How Anti-Hunting Groups Found a Cash Cow Hidden in Federal Law
For years, a quiet legal strategy has been funneling taxpayer dollars into the bank accounts of anti-hunting organizations — and most Americans have no idea it's been happening. A new bill introduced in Congress is now trying to close the door on what critics call one of the most brazen abuses of federal law in the outdoor sports world.
Congressman Mike Rulli, a Republican from Ohio, introduced H.R. 9295, the Stop Serial Litigation Act of 2026, targeting a long-running scheme that advocacy groups opposed to hunting have used to essentially bankroll their operations through the court system — at the expense of American taxpayers.
A Law Built for the Little Guy, Twisted Into Something Else
The Equal Access to Justice Act, known as EAJA, was created with good intentions. The idea was straightforward: if a regular person or small business took the federal government to court and won, they shouldn't have to absorb crushing legal fees just for being right. So Congress allowed prevailing parties to recover their attorneys' fees from the government.
It was designed to level the playing field. What nobody anticipated was that well-funded nonprofit organizations would eventually turn it into a revenue stream.
That's exactly what happened. Anti-hunting groups discovered that by suing federal agencies — and either winning outright or reaching settlements — they could collect attorneys' fees from the government treasury. And because of a specific carve-out in the law, they could do this regardless of how wealthy those organizations actually were.
The Numbers Behind the Scheme
EAJA does have wealth limits built in. Individuals with a net worth over $2 million cannot recover fees. Businesses and organizations worth more than $7 million are also cut off. Those thresholds were meant to make sure the law helped people who genuinely couldn't afford a legal fight against the federal government.
But here's the catch: 501(c)(3) nonprofits are completely exempt from those limits. That exemption, meant to protect small charities, opened the door wide for large, well-capitalized advocacy organizations to collect taxpayer-funded legal fees no matter how big their endowments grew.
The Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation, which has spent years battling these groups in court, has watched the situation reach levels that are difficult to describe without pausing to let the numbers sink in.
"We've seen nonprofit entities with assets north of $50 million, being represented by nonprofit law firms with assets north of $200 million, recovering substantial amounts of attorney's fees from the federal government," said Michael Jean, Litigation Counsel for Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation.
Read that again. A nonprofit organization sitting on $50 million in assets, represented by a law firm with $200 million in assets, walking away with taxpayer money meant to help the little guy fight city hall.
Sue, Settle, Repeat
The mechanism these groups have used most effectively is what's been called the "sue and settle" tactic. It works like this: an advocacy group files a lawsuit against a federal agency. Rather than fight the case in open court, the agency quietly negotiates a behind-closed-doors settlement. That settlement often includes two things — an agreement to adopt policies favorable to the advocacy group, and an agreement to pay out attorneys' fees.
The result is a policy win and a payday, all without a single piece of evidence being tested in open court and without the public ever getting to weigh in. Hunting regulations, land use decisions, wildlife management policies — all subject to being quietly rewritten in private settlement negotiations that taxpayers fund but never see.
These groups have been transparent enough about the strategy in their own materials. The Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation has pointed to documents in which these organizations openly acknowledged that suing the government and recovering attorneys' fees allows them to "survive and thrive." That phrase isn't speculation or spin — it comes from the groups themselves.
What the New Bill Would Actually Do
The Stop Serial Litigation Act of 2026 takes aim at this cycle by putting a hard cap on how much any single organization can recover in attorneys' fees from the federal government in a given year. Under H.R. 9295, that ceiling would be set at $300,000 annually.
For an organization with tens of millions of dollars in assets, that's a significant reduction from what some of these groups have been pulling in. The goal isn't to shut down legitimate legal challenges to government action — it's to stop deep-pocketed advocacy organizations from treating the federal court system as a fundraising mechanism.
As Michael Jean put it: "This bill limits fee awards to $300,000 a year. Now they will have to find other ways to 'survive and thrive' that don't involve taxpayer dollars."
Why This Matters for Hunters
The policy consequences of the sue-and-settle pipeline have been real and tangible for hunters, anglers, and trappers across the country. When federal agencies settle these cases behind closed doors, the agreements often carry conditions that reshape how public lands are managed, which species get listed under the Endangered Species Act, and how wildlife populations are handled — all areas with direct impact on hunting seasons, access, and tradition.
The Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation has been in the trenches fighting these legal battles for years, challenging anti-hunting litigation across multiple states and federal jurisdictions. The organization sees H.R. 9295 as a chance to change the financial math that makes serial litigation so attractive in the first place.
If filing lawsuit after lawsuit is profitable — if it literally keeps the lights on at your organization — then there's no incentive to stop. The Stop Serial Litigation Act is designed to change that calculation without taking away anyone's right to sue the government when they have a legitimate grievance.
A Long Time Coming
There's a certain frustration that builds when a loophole this large has stayed open this long. The EAJA's nonprofit exemption wasn't a secret. The sue-and-settle playbook wasn't invented yesterday. But the political will to address it has been slow to develop, even as the costs to taxpayers and the costs to the hunting community have continued to mount.
Supporters of H.R. 9295 argue that fixing this doesn't require abandoning the original spirit of the Equal Access to Justice Act. Average citizens should still be able to take the government to court without being financially destroyed in the process. What the law shouldn't do is subsidize the operations of organizations with nine-figure balance sheets.
The bill now moves through the legislative process, with sportsmen's groups watching closely. For the hunting and fishing community, it represents something rare — a chance to push back against a system that has quietly worked against them for decades, one closed-door settlement at a time.
