The Center for Western Priorities is excited to present a new dashboard that tracks oil and gas leasing and drilling on public lands. This dashboard is meant to track the Trump administration’s irresponsible leasing activities and highlight improvements to the federal leasing process made by the Bureau of Land Management under the Biden administration.
Under the Biden administration, the BLM made many improvements to the federal leasing system. These improvements, some of which were passed by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, increased agency efficiency, brought balance to public land management, and helped improve the return taxpayers receive when companies extract oil and gas on public lands by raising the onshore royalty rate. These reforms resulted in more targeted lease sales that directed companies to drill in areas with high energy potential and low environmental sensitivity, and they brought in more money per acre than the fire sale auctions held during President Donald Trump’s first term. We refer to this new-and-improved leasing process in the dashboard as “responsible leasing.”
Currently, House Republicans are looking to advance their agenda of offering up the vast majority of our national public lands to oil and gas corporations via the budget reconciliation process. The House has passed a bill that mandates the BLM auction off leases for almost all public lands that companies express an interest in, while also reducing the royalty rate back to the level it was set at over 100 years ago. That bill now heads to the Senate, where Senator Steve Daines of Montana may try to include legislation in the reconciliation package that would also force the BLM to offer over 200 million acres of public lands for lease to oil and gas companies and cut the public out of the leasing process, putting recreational access at risk.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking its own steps to undo the Biden-era reforms. The Trump administration recently issued an instructional memorandum that directs the BLM to shorten the lease sale process timeframe, re-offer parcels that were previously offered in lease sales but didn’t sell, and include low preference parcels in lease sales.
These proposals and revisions take the “irresponsible leasing” practices that were rampant under the first Trump administration to the extreme. Westerners overwhelmingly oppose these changes, which would reduce local input on land management decisions, prioritize oil and gas over all other uses of public land, rollback safeguards for wildlife habitat, threaten clean water, hunting, fishing, and other recreation opportunities, and hurt taxpayers.
The new dashboard illustrates the outcomes of the “responsible leasing” that has occurred since the Biden-era reforms went into place and will track the outcomes of the “irresponsible leasing” that is set to occur under the Trump administration. It includes data on how many acres of public land are offered at auction and how many are leased each year, how many unused leased acres and permits are currently held by the oil and gas industry, how much oil and gas is produced on federal lands each year, and the average price per acre of leased public land each year.