The Interior Department is undoing a Biden-era regulation that treated conservation as a core mission alongside resource development on public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, according to documents released by the Trump administration.
The canceled rule had been designed under President Joe Biden to shift how the Interior Department’s land bureau operates. The regulation placed conservation on “equal footing” with development and allowed taxpayer-owned public land to be leased for restoration through a mechanism similar to the way oil companies can lease land for drilling, the Associated Press reported.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the rule could have prevented energy and timber production and harmed ranchers who graze on public lands, warning that it could have blocked access to hundreds of thousands of acres. Supporters of the 2024 approach argued that conservation had long been a secondary consideration at the land bureau and that the bureau’s practices did not match its mission under the 1976 Federal Lands Policy Management Act.
Biden’s 2024 rule also aimed to give conservation a more formal structure at the bureau, including a dedicated program that the bureau had not had before. Previously, the bureau issued leases for conservation purposes only in limited cases, rather than under a dedicated restoration program, according to the Associated Press account.
Administration officials said in the documents released Monday that the 2024 rule exceeded the authority Congress gave the land bureau and the Interior Department for conservation leasing. The administration’s position was that the rule went too far by allowing outside parties to obtain conservation leases on federal land.
The change drew strong opposition from industry groups and Republican lawmakers, who said conservation leasing under Biden’s rule violated the “multiple use” mandate for Interior Department lands. They characterized restoration leasing—described in the reporting as “non-use” of federal lands—as moving to prominence over activities such as drilling and grazing.
Dan Naatz of the Independent Petroleum Association of America said the administration’s action would provide “greater clarity and predictability” for independent oil and natural gas producers, adding that many rely on consistent permitting and leasing processes to operate and invest in domestic energy supply.
The federal government’s land holdings are concentrated in Western states including Alaska, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and the bureau also manages publicly owned underground mineral reserves across more than 1 million square miles, according to the AP report. As President Donald Trump took office, the administration pursued a series of actions intended to boost fossil fuel production on taxpayer-owned sites and to reduce support for some renewable energy projects that it said had been unfairly subsidized under Biden.
Conservation advocates criticized the rollback. Bobby McEnaney, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said repealing the rule would mean “less protection for the clean drinking water, less protection for endangered wildlife that depend on healthy habitat, and less accountability when corporations leave these landscapes damaged and degraded.”
The repeal is set to take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register, with the AP report saying it was scheduled for Tuesday. The action also followed recent Republican moves in Congress that canceled land management plans adopted in the last days of Biden’s administration restricting development in parts of Alaska, Montana and North Dakota.