Regulations for public lands likely to change under Trump

“Drill, baby, drill!”

President-elect Donald Trump echoed that slogan throughout his successful campaign to retake the White House. 

With key cabinet nominations and other advisers named, oil and gas industry leaders are optimistic about an “energy dominant” future, particularly on federal lands.

In Colorado, recent decisions like the Thompson Divide mineral-lease withdrawal and the Camp Hale monument designation delighted some groups and left others frustrated. Looking ahead to an administration that’s friendly to oil and gas, some experts are saying those decisions are likely safe — but the regulatory and statutory environment that fostered them may not be.

The Bureau of Land Management under the Department of the Interior is charged with managing extraction of minerals, such as oil and natural gas, on both federally owned and privately held land. The bureau also oversees federal lands used for livestock grazing, recreation and timber harvesting — plus conservation.

The BLM webpage for Colorado says the agency manages 8.3 million acres of public lands and 27 million acres of federal mineral estate, most of which is on the Western Slope. Recently, the bureau advertised three oil and gas parcels totaling 12,115 acres that may be included in a September 2025 lease sale in the state.

Project 2025, the conservative roadmap for a second Trump presidency organized by The Heritage Foundation, calls for a return to an “energy dominance” approach to federal land and minerals management. Chapter 16 outlines goals for the Department of the Interior.

Trump and his campaign attempted to distance themselves from the policy agenda, but the New York Times reported many connections between Project 2025 authors or contributors and Trump’s past and future administrations —- including the former acting director of the BLM, William Perry Pendley, who is listed as the author of the chapter on the Interior Department. Pendley was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate and was forced to resign from his BLM director’s position after a federal judge declared his position “unlawful” in September 2020.

Trump’s pick to head the BLM in his second term is North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. National Public Radio reports that Burgum has been a major supporter of oil and gas drilling in his state, though most of that occurred on private land. 

Thompson Divide, a low priority?

Kathleen Sgamma is president of the Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based advocacy that represents oil and natural gas interests in the West. The group advocates for a “a stable, predictable regulatory climate that recognizes the oil and natural gas industry as a partner in environmental protection.” The alliance has lauded Trump’s choice of Burgum.

A coalition of Western Slope conservationists, ranchers, recreationists and more celebrated the Biden administration’s August announcement of an administrative withdrawal of approximately 221,898 acres of USDA Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land from disposition under the public land laws and operation of U.S. mining, mineral and geothermal leasing laws for a 20-year period, subject to valid existing rights. Essentially, that meant no new leases for 20 years.

While Project 2025 says to “abandon withdrawals of lands from leasing in the Thompson Divide,” Sgamma said that’s not high on a priority list for her organization, nor does she think it is for the incoming administration.

“The withdrawal could have been more targeted to take into account those existing leases,” she said. “That’s maybe one area of adjusting it around the edges, but I’m not sure if that one reaches to the top of the priority list in the Trump administration.”

Chris Winter is an attorney and executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. He agreed, noting that the potential for new mineral leasing on the Thompson Divide was already low.

“The oil industry has been really clear throughout this process that it’s not their priority to get into that area for more exploration and development, primarily, I think, not only the public interest in conserving and protecting that area, but because of the oil and gas potential there,” he said.

Wilderness Workshop, a Carbondale-based conservation advocacy nonprofit that works toward the protection of Western Slope wildlife, water and wilderness, worked alongside local groups like the Thompson Divide Coalition to advocate for the withdrawal of lands from new oil and gas leases. 

Wilderness Workshop stills hope for a permanent withdrawal, which only Congress may grant. Executive Director Will Roush said a reversal on the 20-year Thompson Divide protections would violate community will.

“Any attempt to get rid of it would not only be terribly out of touch with local communities, but I think would be fiercely fought against,” he said. “I’m confident that in the end, this place will be protected.”

New conflict brewing

Instead, a conflict appears to brew around the BLM’s recent elevation of conservation in its management plan and the environmental review process for federal agency decisions: the NEPA process.

BLM implemented the The Conservation and Landscape Health Rule in June after adoption in April following a yearlong rule change process with over 200,000 public comments. Also known as the Public Lands Rule, the change brings “conservation” to equal footing with other uses of BLM land to promote the health and resilience of the land. 

Under the final rule, “conservation” includes protecting the most intact, functioning landscapes, restoring degraded habitats and ecosystems, and using science and data, including Indigenous knowledge, as the foundation for management decisions across all plans and programs. It applies to all BLM land, over 245 million acres nationwide.

In an April legal analysis of the Public Lands Rule through the Getches-Wilkinson Center, Winter said the final rule is consistent with the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which established BLM’s multiple-use and sustained yield mandate to serve present and future generations. The BLM manages 8.3 million acres of public land and 27 million acres of federal mineral estate in Colorado, while the U.S. Forest Service holds 11.3 million acres, according to the Colorado State Forest Service. 

Project 2025 does not name the Public Lands Rule, likely due to timing, but it exhaustively argues that Congress, through acts like FLPMA, “clearly set forth multiple-use principles and processes that include production of coal, oil, natural gas and other minerals, as legitimate activities consistent with the welfare of all Americans and of environmental stewardship.”

Oil and natural gas development has an impact that should be minimized, Sgamma said, but the alliance sees the Public Lands Rule as an aberration from FLPMA. 

“Where we advocate and try to overturn rules are things like the BLM conservation rule, which upends the FLPMA system of balanced public lands management,” she said. “When an administration regulates outside of the law, and when an agency oversteps its regulatory authority, that’s when we really get involved.”

For Roush, FLPMA provides “common sense management and protection of ecological values.”

BLM approved a Resource Management Plan for the Grand Junction and Colorado River Valley Field Offices in October. It leaves approximately 85% high potential land open for future oil and gas leasing, while low and medium potential areas are largely closed to leasing. The plans also include new areas for the protection of wilderness characteristics. ​​​​Roush pointed to the apparent consensus around that plan as evidence of common sense management. 

Winter said it is not surprising that two groups with different visions for BLM land use would both cite FLPMA as evidence to support their perspective.

“​​It doesn’t tell the agency which use to prioritize over the other ones, for the most part. It says to provide for a sustained yield over time for current and future generations,” he said. “Within those very broad contours, there’s a lot of room for not only agency discretion, but differing viewpoints and interpretations on how that statutory mandate [FLPMA] should be applied.”

Amending FLPMA would require congressional action. Undoing the rule change could be pursued, Winter said, but the Trump administration would have to follow the same arduous process as the Biden administration utilized for the Public Lands Rule.

Weaponizing NEPA?

Congress signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law in 1970 under President Nixon. It requires federal agencies to consider environmental impacts before making decisions. The NEPA process of varying levels of environmental review comes into play frequently in the Roaring Fork Valley and the Western Slope due to the expansive public lands managed by the Forest Service or BLM. 

It’s used to collect public comment and inform agencies throughout highly complicated decisions with numerous stakeholders like the Thompson Divide administrative withdrawal as well as minor decisions relating to something as simple as a grazing allotment. 

Project 2025 states that the Interior Department is “abusing” the NEPA process to “advance a radical climate agenda, ostensibly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for which DOI has no statutory responsibility or authority.”

It goes on to call for the rescinding of Biden administration amendments to NEPA from the Council on Environmental Equity, a federal agency under the executive branch. The July 2024 CEQ amendments mandate federal agencies use the NEPA process to make decisions “grounded in science, including consideration of relevant environmental, climate change and environmental justice effects.”

Sgamma said that the NEPA process has been weaponized to slow development in the West and Western Energy Alliance would welcome amendments to the law. The alliance registered multiple comments throughout the NEPA process for the Thompson Divide decision.

“Getting NEPA properly scoped to the project impacts and not a 10-year project of original research, getting the page and time limits on how long a NEPA analysis should take, reducing the ability to sue endlessly on NEPA [are priorities],” she said. “NEPA is extremely easy to sue on. Groups have convinced judges that you have to do original research, but NEPA was originally intended to look at the best available information, not to send companies off doing 10 years of modeling.”

Roush’s organization, Wilderness Workshop, participates frequently in NEPA processes. In July, the White River National Forest approved the construction of a 7-mile multi-use trail from Redstone to McClure Pass. It is a segment within a larger connectivity plan from Pitkin County Open Space and Trails — the Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail Plan. 

Wilderness Workshop and others objected to the national forest’s initial allowance through the NEPA process, and eventually got the county to agree to a holistic approach for all future segments of the trail plan, plus removing one high-impact segment from the plan altogether.

Roush said downgrading NEPA requirements would give more power to industry that wants to move ahead with an agenda without considering community voices or human and environmental impacts.

“​​I strongly reject the claim that that NEPA is is burdensome or inefficient. Quite to the contrary. I think it allows us to make better decisions and it allows the people who live in these communities, who know these issues well, to make sure that the federal government listens to them,” he said.

Winter said academic studies support the claim that straightforward projects move through the NEPA process and do not receive many challenges. Limiting Environmental Impact Statements to an arbitrary deadline would be troublesome, he said, due to the varying scope of projects.

Two objectives were baked into NEPA law, Winter said: look before you leap, and public involvement.

The incoming presidential administration, he said, could and is likely to roll back some of the Biden-era amendments and implement its own — as it did in Trump’s first term. The two mandates in the original law, however, will likely survive as rolling that back would require congressional action.

“The Trump administration, what they did last time, they revised the regulations to govern the NEPA process,” he said. “I think there’s a possibility that we could see that happen again. But I also think that this conversation is going to be happening more in Congress, as well.”

Probably nothing dramatic

Winter foresees Utah monuments Bears Ears National Monument, a product of collaboration between indigenous and conservation groups, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument at greater risk. 

“That has turned into a bit of a ping pong ball going back and forth from one administration to the next,” he said. “I think that it’s likely that the Trump administration will once again revisit Bears Ears National Monument.”

Roush worries that accessibility to public lands will suffer under the Trump administration, something his organization works on in part through its Latino outreach arm, Defiende Nuestra Tierra.  

The Interior Department, BLM and CEQ all fall under the executive branch. Some local conservation efforts, like a Wild and Scenic designation for a portion of the Crystal River, fall to Congress. Project 2025 also calls for the repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which grants presidential authority for general legal protection of cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands.

Conservation group The Wilderness Society announced in November that current BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning will leave the agency to take the helm at the nonprofit in late February 2025. Trump has yet to put a name forth for her replacement. 

Winter predicts changes in the conservation and oil and gas landscape on public lands in the Western Slope and beyond are likely to be more regulatory in nature than related to actual mineral leasing. 

“On federal public lands, the oil and gas process takes some time, so I don’t think we’re going to see in the short term a dramatic increase in the amount of activity,” he said. “In some places, new leasing opportunities haven’t generated much interest. That’s partially because the federal government just raised its royalty rates. It’s partially because the price of oil isn’t especially high right now, and it’s partially because the global market dynamics are slowly, or perhaps not so slowly, shifting more towards renewables.”

For Roush, it’s a game of hurry up and wait. The nominations and rhetoric are troubling, he said, but actual decisions will direct Wilderness Workshop’s actions more than Project 2025.

Much of the nonprofit’s work happens at a hyperlocal level, and that will continue no matter who the president is.

“We play the long game. We work to put in place long-term protections, and those take a while, and so we can and do continue that work regardless of who’s in the White House or who controls Congress,” Roush said. “There’s a lot of really important kind of foundational work to do to make sure that then we’re, you know, essentially ready when there’s a political opportunity. In some ways, a lot of the work doesn’t change.

Winter said Republicans’ control of the White House and Congress is not a reason to write off public land protections, citing the 2019 Dingell Act and its rules for 1.3 million acres of wilderness area. And, he pointed out that the U.S. oil and gas production in recent history has been record-setting — regardless of the political party in power. 

“The United States is producing more oil and gas right now than any country ever in the history of the world, and that has been driven to a significant extent by an expansion of oil and gas activity on federal public lands,” he said. “That expansion of the oil and gas program on federal public lands has occurred under both Democratic and Republican administrations over the last several decades.”