Another contentious Biden-era public lands management policy is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
The Bureau of Land Management is moving to potentially scrub some of the revised Rock Springs land-use plan in southwestern Wyoming that was finalized last year. The plan, which was criticized by Wyoming Republicans, called for protections of hundreds of thousands of acres.
BLM plans to review the revised resource management plan, which governs activities across 3.6 million acres of BLM rangelands in the state, to potentially open more federal lands to mining and energy development that were closed in the revised plans.
The bureau had determined the potential “for fluid mineral development” was low in the nearly 1 million acres closed to oil and gas leasing in the revised plan, but “new technologies and industry interest have changed over recent years and the reasonably foreseeable development needs to be reevaluated,” according to an advance notice posted in Wednesday’s Federal Register.
