The Trump administration advanced major changes Monday to how the Bureau of Land Management will handle the use of millions of acres of land, burying an effort to elevate conservation as a use on par with oil and gas drilling, mining, and recreation.
The Interior Department said it will eliminate a Biden administration environmental policy that sought to make conservation a formal use of public lands, while at the same time unveiling new regulations to ease access to livestock grazing. The dual updates, laid out in a pair of advanced Federal Register notices, mark a tectonic shift in the agency’s focus, ahead of the expected confirmation this week of President Donald Trump’s nominee to head BLM, former New Mexico GOP Rep. Steve Pearce.
Neither the Interior Department nor BLM immediately responded to a request for comment.
Over the last year, the Trump administration has sought to eliminate programs or regulations that address the impacts of climate change, and advance what Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called his agency’s path that has “unlocked America’s Balance Sheet.”
In a Federal Register notice to be published Tuesday, BLM announced it will formally strike down the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule.
Often called “the public lands rule,” the policy gave BLM authority to consider conservation and habitat health alongside other aspects of its multiple-use mission, such as oil and gas development, grazing, and recreation.
The rule had also allowed for entities to lease parcels of public land specifically for the purpose of landscape restoration.
In its Federal Register notice, BLM said rescinding the rule “restores balance to federal land management under the principles of multiple use and sustained yield by prioritizing access, empowering local decision-making, and aligning the BLM’s implementing regulations with statutory requirements and national energy policy.”
Industry groups have cheered the rollback of the Biden-era rule since Burgum announced plans to revoke it in September. A White House review of the plan to rescind the rule wrapped up last month.
Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council, an oil industry group, called the Biden-era rule “reckless agency overreach” in a statement.
“AXPC applauds Secretary Burgum for taking a crucial step to secure energy affordability by restoring balanced management of federal lands, including for responsible oil and natural gas development as Congress intended,” Bradbury said.
Burgum has repeatedly decried government policies that limit mining, grazing, drilling and timber harvesting.
The Wilderness Society, which like other environmental groups opposes the Trump administration’s moves, called the proposal “a bid to make industrial applications like drilling and mining the default and dominant use of our nation’s public lands forever.”
In a statement, Alison Flint, the group’s acting vice president for federal policy, said, “Congress directed the BLM to manage public lands in a way that balances uses like outdoor recreation with needs as varied as grazing, energy development and conservation of wildlife habitat.”
The new proposal, Flint said, “flouts both the agency’s legal mandate and the overwhelming wishes of the American people for public lands to be managed in a balanced and sustainable way that conserves special places for future generations.”
Changes to grazing policy
BLM is also set to propose revisions to grazing regulations in the Federal Register, which it asserts will give ranchers more flexibility in utilizing public allotments and alleviate what it called “a disproportionate share of the burden” on permit holders for maintaining rangeland health.
“This proposed rule is intended to modernize the BLM’s grazing program and bring its regulations in line with current best practices for grazing administration,” the agency wrote in its notice, which will kick off a 60-day public comment period.
The rules changes would apply to 155 million acres of public lands on which BLM issues permits for livestock grazing.
An advocacy group for cattle and sheep producers praised the proposed changes.
“For more than 30 years, BLM has been operating under rules that were developed after radical activists tried to remove grazing from federal lands,” said Public Lands Council Executive Director Kaitlynn Glover.
Environmental groups that have urged less intensive grazing called the administration’s actions a big step backward on conservation and warned that cattle and sheep grazing would remain the biggest factor in public lands degradation in the West.
The Western Watersheds Project, based in Hailey, Idaho, said the proposal stretches the law to expand livestock grazing by giving it a production-oriented definition in the permitting regulations. The organization’s policy director, Josh Osher, called it a “blatantly illegal effort to redefine livestock grazing.”
“They’re just making it up out of whole cloth,” Osher told POLITICO’s E&E News. “The courts will surely throw it out.”
Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, likewise criticized the new proposal for reducing public input into federal lands.
“These regulations are designed to further cut the public and scientists out of our public lands. Public lands belong to all of us, even when they’re being used for grazing,” Weiss said. “These rules would get rid of the requirement that BLM ‘consult, cooperate, and coordinate’ with the public when issuing or modifying grazing permits.”
He added: “Grazing would be effectively locked in, even when droughts, fires or other natural disasters make it impossible to meet rangeland health standards.”
