Trump Administration To Reverse Chaco Canyon Protections
The Trump administration just launched a 7-day fire sale on one of the most sacred landscapes in the country. And they're counting on you not to notice.
On Monday, the Bureau of Land Management opened a “public scoping period” on a proposal to revoke the Biden administration’s mineral withdrawal protecting 336,000 acres of public land surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park. That withdrawal — Public Land Order 7923 — was the product of more than a decade of tribal advocacy, two years of environmental review, 150 days of public comment, eight public meetings, bipartisan Congressional support, and nearly 100,000 public submissions. It was finalized in June 2023.
The Trump administration is giving you seven days to weigh in on tearing it apart.
Seven. Days.
A protection that took years to build — that was supported by the All Pueblo Council of Governors representing 20 sovereign Pueblos, the National Congress of American Indians, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the state of New Mexico, the entire New Mexico Congressional delegation, archaeologists, conservation groups, and the overwhelming majority of the American public — and the Interior Department is giving you a week to say goodbye.
Scoping ends April 7.
What They Want to Destroy
If you’ve never been to Chaco Canyon, let me try to explain what we’re talking about.
This is not a ruin. This is not a museum behind glass. Chaco Canyon was the beating heart of an Indigenous civilization that flourished between 850 and 1250 A.D. — a vast network of great houses, ceremonial kivas, astronomical alignments, and ancient roads radiating outward across the high desert of northwestern New Mexico. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A gold-tier International Dark Sky Park. And for the Pueblo peoples whose ancestors built it, Chaco is not abandoned. It is alive. It is sacred. It is home.
The Greater Chaco Landscape surrounding the park contains thousands of archaeological and cultural sites — great houses, roads, shrines — many of them still unexcavated. Only about 15 to 20 percent of the area has been surveyed. Archaeologists estimate as many as 12,000 cultural sites lie within the 10-mile protection zone. Twelve thousand places that could be destroyed by drill pads, access roads, pipelines, and compressor stations.
And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: 90% of the Greater Chaco region is already leased for oil and gas. Ninety percent. There are already more than 37,000 wells and 15,000 miles of roads crammed into this landscape. The air quality is terrible. The health impacts on local and Indigenous communities are well-documented. The damage has been staggering.
The 10-mile buffer was the bare minimum. A tourniquet on a wound that had been bleeding for decades. And now the Trump administration wants to rip it off.
The Rigged Process
Let’s talk about what a sham this “process” is.
When the Biden administration considered this withdrawal, the BLM initiated a 90-day public comment period. They extended it by 30 days after tribal leaders asked for more time. They held public meetings in Farmington and Albuquerque. They conducted formal tribal consultation. They published an environmental assessment. They took 1.5 years to finalize the decision. That’s how you handle a landscape this significant. That’s what respect looks like.
The Trump administration’s version? A 7-day scoping window. No public meetings announced. No extended comment period. No meaningful tribal engagement. Just a letter to the tribes on October 30, 2025 saying “we’re considering full revocation,” and then months of silence until they dropped this on the BLM’s ePlanning website at the end of March with a deadline of April 7.
They’re not interested in public input. They already know what they want to do. This scoping period is a box to check, a formality to survive legal challenges. That’s it.
And they’re offering two alternatives. Both of them are terrible. Alternative 1 revokes the withdrawal entirely — all 336,000 acres opened for leasing. Alternative 2 shrinks the buffer from 10 miles to 5 miles, exposing an estimated 12,000 cultural sites in the 5-to-10-mile zone to drilling. There is no alternative that keeps the protection in place as the preferred option. The “no action” alternative — maintaining the withdrawal — is listed but clearly not what the Secretary has in mind. His “preferred alternative” is full revocation.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in the context of the most aggressive assault on public lands in American history.
The budget reconciliation bill signed into law last July already requires the BLM to offer a staggering 87% of New Mexico’s public and private lands with federally managed subsurface minerals for oil and gas leasing — multiple times a year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act forces quarterly lease sales in nine western states whether industry wants them or not. It stripped the BLM of the ability to reject industry-nominated parcels. It blocked the agency from adding site-specific environmental protections to leases. It even brought back $1.50-an-acre noncompetitive leasing — the kind of fire-sale giveaway that lets companies grab public land for less than the price of a cup of coffee.
Secretary Burgum has said publicly that he views the extractive industries as Interior’s “customers.” Not the tribes. Not the public. Not future generations. The customers are the companies that want to drill.
And Chaco? Chaco is just another line on the balance sheet.
What This Is Really About
This administration doesn’t care about Chaco Canyon. They don’t care about 12,000 unprotected archaeological sites. They don’t care about the 20 Pueblos who have fought for a generation to keep the drills away from their ancestors’ homeland. They don’t care about the Navajo communities downstream of the pollution, living with the health consequences of decades of unregulated extraction.
They care about one thing: demonstrating to the fossil fuel industry that nothing is off limits. That no place is too sacred, too old, too beloved, too unanimously supported by the public to be shielded from the drill bit.
That’s the message. Bears Ears. The Boundary Waters. The Arctic Refuge. And now Chaco.
If they can revoke protections here — at a UNESCO World Heritage Site, over the explicit objections of sovereign tribal nations, with 71% of New Mexico voters opposed to drilling near the park — then they can do it anywhere. And they will.
The Bipartisan History They’re Erasing
Here’s what kills me. Protecting Chaco Canyon used to be the easiest bipartisan call in American politics.
Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, first designated Chaco as a national monument in 1907. Calvin Coolidge, also a Republican, expanded its protections in 1928. In 1980, a bipartisan Congress upgraded Chaco to a national historical park and protected 39 outlying Chacoan sites under the New Mexico Wilderness Act — legislation first introduced by Republican Congressman Manuel Lujan Jr.
Informal moratoriums on new drilling around Chaco existed under both the Obama and first Trump administrations. Congress codified that moratorium in its appropriations bills starting in 2019 and has maintained it in every appropriations bill since.
This wasn’t a Democratic project. This wasn’t an environmental crusade. This was something Americans across the political spectrum looked at and said: obviously we protect this. Obviously.
And now Doug Burgum is going to hand it to the oil industry with a bow on top. For what? The BLM’s own analysis found the withdrawal would prevent about 233 horizontal wells. That’s it. In exchange for protecting thousands of irreplaceable cultural sites across 336,000 acres. And they’re going to blow it up.
The Beginning of a Two-Step Process
Here’s something a lot of people don’t know. Even if Burgum revokes the mineral withdrawal tomorrow, BLM still can’t lease a single acre around the Chaco withdrawal area. Not one.
That’s because Congress has its own protection in place. Section 425 of the current Interior appropriations law, enacted in January of this year, prohibits BLM from spending any federal funds to accept a nomination for, or offer for lease, any federal lands within the 10-mile Chaco buffer zone. The prohibition stays in place until a tribally led cultural resources investigation is completed. That study is still underway. Congress has renewed this protection in every appropriations bill since 2019.
It’s actually the only public lands protection Democrats bothered to secure in the appropriations bill.
So why bother revoking the withdrawal if the land can’t be leased anyway?
Because the withdrawal is the first step.
The Biden administration’s withdrawal is the durable protection — a 20-year administrative order that doesn’t need to be renewed. The appropriations rider that prohibits leasing until the study is completed isn’t. It lives or dies with each funding bill. And Republicans have already shown exactly how they deal with inconvenient protections: they override them in party-line reconciliation bills that can’t be filibustered and don’t need a single Democratic vote.
That’s how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act forced mandatory lease sales across nine western states. That’s how they stripped BLM’s authority to reject industry-nominated parcels. That’s how they locked in Arctic drilling for the next decade. One line of text in a thousand-page bill, passed at two in the morning, and it’s done.
The next reconciliation bill is expected later this year. So they revoke the withdrawal now, strip Section 425 then. And Chaco has nothing left.
That’s the play. And unless people understand that both protections are about to fall like dominoes they won’t see it coming until it’s too late.
What You Can Do
The scoping period ends April 7. That is not a typo. You have until Monday.
Go to the BLM’s ePlanning page or simply click the link below to submit a comment. The project is called “Evaluation of Potential Revocation of Chaco Withdrawal,” NEPA number DOI-BLM-NM-F010-2026-0002-EA. Tell them to keep the 10-mile buffer in place. Tell them seven days is an insult. Tell them this landscape is not for sale. Feel free to use the sample comment below.
The project contacts listed on the ePlanning page are Max Wiegmann at (760) 384-5431 and Sarah Scott at (505) 564-7689. Call them and exercise your right to register your disapproval. Use the sample email below as a call script. Call your members of Congress. Share this article and make sure everyone you know understands what’s happening.
They’re counting on silence. They’re counting on the firehose of terrible news to drown this out. They’re counting on you being too exhausted, too overwhelmed, too beaten down to notice that they’re about to auction off a thousand years of human history.
Don’t let them.
Sample Public Comment
I oppose the proposed revocation of Public Land Order No. 7923 and urge BLM to select the No Action Alternative, maintaining the 10-mile mineral withdrawal surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in full.
I am an American who recreates on our public lands regularly and cares deeply about the proper protection of our natural and cultural resources.
The scoping process is inadequate. The original withdrawal was the product of 150 days of public comment, eight public meetings, formal tribal consultation, and 1.5 years of review informed by nearly 100,000 submissions. A 7-day scoping period for an action of this magnitude — with no public meetings announced — is arbitrary and fails to meet NEPA’s requirement for meaningful public participation. I request BLM extend the scoping period to no fewer than 90 days and hold public meetings with language accessibility, as was done during the original process.
The EA must analyze the full scope of impacts. BLM’s own prior analysis documented 4,730 archaeological sites within the withdrawal area, with only 15–20% of the landscape surveyed. Archaeologists estimate as many as 12,000 cultural sites exist in the 10-mile zone. Ninety percent of the Greater Chaco region is already leased, with over 37,000 wells and 15,000 miles of roads. The EA must rigorously analyze impacts to cultural resources, air quality, public health, water, climate, dark skies, and the visitor experience at a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Given the significance and irreversibility of these impacts, BLM should prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement, not an EA.
The alternatives are inadequate. Two alternatives that revoke or shrink protections, alongside a no-action option the Secretary has already signaled he will reject, do not constitute a reasonable range. BLM must analyze alternatives that maintain or strengthen protections, consistent with the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act and the bipartisan consensus that has protected this landscape since Theodore Roosevelt first designated it in 1907.
Revocation violates the federal trust responsibility. The 20 sovereign Pueblos of the All Pueblo Council of Governors, the National Congress of American Indians, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, and the Hopi Tribe have consistently supported the withdrawal. For Pueblo peoples, Chaco is not a ruin — it is a living sacred landscape central to ongoing cultural and spiritual practices. BLM must complete meaningful government-to-government consultation and Section 106 review under the National Historic Preservation Act before any decision is made.
This action defies the public will. Polling consistently shows that 71–76% of Western and New Mexico voters oppose drilling near Chaco and support conservation over extraction on public lands. Revoking this withdrawal over the opposition of Tribal Nations, the state of New Mexico, the full New Mexico Congressional delegation, and the overwhelming majority of the public would be arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.
Maintain the withdrawal. Extend the comment period. Respect the tribes. Protect Chaco.
Respectfully,
[Your Name]
Chaco is among many critically threatened lands on our brand new interactive threatened lands map. Check it out here to see which other sites need your help.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
-Jim
I am truly embarrassed to be an American. This man who acts according to hatreds and vengeances is an utter disgrace to the White House and our country. No honor. No regard for sacred sites and the First Citizens that laid them down. My hope is that, like leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, no takers will be found. Embarrassment turned around. We need a New Uprising! We The People must rise up!
💪🏾POWER TO THE PEOPLE 💪🏾
Trump is so disgusting. I would take a bet that he's probably never even been in a national forest or by a national monument except in Washington DC. So he doesn't care.