In 2011, McCarthy was the primary author of the "Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act" (H.R. 1581), legislation that would strip 60 million acres of public lands of protected status. Under the bill, protections for roadless and wilderness study areas would be eliminated, and vast swaths of land opened to new industrial development (such as logging, mineral extraction, and fossil fuel extraction). The bill was strongly criticized by conservationist groups and by former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, who called it "the most radical, overreaching attempt to dismantle the architecture of our public land laws" that he had seen in his lifetime.