Trump Administration Moves to Dismantle Conservation as an Official Use of Public Lands

Conservation would no longer count as an official use of federal public lands under a plan announced by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

On Wednesday, the agency declared its intent to rescind the Bureau of Land Management’s 2024 Public Lands Rule, which placed conservation on equal footing with uses such as natural gas drilling, mining, ranching, grazing, timber production and recreation. 

The decision would effectively deny the use of public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management for any non-extractive purpose, opponents say.

“With this announcement, the administration is saying that public lands should be managed primarily for the good of powerful drilling, mining and development interests,” Alison Flint, senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.

“They’re saying that public lands’ role in providing Americans the freedom to enjoy the outdoors, and conserve beloved places for future generations, is a second-class consideration.” 

There will be a 60-day comment period for the proposed rule rescission, during which public land advocates plan to pressure the Interior Department to reverse course. 

“The American people are not going to stand by and allow our common grounds to be handed over to the highest bidder,” said Todd Tucci, senior attorney at Advocates for the West, a nonprofit law firm defending public lands, water and wildlife in the American West.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for 245 million acres of federal public land across the United States, with broad authority to determine how those lands and their natural resources should be used.

The Biden administration codified the bureau’s responsibility for environmental protection and sustainable resource management in the 2024 Public Lands Rule, a landmark policy that declared conservation and restoration of public lands are of equal importance as traditional extractive uses.

The rule also created a framework for restoration and mitigation leases, through which third parties could apply to help restore the health of public land and waters or offset the impacts of resource extraction.

“The Public Lands Rule reaffirmed the foundational principle that the Bureau of Land Management’s multiple-use mission cannot be achieved without uplifting conservation and the health of our public lands,” said Keeley Meehan, policy director at the Colorado Wildlands Project.

At the time of its consideration, an overwhelming majority of public comments, 92 percent, were in support of the Public Lands Rule. Yet less than one year after its enactment, it is being dismantled.

In its press release, the Interior Department said the rule exceeded the BLM’s statutory authority by placing “an outsized priority” on conservation at the expense of multiple-use access.  

“The previous administration’s Public Lands 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.

Rolling back the Public Lands Rule will reduce regulatory uncertainty and expand access for the energy industry, recreational users, agricultural producers and others, the department said. 

Melissa Simpson, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade group, praised the Interior Department’s decision in a statement that characterized the Public Lands Rule as a misinterpretation of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The FLPMA, passed in 1976, outlines the powers and responsibilities of the Bureau of Land Management.

“FLPMA already provides BLM authority and mechanisms to address conservation,” Simpson said. Tens of millions of acres already have conservation-minded designations such as areas of critical environmental concern, national monuments and national historic trails, she said, far more acreage than is used for oil and gas production.

Tucci, of Advocates for the West, said the Public Lands Rule was not an overreach, but rather enshrined values already laid out in the land-policy law.

“There is a long history of FLPMA requiring the Bureau of Land Management to take conservation into consideration in determining how to manage our common ground,” Tucci said. “The only problem with the Public Lands Rule is that it took 50 years to issue.”

The decision to overturn the rule also directly contradicts the bureau’s arguments in support of the Public Lands Rule in federal court just last year, Tucci said. 

The agency “not only can, but must,” take conservation into land use consideration, said documents it filed in the lawsuit, brought by the American Farm Bureau Federation last summer.

The bureau’s recent change of tack could endanger the rule rescission if it is taken to court by opponents, said Chris Winter, executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School.

“They’re going to have to explain in court why they would do a complete 180-degree shift from where the prior administration was, and that’s not simple,” Winter said.

In the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, Congress clearly articulated the bureau’s responsibility to conserve public resources for the benefit of current and future generations, Winter said. “And I think this administration is just ignoring that language,” he added.

Given the land management challenges posed by climate change, the Public Lands Rule was intended to modernize the bureau’s approach, Winter said. 

Revoking it limits the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to care for areas that have not already been formally set aside as national monuments or areas of critical environmental concern, he said.

“This new development is going to hamstring [the bureau’s] ability to manage public lands in the face of climate change,” he said.

The reversal of the Public Lands Rule is antithetical to the very idea of public lands, argued John Robison, public lands and wildlife director of the Idaho Conservation League, in a statement.

“While we recognize the role that livestock grazing, energy development, and mineral extraction play, if you remove the Public Lands Rule and the ability to balance these uses with conservation, you end up prioritizing corporate profits over all other uses and the public ultimately loses out,” he said.