Interior Outlines Sweeping Plan to Drill, Divest Federal Lands

The Interior Department is aiming for mid-May to make public its strategic plan to drill and mine on federal land, sell some of that land for housing, and transfer other lands to states.

The department outlined its vision for deregulation and harnessing public lands’ natural resources as “assets” in a draft internal strategic plan that was obtained by Bloomberg Law on Wednesday and confirmed as authentic by a person at Interior with knowledge of the document. The person was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to share the information publicly.

The draft plan, marked as updated Monday and first reported on Tuesday by the Public Domain Substack, would enact President Donald Trump’s vision to use federal lands as vast sources of fossil fuels while employing emergency provisions of environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act to set aside environmental safeguards to achieve those goals.

The draft says the plan is targeted to reach the White House for review and be made public for comment by the end of May. The Interior Department is expecting the proposal to appear in the Federal Register in mid-June. The goal is to finalize the plan by October.

“It is beyond unacceptable that an internal document in the draft/deliberative process is being shared with the media before a decision point has been made,” an Interior Department spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“Not only is this unacceptable behavior, it is irresponsible for a media outlet to publish a draft document. We will take this leak of an internal, per-decisional document very seriously and find out who is responsible,” the spokesperson added. “The internal document is marked draft/deliberative for a reason - it’s not final nor ready for release.”

Developing natural resources on federal lands to the maximum extent possible is among the key tenets of the draft plan, which broadly dovetails with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s previous orders and announcements saying he intends to use federal lands to “unleash” US fossil fuels.

The draft plan calls for selling federal lands to enable housing development; simplifying oil, gas, and coal leasing processes; supporting increased agricultural use of federal lands to reduce food costs; allowing more mining in Alaska; and investing more in geothermal and hydropower.

One of the Interior’s strategies under the draft plan would be reducing the roughly 500 million acres of federal land the department manages nationwide. In addition to calling for selling land for home building, it directs Interior’s agencies to “return heritage land and sites to the states.” It doesn’t define “heritage land.”

The draft plan also calls for national monuments to be “assessed and correctly sized.” Republicans—especially those in Utah—have criticized national monuments created by presidents using the Antiquities Act as blocking access to that land.

The Trump administration has been expected to reshrink or abolish at least two national monuments in Utah that Trump had decreased the size of during his first term in office. Those monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, were expanded to roughly their original sizes by President Joe Biden.

The draft also calls for removing Endangered Species Act protections for imperiled plants and animals that the Trump administration says have been recovered. Republicans have called on the administration to lift protections for the grizzly bear around Yellowstone National Park because they believe the animals are no longer in danger of extinction in that region.

The draft plan drew criticism from environmental groups Wednesday.

“It is now widely recognized that state governments lack the staffing and infrastructure to manage federal public lands, so a large-scale transfer of public lands to state or county governments would amount to a sellout of public lands and a transfer to private ownership,” Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project, said in a statement.

“All Americans have a strong interest in keeping public land in public hands and allowing commercial and extractive uses only to the extent that they are compatible with maintaining healthy lands and abundant wildlife,” Molvar said.