Burgum secretarial orders target monuments, give drilling favored status on public lands
Cottonwood Canyon Wilderness, UT
Bob Wick, BLM
Undermining balanced public lands approach, orders call for more oil and gas leasing, review of Biden conservation rules
WASHINGTON D.C. (Feb. 4, 2025) — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a series of secretarial orders that position drilling and mining interests as the favored users of America’s public lands and threaten to scrap existing land protections and conservation measures, acting in service of President Trump’s “energy dominance” executive orders.
Among many other actions, Secretary Burgum’s first six secretarial orders direct officers within the Department of the Interior to offer more parcels of public land for oil and gas leasing; revisit and potentially “revise” protections of national monument lands; explore reinstatement of canceled leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; and revisit land management plans that were the product of years’ worth of locally led efforts, including the Rock Springs RMP in Wyoming.
The call to review monuments (SO 3418 - Unleashing American Energy, Section 4c) is easy to miss—it asks for steps to “review and, as appropriate, revise” certain public land protections while conspicuously avoiding using the words “national monuments.” The order would apply to hundreds of national monuments managed by the Interior Department.
The new secretarial orders also call on assistant secretaries to review and lay out steps to suspend, revise or rescind numerous rules finalized during the Biden administration. These include the BLM Public Lands Rule, which confirmed that conservation of nature, cultural resources and outdoor recreation areas is on equal footing with drilling and mining across 245 million acres of BLM lands; the BLM Oil and Gas Leasing Rule, which was designed to reform the badly outdated federal leasing program and make oil and gas companies clean up after themselves; the BLM Renewable Energy Rule, which promoted responsible solar and wind energy development on public lands while minimizing damage to sensitive areas; and the BLM Western Arctic Rule, a set of regulations to provide stronger protections for lands in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Dan Hartinger, senior director of agency policy for The Wilderness Society, made the following statement about the secretarial orders:
“First impressions don’t get much worse than this. The new secretary hasn’t even had time to break in his chair at the Department of the Interior, and yet the Trump administration is already driving day-one actions to implement a drill-first agenda, including launching a secretive 15-day review of national monuments."
“People in this country love public lands, consider them key to our shared national identity and want to see them managed in a balanced and responsible way. They don’t want to see these places neglected or wrecked by drilling or mining. Hiding the ball on a review of national monuments shows the White House and Interior know full well how unpopular these actions are. We hope Secretary Burgum will reconsider this approach and listen to the public about how essential protected public lands are to their local communities and ways of life.”
