The Interior Department moved Wednesday to kill the Bureau of Land Management’s public lands rule, saying the Biden administration’s designation of conservation as a formal use of BLM rangelands violates federal law by restricting the use of millions of acres of public land.
The Trump administration’s proposal to rescind the conservation and landscape health rule — commonly referred to as the public lands rule — follows a five-month review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and a separate BLM review of the rule.
BLM’s review determined that the rule making conservation as much of a priority on bureau rangelands as energy development or recreation “is unnecessary and violates existing statutory requirements,” according to a notice published in the Federal Register on Wednesday that outlines details of the proposal.
The Biden administration’s rule “had the potential to block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of multiple-use land — preventing energy and mineral production, timber management, grazing and recreation across the West,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement.
But conservationists pushed back, saying the move to dismantle the rule would hamstring BLM’s ability to protect public lands from the ravages of increased wildfires, drought and other impacts of a warming climate. Among other components, the rule applied rangeland health standards across the 245 million acres the bureau oversees. It also created a new leasing system that would have allowed environmental groups or others to pay to protect BLM-managed land for a certain period of time, such as if companies wanted to execute a mitigation project to compensate for work on other federal land.
“With this announcement, the administration is saying that public lands should be managed primarily for the good of powerful drilling, mining and development interests,” said Alison Flint, senior legal director at the Wilderness Society. “They’re saying that public lands’ role in providing Americans the freedom to enjoy the outdoors, and conserve beloved places for future generation, is a second-class consideration.”
Vera Smith, national forests and public lands director at Defenders of Wildlife, said the public lands rule “provided for healthy habitats and now it’s foolishly being yanked away in service of the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ agenda.”
BLM suggested in the Federal Register notice — signed by Adam Suess, Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management — that the Biden administration sidestepped public concerns and criticisms of the rule before implementing it in June 2024. Those included comments that the administration downplayed the economic effects of the rule.
“The most effective caretakers of our federal lands are those whose livelihoods rely on its well-being,” Burgum said in his statement. “Overturning this rule protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on.”
The proposal to revoke the rule falls in line with numerous executive orders issued by President Donald Trump and secretarial orders from Burgum, designed to remove regulatory barriers to energy development and mining activity on federal lands in the name of bolstering energy independence and security.
“The new rule is a welcome change from the prior clear disregard for the legal obligation to balance multiple uses on federal lands,” said Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association.
Revoking the rule, Nolan added, will help ensure “that our vast resources can meet today’s soaring energy needs and become the secure mineral supply chains for American industry.”
Melissa Simpson, president of the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry trade group, echoed that sentiment.
“The Conservation and Landscape Health rule upended over a century of public lands management practices that strike a balance between providing the resources our nation needs with protecting the environment,” Simpson said in a statement. “Whereas lands leased for oil and natural gas development are still available for numerous other uses such as recreation, land that would be set aside for conservation would restrict other productive uses.”
It’s not yet clear how revoking the rule would impact a handful of federal lawsuits challenging the rule that have been filed by various industry groups, including Western Energy Alliance, as well as six states, including North Dakota last year while Burgum was governor.
“It’s yet to be seen what happens to the federal litigation, but it does seem to me that it is likely that the cases go away,” said Todd Tucci, a senior attorney for Advocates for the West, which is representing a coalition of conservation groups that have intervened in the lawsuits.
BLM said in the Federal Register notice that it has determined the rule violates federal law and oversteps the bureau’s statutory authority to carefully balance the management of rangelands for multiple uses as required by the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
“The 2024 Rule constrains agency flexibility necessary to manage under such principles,” according to the notice.
The notice takes aim at the rule’s establishment of a restoration and mitigation leasing program designed to leverage private dollars by allowing companies and nonprofit groups to purchase leases for restoration projects or to offset damage from projects on other bureau rangelands.
BLM says in the notice that this leasing program “ultimately vests too much discretion in individual authorizing officers to preclude other, productive uses, such as grazing, mining, and energy development, as incompatible with the goals of the restoration or mitigation under the lease, potentially over large tracts of public land.”
The rule “also unlawfully and unnecessarily expanded the scope of the BLM’s regulations governing the designation and management of areas of critical environmental concern,” or ACECs, according to the notice.
The rule prioritized conserving pristine landscapes through ACEC designations. Among other things, it allowed BLM to implement “temporary management” procedures for some parcels nominated for designation as ACECs — which are managed primarily to protect their environmental, cultural, historic or scientific values, restricting activities that conflict with that priority.
“This distorts the normal ACEC process,” BLM said in the notice. “These temporary management areas not yet designated as ACECs interfere with productive use of the land without engaging in the planning process. Thus, the 2024 Rule denies opportunities for public participation to determine whether the ACEC designation is even warranted.”
A 60-day public comment period on the Trump administration’s proposal will begin Thursday and runs through Nov. 10.
The White House has targeted November for finalizing the rule, according to the latest Unified Agenda released last week detailing the Trump administration’s priority rules and regulations.
The effort to do so “is a welcome relief,” said House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), a vocal critic of the Biden administration rule.
“This rescission ensures our public lands remain productive and accessible for all Americans,” Westerman said in a statement. “I thank the administration for protecting Western jobs and American energy dominance and look forward to working with them to restore commonsense to federal land management.”
Scott Streater can be reached on Signal at s_streater.80.
