The Bureau of Land Management implemented four rules today that create more leeway for oil and gas companies wanting to drill on public lands, as required by the spending bill President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress passed in July. But voters will not have a chance to comment on two of the rules.
Lands “eligible” and “available” for oil and gas leases will now be determined using definitions laid out in the bill, as opposed to the discretion of the BLM. These new definitions include areas defined as available for oil and gas leasing in resource management plans, which can sometimes be several decades old.
Other changes require the agency to offer new acres for leasing within 18 months of a company expressing interest, and prevent the BLM from adding any new stipulations to a lease unless they are present in an existing resource management plan. Unused drilling permits now last four years, up from three, and the agency has waived the $5-per-acre nomination fee for companies submitting claims on public lands .
The BLM did not answer questions about how the agency determined these rules were “noncontroversial.”
“Removing the nomination fee will allow companies to propose vast tracts of public lands for leasing, which the BLM will now be required to offer within 18 months,” said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager for Center for Western Priorities, in a statement. Given the recent federal layoffs, “the BLM will have to shift significant resources into preparing these lease sales, effectively making the BLM a single-use agency dedicated to oil and gas management.”
While these changes are the result of new congressional legislation, federal law typically requires agencies to offer public comment periods on new rules. There are exceptions under the Administrative Procedure Act if an agency has “good cause” to find the comment periods are “impractical, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.”
To justify changing leasing terminology and eliminating the application fee without public input, the BLM said that “notice and comment are unnecessary because [these rules are] noncontroversial.”
Environmentalists disagreed, taking issue with the way the administration is handling the public comment period.
“By issuing all of these changes as final rather than draft rules, the Trump administration is signaling its disregard for public input,” Groetzinger said. “This is not how public land management is supposed to work.”
Industry groups found the new rules reasonable. “We’re pleased BLM is moving quickly because, in some instances, these rules will help agency staff working in the field offices and judges considering cases on federal leases,” said Melissa Simpson, president of Western Energy Alliance, in a statement. “Congress provided clarification that we’ve seen is necessary as we’ve been defending federal leases over the past decade in multiple venues.”
Simpson did not comment on the agency’s decision to withhold public comment for two of the rules.
Republicans faced broad bipartisan pushback and fierce local objections to their effort to sell off public lands earlier this year, and some say the party has not learned its lesson. By failing to offer a public comment period for some rules and truncating the time allowed for commenting on others, the administration “continues to show a concerning trend for taking regulatory action that risks cutting out the public voice,” said Gregg DeBie, senior staff attorney at the Wilderness Society, in a statement.
“If the Trump administration was listening to the people they are meant to serve, they’d hear loud and clear that our public lands are shared spaces that deserve protections, not places for oil and gas companies to grow even richer and dig us deeper into fossil fuel dependency,” he said.
The other two rules will become effective by Sept. 30, unless the agency receives “significant adverse comments” by Sept. 2. Under former President Joe Biden, a BLM rule overhauling oil and gas leasing and royalty rates on public lands offered the public a 60-day comment period.
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Jake Bolster reports on Wyoming and the West for Inside Climate News. Previously, he worked as a freelancer, covering climate change, energy, and the environment across the United States. He holds a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University.
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