By Sarah Montalbano
On May 11, the Department of the Interior finalized the repeal of the Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, better known as the Public Lands Rule.
In 2023, when the Biden administration’s BLM first proposed the rule, my colleague at Independent Women, Gabriella Hoffman, and I argued in the Wall Street Journal that it exceeded BLM’s authority and would undermine the effective management of 245 million acres of public land. The Biden administration finalized it despite bipartisan objections from Western states, including Alaska.
The Trump administration has now reversed it, and the legal and policy case for doing so is strong.
No state has more at stake than Alaska. BLM manages 70 million surface acres and 220 million subsurface acres of federal mineral estate in Alaska, more than any other state. In fiscal year 2024, BLM management in Alaska supported more than 4,300 jobs and over $170 million in economic activity.
The Public Lands Rule threatened that by inventing a new use for public lands that Congress never authorized.
The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 directs BLM to manage public lands for “multiple use,” which is “including, but not limited to,” the uses of “recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific and historical values.”
The Public Lands Rule elevated “conservation” as a co-equal “use” alongside these clearly-defined uses of land and created a “conservation leasing” mechanism that allowed third parties to lease federal land— specifically to keep it undeveloped.
As BLM’s own rescission document states, treating conservation as a “use” under FLPMA is “contrary to the BLM’s mandate and statutory authority.”
The rule was redundant with current law. All uses of land— even those productive uses under FLPMA, like timber, minerals, and grazing— already entail wise conservation of resources. Without conservation, BLM cannot achieve the other half of its dual mandate: “sustained yield,” which requires “achievement and maintenance in perpetuity” of resources. And millions of acres of BLM lands are already protected under other designations. The obligation to conserve already existed without the Public Lands Rule.
Conservation leasing is not an inherently bad idea, but the Biden administration’s version had serious problems. The rule never specified whether public access would be permitted on conservation-leased land. The rule as a whole gave individual BLM field officers broad discretion to block productive uses as “incompatible” with conservation goals. And BLM created the entire program through rulemaking rather than seeking congressional authorization.
The legal case against the rule was already clear. The Tenth Circuit ruled in Public Lands Council v. Babbitt that BLM “lacks the statutory authority to prioritize conservation use to the exclusion of other uses.” Congress signaled its own position in 2017 when it used the Congressional Review Act to repeal BLM’s Planning 2.0 rule, a prior attempt to embed conservation standards into the planning process through procedure.
Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski led that effort in 2017, saying that the prior attempt “shifts decision-making authority away from the impacted states,” and “disregards BLM’s multiple-use mission.” Public Lands Rule went much further than Planning 2.0.
The Biden administration withdrew 28 million acres of BLM-managed lands from development, suspended and revoked Coastal Plain leases, and blocked the Ambler Road. The Public Lands Rule would have handed environmental litigants yet another tool— alleging insufficient deference to the “conservation” use of land— to challenge any permitting decision on BLM lands in the state. The BLM itself notes that the rule’s requirements “risked incentivizing strategic litigation challenging the BLM’s planning and permitting decisions.”
The Trump administration has led a course-correction. Interior has reopened 1.56 million acres of the Coastal Plain to oil and gas exploration, opened 2.1 million acres in the Dalton Utility Corridor to state selection and mineral entry, reinstated Ambler Road permits, and held a National Petroleum Reserve lease sale that generated over $163 million. Congress has used the Congressional Review Act to cancel Biden-era land management plans that restricted development in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota.
FLPMA already directs BLM to manage lands to “protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values.” BLM has managed for conservation under its existing authorities for fifty years.
Alaskan communities live or die on federal land management decisions. The Public Lands Rule was designed in Washington by people who see Alaska as an infinite wildlife reserve and fail to see the people counting on responsible natural resource development alongside wise conservation, not as opposed to it.
The Public Lands Rule’s repeal restores the principle that Alaska’s public lands exist for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.
Sarah Montalbano is an energy policy analyst at Always On Energy Research and a senior fellow at Independent Women. She writes on Substack at Montalbano Mondays and grew up in Wasilla, Alaska.
