Public lands protection took another hit last week when the White House Office of Management and Budget posted the administration’s intent to roll back a Biden-era ruling that put conservation on equal footing with energy development, livestock grazing and recreation on 81 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land, including 8.3 million in Colorado.
Posting the notice is a part of the formal process to list rules at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, so a rule hasn’t been proposed yet, said Kathleen Sgamma, President Donald Trump’s appointee for BLM director until she withdrew her nomination after a 2021 letter critical of Trump that she wrote as president of the Western Energy Alliance resurfaced. She recently resigned from the oil and gas trade group.
But conservation groups like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers are raising the alarm, because the Public Lands Rule, which is on the chopping block, reflects years of work from multiple stakeholders “to ensure the long-term health of the landscapes we rely on for healthy fish and wildlife habitat,” they say, and “rescinding it in its entirety is a direct affront to those who value America’s wild places, and the democratic process used to steward them for the benefit of all of us as public landowners.”
The notice aligned with a meeting called by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last week when he let Interior Department employees know the job of the agency is to “manage and protect” public lands, not just protect them. “We’re in the world of ‘and,’ not ‘or,’” he said.
Management and protection of BLM lands was what the Biden administration’s Public Lands Rule espoused as it moved through the Republican-controlled U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources in 2023 and was finalized in April 2024 following review of more than 200,000 public comments.
The BLM is the nation’s largest land management agency. The Public Lands Rule sought to put conservation and ecosystem restoration on equal footing with drilling and other extractive uses, including by offering new leases for improving and recovering federal lands and offsetting development impacts.
Not everyone loved it: During the 2023 House committee hearing it was called a seismic shift in public land management that would upend the agency’s multiple-use mandate and a Biden administration tactic to lock up more lands and advance the administration’s goal of conserving 30% of U.S. lands and oceans by 2030.
The Trump administration seems intent on dismantling that goal.
Following directions in Trump’s Unleashing American Energy executive order released in January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week lifted protections proposed by the Biden administration on over 264,000 acres in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains and parts of New Mexico to promote oil, gas, geothermal and hard-rock mineral extraction, for instance. Burgum has called the nation’s parks, public lands and natural resources – including timber, fossil fuels and minerals – assets on “the nation’s balance sheet.”
But Sgamma said rescinding the BLM rule would be essentially inconsequential as it was “based on a very novel interpretation of the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act,” which established the BLM’s sustained yield and multiple-use mandate. And “there’s no legal basis for it,” she said.
The rule has “barely been implemented, so it really hasn’t had much effect on BLM lands in the West,” she said.
And it’s pretty much a given that it will be rescinded, Sgamma said, because “Congress overturned a substantially similar rule using the Congressional Review Act when they overturned BLM Planning 2.0” during Trump’s first presidency.
That rule was considered a long-overdue attempt by the BLM to improve the way the agency had developed land use plans over the previous 40 years in ways that made its efforts with multiple stakeholders more collaborative, transparent and efficient.
“This rule is obviously substantially similar,” Sgamma said.
But The Wilderness Society says the Public Lands Rule wasn’t attempting to stop oil and gas development and there’s no reason to rescind it.
“Public lands belong to the American people, not to drilling or mining interests,” Alison Flint, its senior legal director, said. “The BLM Public Lands Rule simply affirmed that conservation is just as valid a use of our public lands as development, and it brought common sense and overdue reform to how these places are managed.
“By marking it and pragmatic protections for the Western Arctic for rollbacks, the administration is shouting from the rooftops that they intend to give our public lands away, threaten access to outdoor recreation and run roughshod over wildlife habitat.”
Sgamma said “if the left really wants to have this type of conservation regulation of BLM lands, then the left needs to do the hard work of getting something passed in Congress.”
