Trump Nixing Conservation Rule in Favor of Drilling and Mining on Federal Lands

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At an all-hands meeting of Interior Department employees on April 9, Secretary Doug Burgum stressed that managing and protecting federal public lands “must be held in balance.”

“It says in the mission statement the job of Interior is to ‘manage and protect,’” he said. “It doesn’t just say ‘protect,’ it says ‘manage and protect.’”

Better balance on public lands was precisely what the Biden administration was after with a rule it finalized last year. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the nation’s largest land management agency, has a long history of prioritizing drilling and other extraction. Biden’s so-called 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.

The change promised to improve the conservation track record of an agency that protects far less of its land from development than the Forest Service, the National Park Service, or the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Republicans denounced the rule, arguing it violated the BLM’s multiple-use mandate. And earlier this week, the Trump administration moved to rescind it altogether—part of a broader effort to boost drilling, mining, and other development across federally managed lands.

The rescission notice, which the White House Office of Management and Budget posted on Tuesday, follows a Trump executive order in February that directed federal agencies to identify and revoke “unlawful regulations and regulations that undermine the national interest.”

Rescinding the Biden-era rule flies in the face of public opinion. An analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that 92 percent of public commenters supported the rule. And the 15th annual “Conservation in the West” poll, released in February, found that 72 percent of voters in eight Western states want the government to prioritize conservation over increased energy development on public lands—the highest level of support in the poll’s history.

In addition to the Public Lands Rule, the White House moved to eliminate a Biden-era rule that barred oil and gas development across more than 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve, on Alaska’s North Slope.

Alison Flint, senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement that Trump is “putting himself above the law and planning to slash the safeguards that protect wildlife, clean air and water, and the communities that depend on them.”

“This is not policy—it’s a blatant giveaway to industry that threatens to dismantle decades of conservation progress, shut down public access, harm wildlife and accelerate the reckless sell-off of our natural resources,” she said.

Roque Planas contributed to this report.