The Public Lands Rule Is Gone

What the BLM's Public Lands Rule was, why the Trump administration killed it, and what it means for the 245 million acres we all own.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management officially rescinded the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—better known as the Public Lands Rule. The change takes effect June 11. The administration had been signaling this move since last spring, but this week made it final, and it landed alongside a separate proposed rule weakening grazing oversight on 155 million acres of Western land.

I haven’t previously written about the Public Lands Rule, in large part because, frankly, it’s very much an in-the-weeds policy story and tough to make interesting. But that doesn’t mean the rule was not important or that this week’s decision won’t have downstream impacts. The PLR was a sincere attempt to put conservation on equal footing with drilling, mining, and grazing in how the BLM makes decisions about the 245 million acres it manages—roughly one in ten acres in the United States. That the administration moved so aggressively to kill even that modest reset tells you something about where its priorities lie.

Here’s what you need to know.

What was the Public Lands Rule, exactly?

For most of the BLM’s modern history, “multiple use” in practice meant that drilling, grazing, and mining got to sit with the adults when decisions were made, while conservation was relegated to the kids’ table, typically alongside recreation. The Public Lands Rule, finalized in May 2024, was meant to fix that. It directed the BLM to protect the most intact landscapes, restore degraded habitat, and use science and Indigenous knowledge as the foundation for management decisions. Most consequentially, it made conservation an official use of public lands—meaning a tribe, a rancher, or a conservation organization could hold a restoration lease on a piece of ground the same way an oil company leases it for drilling. That’s what was really at stake. Not a land grab, but a seat at the table.

Who made the rule?

The Biden-era BLM, led by director Tracy Stone-Manning, finalized it in May 2024 after a lengthy public process. The comment period generated 215,000 remarks, and the overwhelming majority were in favor. The rule wasn’t a new policy invention so much as a course correction. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 already requires the BLM to manage lands for “multiple use and sustained yield” to benefit current and future generations. After decades of drift toward extraction as the default, the Public Lands Rule was the agency trying to follow the law Congress wrote nearly 50 years ago.

What was the case for rescinding it according to the current administration?

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued the rule was “unnecessary” and could block access to hundreds of thousands of acres, hurting energy producers, miners, and ranchers. The administration began the rescission process last spring. A 60-day public comment period followed—and the results were striking. Roughly 98% of more than 61,000 commenters opposed rescission, including members of Congress, former BLM officials, Tribal representatives, ranchers, hunters, and local elected leaders. The administration proceeded anyway.

What does the rescission mean in practice?

Picture the Owyhee Canyonlands in southwestern Idaho—one of the most intact desert ecosystems left in North America, home to bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and some of the wildest river country in the lower 48. Under the Public Lands Rule, a conservation organization or Tribal nation could have held a restoration lease there, giving those values a formal foothold in BLM planning. That mechanism is now gone.

More broadly: 81% of BLM lands are open to oil and gas drilling. About 60% are grazed by livestock. Just 14% are designated for lasting conservation. The rule was meant to start bending those numbers toward balance. Instead, the thumb goes back on the extraction side of the scale.

OK, so how big a deal is this?

The Public Lands Rule was only 16 months old when the administration moved to kill it. Its most important provisions—like conservation leasing—hadn’t yet been fully tested. So the rescission prevents future progress more than it reverses present gains. That’s actually a useful way to understand the administration’s broader strategy: move fast enough that the seeds for a different future, one guided by long-term stewardship principles, never get a chance to take root.

The rescission is significant—but it’s also one item in a very long list, and that context matters. Since January 2025, the administration has fired or pushed out thousands of Interior Department and Forest Service employees. It has proposed cutting public lands agency budgets by more than a third. It issued an executive order making mining the "primary land use" across all public lands where legally allowable—ahead of recreation, wildlife, watersheds, cultural sites, everything. It opened sensitive Arctic habitat to drilling, moved to strip mineral protections from the Boundary Waters watershed in Minnesota, and declared a state of “emergency” on nearly 60% of national forest lands to fast-track commercial logging.

The Public Lands Rule rescission is the headline this week. But the pattern is the real story.

by Christopher Keyes, Re:Public | Read more:
Image: Daniel Halseth/Unsplash
[ed. Public lands (and the public's access to them) are under constant assault lately. See also: The Sellout of the Crazies (Re:Public):]

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"At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property.

For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.

“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight.

Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains—their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.

“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes.

The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club—an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.

For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. [...]

Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands—and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings—more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.

“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn’t have that access.”

Every American—not just Montanans—should care, he warned.

“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”