Trump Repeals Rule That Let Conservation Compete With Mining On America's Public Lands, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Protecting The Land Was Still A Legal Way To Use It

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday finalized the repeal of its Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, known as the Public Lands Rule, a 2024 regulation that had committed the federal government to treating the protection of land as a use of equal standing with mining, drilling, logging, and grazing, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that conservation had been permitted to enter the competition at all.

The rescinded rule governed the 245 million acres the agency manages under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, a law that directs the BLM to balance multiple uses for present and future generations. Officials took particular issue with the rule's central instruments, restoration and mitigation leasing, which had raised the possibility that a party might lease a parcel of public land in order to repair it rather than remove something from it, an outcome the agency characterized as an unnecessary burden.

"By rescinding the 2024 Rule, the BLM eliminates mechanisms, such as restoration and mitigation leasing, that threatened to restrict productive use of the public lands," the agency wrote in the Federal Register, adding that existing tools "remain sufficient to address conservation objectives without imposing prescriptive mandates or rigid timelines on public land users and the BLM itself." The bureau did not respond to a request for comment, having already explained itself in the document repealing the rule it was being asked about.

The original Public Lands Rule had drawn the support of 92 percent of the public comments the agency received on it, a level of agreement the bureau resolved by removing the rule those commenters supported. A source within the administration noted that the regulation had let conservation groups, of all parties, lease federal acreage to begin restoring abandoned mine sites, a function the source described as the kind of thing the land could simply be left to handle on its own over the coming centuries.

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon praised the decision as "a welcome return to the statutory principle of true multiple use on our public lands," the multiple uses in question being the several that take material off the land and the single one, now retired, that proposed putting some back. Conservation groups and county officials in Utah and Arizona, whose local economies depend on visitors arriving to look at the land rather than through it, called the repeal a betrayal of the agency's mandate to manage public acreage for future generations.

At press time, the Interior Department had confirmed that America's public lands remained fully open to the public, provided each member of the public arrived with a drill, a chainsaw, or a herd of cattle and a sincere intention to use it.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who banks another deregulatory achievement for his energy-dominance agenda and a further demonstration that protections finalized by the prior administration can be undone by his own.
§Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Bureau of Land Management leadership, who delivered a long-sought industry priority and reframed the elimination of conservation leasing as the removal of red tape.
§The mining, oil and gas, timber, and livestock-grazing industries, which no longer have to see conservation treated as a competing claim on the 245 million acres they extract from.
§Hardrock and critical-minerals mining companies, specifically relieved of the mitigation-leasing system that could have required them to offset the public land they consume by protecting public land elsewhere.
§Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and allied Western state officials, who get the "multiple use" framing they wanted, now narrowed to the uses that remove things.
§Project developers across the West, freed from the prospect of having to lease and restore intact parcels to balance the damage their projects do to others.
§Future commercial interests and any future administration, which inherit the established precedent that protection of public land is a temporary condition reversible by a single rulemaking.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment