The Trump administration announced Wednesday its plan to revoke a Biden-era rule that put conservation on equal footing with energy development on federal public lands. The proposal targets the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which was designed to allow conservation groups and other entities to lease federal land for restoration purposes.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the Biden administration’s policy would have restricted access to hundreds of thousands of acres across the American West. The rule allowed tribes, states, and conservation districts to lease public lands for preservation rather than extraction activities like mining, drilling, or grazing.
