In a bargain that trades America’s natural heritage for corporate profit, the Trump administration has launched the largest giveaway of public lands in modern memory, opening millions of acres of protected wilderness to oil drilling, mining, and commercial exploitation, according to a new report.
The analysis from Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project details how Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, in one of his first acts, signed a series of secretarial orders designed to hand publicly owned lands and waters across America to the fossil fuel and mining industries.
The move represents a radical shift from conservation to commercialization, echoing the philosophy of Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt, a noted privatization enthusiast.
The administration’s ambition stretches from the Arctic to the desert southwest.
The Interior Department has moved to rescind a Biden-era rule that restricted oil and gas development in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, potentially opening 13 million acres to drilling and threatening vulnerable caribou habitat and Indigenous communities that depend on subsistence hunting.
Simultaneously, the Bureau of Land Management has adopted a new policy to slash the oil and gas leasing review process from up to fifteen months to under six months, while the department has drafted a strategic plan that reads like an industry wish list.
The plan prioritizes “mapping out all Interior-held lands for energy and minerals and quantifying their value,” treating the nation’s scenic wonders as a balance sheet to be liquidated.
The report further warns that at least six national monuments are under threat of being reduced or eliminated, with the Department of Justice having issued a legal opinion overturning an 86-year-old precedent to argue that a president holds the power to revoke previous national monument designations.
This paves the way for the potential dismantling of protections for lands near the Grand Canyon and in Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante regions.
This transformation has been executed with brutal efficiency.
The Interior Department has fired or forced out thousands of employees, eviscerating its capacity to manage wildfires, protect endangered species, and maintain the national parks that millions of Americans visit each year.
The National Park Service’s permanent staff has declined by 24 percent since January, creating dangerous conditions in parks where lifeguards, firefighters and rescue experts are now in short supply.
The consequences of this great American land rush will be felt for generations.
Families who have hiked these trails and fished these streams will find landscapes transformed into industrial zones, while the burning of the additional fossil fuels extracted will further destabilize the climate. It is a curious piece of business, this selling off of a nation’s common inheritance to private interests.
The administration calls it “energy dominance,” but the report suggests it looks more like a liquidation sale, where the priceless is sold off cheaply, and the public is left with the bill and the loss.