The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages 245 million acres of public land, or about one-tenth of the country’s land, so its decisions and policies can have major impacts. And since many of its rules can easily shift as the administrations in charge change, public land policy is subject to sharp swings between conservation and extraction. The birth, life, and death of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule is a prime example.
What Is This Rule?
The Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, known as the Public Lands rule for short, was established in June 2024 under the Biden Administration. It set out several new policies “for the use of conservation to ensure ecosystem resilience and prevent permanent impairment, unnecessary degradation, or undue degradation of public lands, and it revises existing regulations on designation of areas of critical environmental concern (ACECs),” according to a press release.
There are 10 major requirements of the rule, primarily focused on land health assessments, data collection, and protection. They include:
- The BLM must “share watershed condition assessment data in a publicly available database, to meaningfully consult with Tribes and Alaska Native Corporations, and to identify opportunities for Tribal co-stewardship.”
- The agency is required to “identify priority landscapes for restoration and produce a restoration plan for those priority landscapes.” This information must be updated every 5 years.
- The BLM must “develop, review, and amend national land health standards and indicators every 10 years for all ecosystems,” it manages. It has to “conduct watershed condition assessments and land health evaluations” for all BLM land every decade.
- Focus on acquiring and protecting intact landscapes.
Overall, the goal of the rule was to “use high-quality assessment, inventory, and monitoring data in all BLM decision-making.” The agency was aiming to collect better data, and also make that data accessible to the public.
It also prioritized conservation as a use of public lands equally important as mining or timber harvesting. “Conservation is a use of public lands on equal footing with other uses and is necessary for the protection and restoration of important resources,” the BLM said.
The Change
Under the Trump Administration, the Department of the Interior (DOI), led by Secretary Doug Burgum, identified the Public Lands Rule as a major issue. In September 2025, the DOI proposed repealing the rule. It believed the rule exceeded the BLM’s authority and put too much of an emphasis on conservation. Other rationales for the repeal included the belief that the new rules added unnecessary complex logistical challenges to the BLM’s permitting process.
“The previous administration’s Public Lands Rule had the potential to block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of multiple-use land — preventing energy and mineral production, timber management, grazing and recreation across the West,” Burgum said in a press release.
“The most effective caretakers of our federal lands are those whose livelihoods rely on its well-being. Overturning this rule protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on.”
The DOI soon began the formal rescission process, which included a 2-month public comment period. On May 11, it issued the final repeal. “This action restores balance to federal land management under the principles of multiple use and sustained yield by prioritizing access, empowering local decision-making, and aligning the BLM’s implementing regulations with statutory requirements and national energy policy,” the notice read.
The Debate
This issue was hotly contested. In fact, in the 2-month comment period in 2025, the BLM received 138,161 submissions. Conservation and environmental groups were quick to criticize the repeal.
“Today’s repeal of the Public Lands Rule abandons progress at the same moment climate change, chronic drought and accelerating habitat loss demand better stewardship from BLM,” said Maddy Munson, senior planning and policy specialist for federal lands at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a press release.
“When this rule was finalized almost two years ago, the agency acknowledged then what remains true today: decades of prioritizing resource extraction has resulted in large-scale degradation of habitats which urgently needs to be corrected through improved oversight and restoration.”
Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation at Natural Resources Defense Council, also condemned the move. “Congress and the courts have been clear that BLM must manage for conservation alongside other uses. But this administration is lawlessly green-lighting extraction. If this takes effect, the drilling, mining, and logging industries will get their way while public lands are damaged and spoiled for the rest of us,” he said in a press release.
Other outdoor access groups, like the Blue Ribbon Coalition, supported the rescission. “The BLM’s ‘Public Lands Rule’ is being sold as a progressive, balanced solution: conservation and development in tandem, safeguarding lands. But at its core is a dangerous power grab by an executive agency — a rewrite of public land governance without public consent,” the organization stated.
Why It Matters
The repeal of this rule is part of the Trump Administration’s larger stated goal of resource extraction from public lands. His Jan. 2025 executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” mandated that the DOI and other agencies do everything possible to “eliminate all delays” in their permitting processes. The DOI was also mandated to identify any public lands withdrawals that should be reconsidered.
Interior has also pushed expanded resource development on federal lands, including BLM timber sales in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon, and oil and gas leasing in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The repeal of this rule means that the DOI has fewer hoops to jump through when approving new development or leases.
Many of these actions are a direct reversal of the priorities of the Biden administration, demonstrating just how quickly public lands policies can shift when not codified into law.
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