy nonprofit organizations to pursue repeated litigation against federal agencies.
"For too long, EAJA has been implemented in a way that is anything but equal," said SCI CEO W. Laird Hamberlin. "Organizations with a net worth in the tens or hundreds of millions have misused this law to shift their legal costs onto taxpayers while advancing lawsuits that yield little meaningful conservation benefit."
EAJA imposes net worth eligibility on businesses and individuals, but excepts 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from these caps. Well-funded non-profits have recovered millions of dollars in attorneys' fees under EAJA—even when these organizations have significant funding sources, including tax-deductible contributions. SCI and other stakeholders have raised concerns that this dynamic incentivizes serial litigation, diverting limited agency resources away from on-the-ground conservation work and toward defending lawsuits.
Representative Rulli's bill addresses these concerns by introducing critical transparency and accountability measures. It imposes much-needed hourly fee caps outside of social security and veterans' benefits cases and establishes annual limits on fee recovery, therefore reducing the amount of attorneys' fees that 501(c)(3) organizations can recover. It also requires full documentation and disclosure to support any fee request. These reforms are designed to ensure that taxpayers are not subsidizing excessive or unjustified legal costs.
"This bill ensures that taxpayer funds are used as intended—not as a litigation revenue stream—but as a safeguard for fairness and good governance," said CEO Hamberlin. "Reforming EAJA is essential to advancing science-based wildlife and habitat management and protecting effective conservation outcomes. Excessive litigation can delay species recovery efforts and proactive land management initiatives that benefit both wildlife and local communities."