Public Lands Outlook Under Trump to Face ‘Copious Litigation’

The second Trump administration’s federal lands agenda is widely expected to promote fossil fuels development and reverse Biden administration conservation efforts, moves environmental groups say they’ll litigate at every opportunity.

Though President-elect Donald Trump disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, his new administration is expected to take cues from its approach to public lands and natural resources development, and he repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he’d promote oil drilling.

The degree to which the Trump administration will rely on Project 2025 for its public lands agenda is unclear, “but there is much to commend about the policies outlined in the project,” said Frank Garrison, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which favors deregulation and fought the Obama administration’s use of the Antiquities Act to designate national monuments. “We are hopeful some of those policies will be pursued.”

Project 2025, written by a former Bureau of Land Management official in the first Trump administration, calls for a rapid ramp-up of oil, natural gas, and coal production on federal lands, including in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the Bureau of Land Management moved to restrict on Wednesday. The project also calls on Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act and shrink national monuments created under the law, and envisions weakening the Endangered Species Act and opening Alaska’s largest and most intact national forest to logging.

“Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers,” said Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”

Environmental attorneys and legal experts say they’ll be watching how the new administration approaches calls for the abolishment of national monuments, Utah’s push to take over public lands from the federal government, and its adherence to federal law.

National Monuments

Trump shrank Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in 2017. Utah is fighting Biden’s re-establishment of those monuments under the Antiquities Act in Garfield County v. Biden before the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The monuments together, championed by tribes, protect fragile ecosystems and tribal sacred sites but block coal mining, oil drilling, and other development within their roughly 3 million-acre borders.

It’s unclear if Trump can legally abolish the monuments without Congressional action, but he is expected to shrink the monuments again.

“The executive giveth, and the executive taketh away under the power granted by Congress in the Antiquities Act,” said Murray Feldman, a partner at Holland & Hart LLP in Boise, Idaho. “In the past Trump administration, we saw the reduction in size and realignment of some prior monument designations, but also recommendations for new monument designations. The same is likely to happen in the Trump 47 administration.”

Though presidents have been creating national monuments for more than a century, Biden’s monuments totaling more than 3.5 million acres are most vulnerable in the new administration, said Sarah Matsumoto, director of the environmental law clinic at the University of Colorado Law School. Biden created those monuments to protect Indigenous sacred sites and to block mining and other development.

Divesting Federal Lands

Utah’s effort to force the federal government to hand over more than 18 million acres of “unappropriated” federal land to the state is also expected to resonate in the new administration. The state this year filed an original jurisdiction petition at the US Supreme Court seeking to have the lands declared unconstitutional. The justices have not yet decided whether to take the case, Utah v. US.

The state makes a strong case that the Constitution prevents the federal government from holding lands in perpetuity, and that should guide the Trump administration in its approach to federal lands management, Garrison said.

Other lawyers say Utah’s case is weak.

“I view the litigation as a pretext to foment political attacks on public lands protections that will percolate in Congress and the administration,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center in New Mexico.

Feldman said the case is likely to fail, but it represents a “moonshot” that aims to influence public lands law and undo established legal precedent.

Matsumoto said she’s watching how the new administration will approach the privatization of federal lands to support housing development, something Vice President-elect J.D. Vance raised in his debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

“A number of elected officials from Western states seem supportive of that idea, at least in concept,” she said. “But, many conservation groups oppose the concept of using public lands for housing purposes, and would likely challenge those decisions.”

Copious Litigation

Environmental attorneys say they hope the Trump administration can be constrained by environmental laws, which blocked some of the first Trump administration’s most ambitious development and anti-conservation measures.

“I expect there to be copious amounts of litigation,” said Susan Jane Brown, an attorney and principal at the Oregon nonprofit environmental law firm Silvix Resources. “As a candidate, the president-elect was very clear about how he looked at federal environmental laws or regulations writ large, the administrative state and public lands. It was clear that selling of federal lands was a cornerstone of Project 2025.”

At best, conservationists are likely to hold the line against Trump administration efforts to exploit federal lands for fossil fuels and other development, Schlenker-Goodrich said.

“While a second Trump term moves us into deeply perilous terrain, the best way to navigate that terrain is together through coordinated and sustained advocacy, litigation, organizing, and communications campaigns,” he said.