House Bill Would Destroy Public Lands, Forests, and Oceans
Destructive proposal sells off public lands; boosts fossil fuels, mining, clearcutting; and includes “pay-to-play" scheme granting industry a shield from judicial review.
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The House Natural Resources (HNR) Committee has advanced its contribution to a massive government spending bill that puts our shared public lands, forests, and waters squarely on the chopping block. Minutes before the measure passed out of committee, a midnight addition proposing to sell off up to 500,000 acres or more of public lands in Utah and Nevada was snuck in, making the bill’s unparalleled attacks on the environment even worse.
In its present form, the bill takes the unprecedented steps of creating a "pay-to-play” scheme that allows polluters to foot the bill for their own environmental reviews in exchange for avoiding judicial review; hands near-complete control of onshore oil and gas leasing over to oil and gas companies; puts the Gulf of Mexico and its imperiled species at even greater risk of extinction from rampant oil drilling; opens vast tracts of lands and waters across Alaska to new fossil fuel and mining development; mandates clearcutting of our national forests; and inexplicably attempts to revive the dying coal industry.
It's environmental "pay-to-play”: a rigged scheme that auctions off fundamental environmental protections and the public’s right to petition the government to remedy harms caused by industry.
In the following, we highlight a range of additional egregious attacks contained within the bill. The list is not exhaustive—it is not hyperbolic to say that this is the most expansive and devastating attack on shared public natural resources we have seen in the last century. Should these proposals become law, the damage to our oceans, forests, and lands would be catastrophic.
Target: Transparency, public participation, and democracy
The bill proposes to sell immunity from judicial review of environmental analysis. Oil, gas, coal, timber, and mining companies could pay an upfront fee for projects and, in exchange, enjoy expedited environmental analyses that are then completely immunized from judicial review.
No matter how egregious a project or how shoddy the analysis, permittees will be granted a “get out of jail free” card. So, for instance, even if the agency ignored an oil drilling project’s potential to pollute a community’s primary source of drinking water or neglected to examine a logging project’s harmful effects on an endangered species, the public would not have an opportunity to challenge those omissions from environmental analyses in the courts.
It's environmental "pay-to-play”: a rigged scheme that auctions off fundamental environmental protections and the public’s right to petition the government to remedy harms caused by industry.
Target: Public lands across the West and Alaska
For lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the HNR committee has proposed the direct sell-off of shared public lands and a suite of fossil fuel handouts, including the following:
The changes to the Mineral Leasing Act would do the following:
- Mandate quarterly oil and gas lease sales
- Hand control over what is offered for lease to industry
- Lengthen drilling permit terms
- Prohibit imposition of measures to limit environmental impacts of oil and gas production
- Revive the abusive practice of noncompetitive leasing
- Provide for a pay-to-play rubberstamp drilling permit
- Lower royalty rates back to bargain basement levels
- Lift federal permitting requirements for oil and gas production from split estate lands
The bill's harmful proposal of mandated leasing across the state of Alaska includes:
- Forcing issuance of leases sold in January 2021
- Mandating four additional lease sales, at a minimum size of 400,000 acres, over the next 10 years on the Coastal Plain
- Mandating issuance of all relevant permits to support new oil and gas development
- Rolling back rules meant to protect irreplaceable ecosystems and imperiled wildlife within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A)
- Mandating lease sales of four million acres within the NPR-A at least once every two years
- Severely limiting judicial review of nearly all agency actions related to leasing and permitting of oil and gas activities in these areas
The bill pushes the revival of the long-dying coal industry via:
- A mandate to open four million new acres to coal mining from North Dakota westward
- Expedited issuance of new coal leases
- Slashing royalties for existing and future coal production
- Granting a handout to one of Montana’s most controversial coal mines
These Resource Management Plans were meant to guide the responsible management of our shared public lands with critical updates to science and data that reflect how conditions on the ground are changing. The blocks mean tens of millions of dollars of federal investments will be flushed down the toilet, and the Rock Springs, Buffalo field office, Miles City, North Dakota, Colorado River Valley, and Grand Junction offices will be forced to either redo these complex plans or fall back to relying on out-of-date, unreliable plans that are, in some cases, decades old.
Under the cover of midnight, the committee majority slipped in a measure that would allow for the direct sale of federal public lands in Utah and Nevada to private buyers.
The bill provides authorization for sales of an estimated 11,000 acres in Utah and possibly 500,000 acres or more in Nevada, with language that suggests the provision could allow for even more expansive sales where lands have been identified as eligible for sale (known as “disposal”) under governing resource management plans.
Target: Controversial mines in pristine wildlands in Alaska and Minnesota
Fossil fuels aren’t the only extractive industries hoping to cash in with this bill. The mining industry also receives hand-picked gifts in for the form of the following:
Approval of the Ambler Road proposal would see the construction of a 200-plus-mile road through Alaska’s Brooks Range and the vast wilderness of the Gates of the Arctic National Park to facilitate speculative mining in an area that is critical to the subsistence lifestyle of local tribes and home to critical spawning grounds for Chinook salmon.
Protections for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness are being lifted to facilitate the issuance, or development, of copper mining leases just upstream from the wilderness area, placing its iconic lakes and rivers at risk of contamination from the copper-sulfide mining process that is planned for the area.
Target: Offshore areas in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska
Offshore, the HNR Committee has put forward a bill that forces the government to hold an unprecedented number of oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and other coastal waters in a shameless giveaway to Big Oil. Handouts to the oil and gas industry at the expense of our ocean and its wildlife, along with our coastal communities, include:
Each sale by the Bureau of Ocean Emergency Management would need to offer up at least 80 million acres of our ocean for industry to drill, significantly more than any recent lease sale. These sales are mandated on top of whatever additional lease sales may be scheduled in a new five-year offshore leasing plan, which Interior is currently preparing.
Reverting to the terms from lease sale 254 (held in 2020) would prevent BOEM from implementing commonsense protections for the ocean and the critically endangered Rice’s whale. The bill would also increase so-called GOMESA revenue sharing to Gulf states from $500 million to $650 million for 2025–2034, ensuring that Gulf states remain economically shackled to the offshore oil and gas industry.
Holding the six lease sales in the pristine and ecologically rich Cook Inlet would be in addition to whatever additional lease sales may be scheduled in the new five-year plan—each offering at least one million acres.
Expanding offshore drilling threatens coastal tourism, the fishing industry, and recreation—which together support millions of jobs and billions in economic activity—and locks us into decades of fossil fuel pollution. In Alaska, it hurts Indigenous communities who depend on healthy coastal waters and fish populations for their traditional way of life. And that’s not to mention that this is an unprecedented number of offshore lease sales—more than seven times the number of lease sales mandated by Congress in the past.
If earmarking huge swaths of ocean for reckless sale to Big Oil billionaires wasn’t enough, the bill also forces taxpayers to bankroll oil and gas companies with lower royalty rates, fast-tracked permits, and avoided environmental cleanup costs, even as those same companies have reported years of record profits. These corporate subsidies aren’t needed; the United States is already the world’s top producer of oil and gas.
Target: Coastal community and marine wildlife protections
And the handouts don’t stop with these new financial incentives to drill. The bill also assaults bedrock environmental, safety, and public health protections including:
- Gutting species, habitat, and community protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) are being targeted. The bill waives virtually all the requirements that the ESA and MMPA provide marine mammals and endangered species to protect them from industry’s activities, including seismic blasting. The language goes further to undercut environmental review and coastal state participation in leasing decisions by allowing BOEM to rely on outdated NEPA and CZMA determinations.
- Requiring the government to approve certain deepwater drilling practices even if deemed unsafe
- Interfering with existing court cases to dictate results in favor of the oil and gas companies
- Steering future cases to courts that are historically industry-friendly
- Supplanting all ESA and MMPA requirements for all Gulf oil and gas activities with an inadequate and outdated Biological Opinion that was found by a federal court to violate the ESA in at least eight ways
Target: Forests across the country
For our forests, on lands managed both by the Forest Service and the BLM, it’s the same story: The HNR proposal would dramatically ramp up harmful logging, putting commercial timber interests first in line when considering how to manage our National Forests. Provisions in the bill do the following:
Under this bill, the Forest Service must annually enter into at least one long-term logging contract for each National Forest System region until 2034 —regardless of demand or need. And BLM similarly must annually enter into at least one long-term logging contract until 2034. This will abet the administration’s reckless goal of privatizing federal forest management. And it will make our forests less resilient, as these contracts will very likely target the big, mature, and old-growth trees that provide disproportionate ecological benefits.
The bill commands both the Forest Service and BLM to log 125 percent of the amount logged in FY24 on the lands they manage. This directive applies across federal forests, including treasured landscapes like the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. Making matters even worse, it appears that the language could allow the Forest Service to bypass protections created by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
Target: Critical funding for national parks, national forests, and coastal communities
As if this myriad of attacks on our shared public lands, oceans, and forests weren’t enough, the bill also strips funding from a host of critical programs meant to create jobs in our National Parks, restore the ecosystems we rely on for clean air and clean water, and help communities adapt to the continual and often-devastating effects of climate change. Funding would be cut to programs that do the following:
The bill would claw back any unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds dedicated to old-growth forest protection and inventorying federal mature and old-growth forests, moves that would undermine forest resilience and the ecosystems we all depend on for clean air and clean water.
The bill would gut safeguards meant to protect communities from climate disasters, safeguard marine habitats, and restore fisheries.
The bill would cut programs by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Sanctuaries System to provide critical infrastructure for, study, and support the fisheries and marine ecosystems that our coastal communities depend on.
Cuts would claw back any unspent funds from a $1 billion pot meant to enhance public access, wildlife protections, ecosystem function, and other critical activities across lands managed by the National Park Service and the BLM
Cuts will make communities less safe and put infrastructure and other investments at risk from climate-related events like floods, fires, and hurricanes.
Taken as a whole, this bill is an astonishing scheme to sacrifice our shared public lands, pollute our oceans, and hand out massive giveaways to the oil, gas, timber, mining, and coal industries—all to help pay for multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the rich. It would block the public’s and communities’ right to challenge harmful projects planned near their backyards, rubberstamp permits, and cut programs that were making our lands, forests, and oceans more resilient to the stresses of climate change and overexploitation. All this at a time when continued production and consumption of fossil fuels and destruction of forest ecosystems is exacerbating disasters like hundred-year floods, devastating fires, and powerful storms.
Instead of expanding onshore and offshore drilling, teeing up our forests for clearcutting, or desperately gambling to revive the coal industry, Congress should end taxpayer subsidies for trillion-dollar polluting industries, close tax loopholes, and ensure corporations pay their fair share for developing publicly owned resources. These measures would truly address the deficit while safeguarding our lands, forests, and oceans for future generations. Instead, this bill takes a slash-and-burn approach that eviscerates wildlife, ecosystem, and ocean protections, and undercuts climate investments in a way that is anti-science, anti-family, anti-worker, and anti-American.
This Backgrounder was originially published on May 5, 2025, and has been updated with new information and links.
Stop our wildlands & waters from being auctioned off to corporate polluters!
The current administration is planning to allow companies to drill and mine with little oversight—with practically no say from the public. But we won't ignore this.
Stop our wildlands & waters from being auctioned off to corporate polluters!
The Trump administration announced a plan that would allow companies to drill and mine with little oversight—with practically no say from the public. Plus, the Interior Department is looking to slash protections for several of our national monuments. Tell Interior Secretary Burgum to stop giving away our public lands and waters to corporate polluters!
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