The Trump Administration on Tuesday finalized its repeal of the Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, better known as the Public Lands Rule, which gave conservation activities on federal land equal priority with extractive uses like mining and logging. It’s the latest in what is now a long series of decisions from the Trump administration to prioritize industry use of the nation’s public lands.
Aspects of the rule, such as restoring degraded habitat and allowing developers to lease and protect intact public land to offset a project’s impacts on other public parcels, could inhibit resource extraction from the U.S. federal lands, the agency wrote.
“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 and introduced uncertainty and unnecessary burdens in planning and permitting,” the BLM wrote in its rescission of the rule in the Federal Register Monday before finalizing the decision Tuesday. “Existing authorities and tools remain sufficient to address conservation objectives without imposing prescriptive mandates or rigid timelines on public land users and the BLM itself.”
