Just a Year After It Was Implemented, BLM Plans to Rescind the Public Lands Rule

Just as it is proposing rollbacks to conservation measures on U.S. Forest Service lands, the Trump administration today announced plans to rescind the BLM’s Public Lands Rule, which elevated conservation as a multiple use on par with grazing and oil drilling on millions of acres of mainly Western rangelands.

This morning Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the agency’s proposal to rescind the 2024 Public Lands Rule that was intended to broaden the BLM’s ability to manage landscapes and enter into leases for reasons other than resource extraction.

In a news release, Burgum noted that the Public Lands Rule, officially known as the “Conservation & Landscape Health Rule,” made conservation an official use of public lands, putting it on the same level as BLM’s other uses of public lands. The rule required the BLM to consider “landscape health” as a key management objective. That vague definition, intended to give the BLM tools to improve wildlife and fisheries habitats, was out of alignment with the Trump administration’s “Unleashing America’s Energy” initiative to accelerate mining and fossil-fuel extraction on public lands.

“The previous administration had treated conservation as ‘no use,’ meaning it [sic] the land was to be left idle rather than authorizing legitimate uses of the land like grazing, energy development or recreation,” noted the BLM in its release. “However, stakeholders, including the energy industry, recreational users and agricultural producers, across the country expressed deep concern that the rule created regulatory uncertainty, reduced access to lands, and undermined the long-standing multiple-use mandate of the BLM as established by Congress. Now, the BLM proposed to rescind this rule in full.”

The Department of Interior will accept public comments on the proposal to rescind the rule. The comment period will be open for 60 days following the official rescission proposal’s publication in the Federal Register.

The administration had already signaled that the Public Lands Rule was “marked for death,” according to sources.

The 2024 rule had been pursued for decades by conservationists who had observed that while the BLM’s multiple-use mandate required managers to balance grazing, mineral extraction, hunting, and recreational access, habitat conservation wasn’t always elevated in what critics called an “industrialization” of 245 million acres of American public land.

Read Next: You Have Just 3 Weeks to Object to the Roadless Rule Rollback, Which Will Affect 45 Million Wild Acres Across the U.S.

“Rescinding the rule eliminates uncertainty for industry stakeholder concerning potential litigation risks and permitting delays,” noted the Interior Department in today’s release. “Consistent with Secretary’s Order 3418, ‘Unleashing American Energy, the recission [sic] of the Public Lands Rule will eliminate unnecessary barriers to energy development and support the multiple-use mandate of the BLM by not prioritizing conservation over all other uses.”