The Trump administration is proposing a drastic reimagining of how public lands across the United States are used and managed, according to an Interior Department document leaked to the public in late April. The document, a draft of the department’s strategic plan for the next five years, downplays conservation in favor of an approach that seeks to maximize economic returns, namely through the extraction of oil, gas and other natural resources.
“That’s a blueprint for industrializing the public lands,” said Taylor McKinnon, who works on preservation of Southwestern lands for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization. “A separate question is whether they’re able to achieve that,” Mr. McKinnon said, vowing lawsuits from his group and others.
Sweeping proposals are a species native to Washington, D.C., and many of them stand little chance of being realized. However, Donald J. Trump has begun his second term as president at a blistering pace, remaking or shuttering entire federal agencies with such speed that opponents have only recently found their footing.
“I would take it every bit as seriously as I would take what is laid out in Project 2025,” said Jacob Malcom, who until recently headed the Interior Department’s office of policy analysis. Project 2025, a 900-page document issued in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, has served as a blueprint for the Trump administration on a host of policy fronts — including in its approach to public lands. The section of Project 2025 dealing with the Interior Department was primarily written by William Perry Pendley, a conservative activist.
Of the several goals laid out in the draft strategic plan — which was pointedly made public on April 22, when Earth Day is marked — “Restore American Prosperity” earns top billing. To achieve that aim, the Interior Department proposes to “open Alaska and other federal lands for mineral extraction,” “increase revenue from grazing, timber, critical minerals, gravel and other nonenergy sources” and “increase clean coal, oil and gas production through faster and easier permitting.”
Public Domain, a newsletter that covers the Interior Department, first reported on the document. In an emailed statement, an Interior Department spokesperson denounced the leak, which was seemingly intended to prepare environmental groups like Mr. McKinnon’s for all-but-certain legal battles. The statement called the leak “beyond unacceptable” and said it was “irresponsible for a media outlet to publish a draft document. We will take this leak of an internal, pre-decisional document very seriously and find out who is responsible.” The department’s media office declined to elaborate on the state of the investigation into the leak.
The plan does mention more traditional goals, such as enhancing “resiliency from natural disasters,” upgrading infrastructure like dams and bridges and promoting recreation (with an emphasis on hunting and fishing). But the overarching vision of the 23-page plan aligns with Republicans’ longstanding conviction that federal land protections have become onerous and intrusive. Those convictions burgeoned in the late 1970s and the early years of the Reagan administration, when activists calling themselves Sagebrush Rebels launched a movement that favored privatization over protection. (Mr. Pendley, the activist, uses the handle @Sagebrush_Rebel on the social media platform X; his profile avatar is a photograph of Ronald Reagan in cowboy attire.)
“The strategic plan clearly puts extraction and sell-off of public lands first,” said Aaron H. Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for land conservation. “Conservation, protection, recreation and tribal obligations are all at the bottom of the list.” (The Interior Department, sometimes known quasi-affectionately as “the Department of Everything Else,” includes the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.)
Key aspects of the 2030 plan are already underway. Doug Burgum, the Interior secretary, has moved to shorten environmental reviews required for approving mines, wells, pipelines and other industrial infrastructure. The Trump administration recently endorsed building housing on federal land, a proposal favored by Mr. Pendley, who ran the Bureau of Land Management during the first Trump administration. And on May 2, Mr. Burgum announced that 87,000 acres managed by his department would be opened to hunting and fishing.
Mr. Burgum’s strategic plan also proposes returning federal land to states, an idea Mr. Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities described as policy subterfuge. “We know from past history that the states can’t afford to manage that, so the inevitable outcome there is closures and sell-offs and more privatization. That’s the end game.”
To be sure, the new Interior Department vision may at best be only partially realized, especially as courts continue to block key components of Mr. Trump’s agenda. “I think a ton of what they’re doing is illegal,” Dr. Malcom said, pointing to the Trump administration’s wholesale dismissals of Interior Department employees and halt of renewable energy projects. Even so, the document is stark evidence of how the modern-day G.O.P. has largely come to spurn the conservationist spirit of Theodore D. Roosevelt, the Republican president who is closely associated with the expansion of the National Park System.
It was Mr. Roosevelt who implemented the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that allows the president to protect lands deemed culturally or historically significant. Democratic presidents including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Mr. Trump’s immediate predecessor, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., embraced the Antiquities Act in ways that led to charges of executive overreach from conservatives.
Mr. Burgum’s strategic plan would “right-size monuments,” a likely reference to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, both of which Mr. Trump diminished in size during his first term. Mr. Biden undid those changes in 2021, but those monuments, and perhaps others, are now likely to be reduced yet again.
Other proposals include a move to “restore historic names,” presumably a reference to the swapping out of Native American names like Denali, the Alaska mountain that Mr. Trump has said should be called Mount McKinley again. The Interior Department also seeks to strip some Endangered Species Act protections and to get rid of “unnecessary” electric vehicles.
On the whole, the vision laid out by Mr. Burgum is a stark contrast to the 2022-2026 strategic plan issued by the Biden administration, which highlighted goals related to “climate change,” “environmental stewardship” and “environmental justice.” The Biden-era strategic plan also celebrated efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., which the Trump administration has been aggressively purging from the federal government.
In one of his first acts upon returning to the White House, Mr. Trump declared a “national energy emergency,” in response to which the Interior Department said it would speed up the permitting process for new oil and gas leases.
But experts say that no such crisis exists: According to the Energy Information Administration, the United States is “the world’s largest crude oil and natural gas producer.” And with emphasis growing on renewable sources, which are becoming more affordable, the justification for opening up federal lands to drilling appears to be questionable. “The idea that we’re going to have a lot of new coal mining in this country seems absurd to me,” said Mark Squillace, a natural resources expert at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. The claims of a national energy emergency were also “absurd,” in his estimation.
Dr. Squillace also took issue with the narrow window the public will have to review and comment on the strategic plan, which the Interior Department wants to finalize by October. “This is just basically avoiding a public engagement process wholesale,” he said. “This is not really a serious process.”
Mary Jo Rugwell, who runs the Public Lands Foundation and was previously the Bureau of Land Management’s state director for Wyoming, pointed out that land use policy tended to swing between ideological extremes, which invites legal challenges.
“They are going to get sued,” she said of the Trump administration. “And the thing about that is, the minute you get sued, nothing gets done. The only thing that’s going to come out ahead is a bunch of lawyers.”
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