Writing the Public Out of Public Lands, and the Billion-Dollar Dinner Behind It
Five departments gutted their environmental review rules in one day, without taking comment on the rules that shrink your comment. More than a million Americans have objected since. Nothing has change
Heads up! As you read this Jim and I are currently out in the wild. If you missed where we’re headed and why, start here.
The National Environmental Policy Act turned 56 this January and marked the occasion solemnly, as we reported. What it requires (or at least used to) is narrow and specific and oddly there’s a fair amount of folks here on Substack that have cheered its demise just like the Forest Service in one way or another. But I digress.
Basically it goes like this. Before the Forest Service logs a drainage or BLM leases a parcel to a driller, the agency publishes what it intends to do, opens a window for the public to respond, and answers the objections it gets before anybody signs. Roughly 640 million acres of federal land run on that arrangement.
On July 3, 2025, five federal departments filed rules in the Federal Register gutting their own environmental review regulations. Agriculture. Interior. Energy. Transportation, covering the highway, rail, and transit administrations at once. Defense twice, once for the Army Corps and once for the Navy. Six rules in a single day.
The move wasn’t secret nor was it a coincidence. Executive Order 14154, signed January 20, 2025, directed every agency to “revise” (aka gut) its environmental procedures in consultation with the Council on Environmental Quality, and CEQ gave them twelve months to do it. July 3 was the deadline crowd all showing up at once.
What went under reported was the method. All six went out as interim final rules, which means they go effective the day they published, with public comment invited afterward if at all. Energy’s includes a section heading that reads “Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking Is Not Required.” Agriculture’s erased every agency-specific environmental regulation across seven sub-agencies, all of the Forest Service’s among them, and dropped the requirement to ask the public about an environmental assessment. It took effect before anyone outside the government could say a word about it.
And the especially fun part – the rules shrinking public comment did not themselves go out for public comment. Why start there?
So the question worth asking is what all the hurry is in service of? A great place to start is a largely forgotten answer given by the man at the top two years earlier.
The dinner
Some of you may remember it. At Trump’s table at Mar-a-Lago on the night of April 11, 2024, one of the oil executives complained that the industry had spent $400 million lobbying the Biden administration over the previous year and was still stuck with the regulations. Four hundred million and the rules hadn’t moved.
Trump’s counteroffer to that man and the twenty or so others in the room, from Chevron and ExxonMobil and Continental Resources and Chesapeake and Occidental, was that they should raise him a billion instead. He was specific about the return. More oil and gas leases auctioned off on federal land, the pause on gas export permits ended, Arctic drilling restrictions lifted. He called it a deal and on his arithmetic it was - what they’d save in taxes and regulation would dwarf the billion going in.
The Washington Post and the New York Times both had the story within a month from people who were in the room. House Oversight wrote to nine of the CEOs demanding answers. The Senate opened its own inquiry. None of the companies disputed the account.
Fifteen months later, five departments filed on the same day.
The inventory
The foundation was the first thing to go. Effective April 2025 the Council on Environmental Quality rescinded the regulations upon which every agency built its own rules. It finalized ten months later citing a Supreme Court decision handed down that May – the public invited to respond to reasoning that didn’t exist yet.
Interior went final February 24, throwing out more than 80 percent of its environmental review regulations and moving the remainder into a departmental handbook it can rewrite whenever it likes with no notice and nobody outside the building consulted. Draft environmental impact statements became optional. We took apart why the whole NEPA rewrite was a con when it started.
The Forest Service proposed cutting comment on a national forest project from 30 days to 10, and the window to object from 45 days to 10, with extensions eliminated. It deletes the provision letting objectors and the agency sit down in a room together and hands review of your objection to the official who made the decision you’re objecting to.
Two provisions in that rule interlock and together they make all too much sense. It ends the requirement to run legal notice in the newspaper of record, the back pages where people have always found out that somebody wants to log the drainage above the house, and moves notice to a federal webpage. And it says that a project drawing no comments gets no objection process at all. So a ten-day window nobody advertised, that nobody catches, closes the door before anyone knows it’s open. A separate rule narrows comment on the agency’s internal directives, the manuals telling every district ranger what the rules actually are.
BLM’s oil and gas leasing rule, open through August 24, cuts public participation from 90 days to 10 and eliminates two comment periods outright. Its grazing overhaul across 155 million acres skipped an environmental assessment entirely and narrows who’s permitted to object at all. More than 115,000 people commented anyway. We covered who that grazing program actually serves in the spring.
The Roadless Rule. You may have been at one of these. The Forest Service held about 430 public meetings on the draft rule alone, every single national forest and grassland in the country hosting at least two of them, and more than 23,000 people came. The agency counted 1.6 million comments, and all of it is in the final rule preamble from January 2001. To erase it, USDA gave the public 21 days last August and, as of this April, had held zero meetings. A spokesperson said the decision about whether to hold any comes at a later phase. The 21 days produced 625,737 comments, more than 99 percent opposed. The draft impact statement promised in March still hasn’t published. I testified against the rescission here in Oregon and Jim rallied against it in Georgia.
Chaco Canyon got seven days. The Bureau of Land Management opened that window in April, ran it online only, and set it down inside Holy Week. It drew more than 100,000 comments anyway. A second window in July, fourteen days this time, drew more than 200,000. The protection being revoked took two and a half years to build, with 150 days of public comment and 24 Tribal Nations invited to consult.
Then the exemptions which skip the window instead of shortening it. An emergency determination now covers 112,646,000 acres of national forest where the objection process doesn’t apply to anything. That’s nearly 60 percent of the entire national forest system out of the agency’s own 193 million. A five-million-acre emergency salvage project across Montana and Idaho in June came with a line saying it wouldn’t be subject to objection either. The Forest Service proposed raising the salvage logging exclusion from a 250-acre cap to 5,000 acres with a mile of permanent road, exempt from analysis altogether.
And a signature works too. One provision exempts anything the Secretary or an Under Secretary personally approves. That’s the maneuver we caught at Bear Lodge last week, where a signature on a radioactive open pit mine near Devils Tower erased the public’s right to object to any of it, and the routing sat on a federal permitting dashboard four months before anybody noticed.
And when none of that moves fast enough, there’s Congress. The Boundary Waters withdrawal got no comment window whatsoever. H.J. Res. 140 ran through the Congressional Review Act, which skips the environmental analysis and public process federal law otherwise requires, and it passed the Senate 50 to 49 on April 16 with Thom Tillis and Susan Collins crossing to vote no. Twenty years of protection across 225,378 acres of the Superior National Forest watershed, gone in an afternoon. First mineral withdrawal in history undone that way.
That’s eighteen months and this accounting here just scratches the surface. More than a million comments filed across Roadless, Chaco, and grazing alone, and every decision went the other way. We catalogued the 2025 half in January and it has only picked up in speed and intensity.
Who’s holding the pen
Every one of these rules is justified as “efficiency” or “emergency”. It turns out you can do things much faster if you don’t have to consider the implications and adverse effects of your actions. And if you headline your actions under the emergency banner our system allows you to bulldoze almost anything through.
Then you look at who ended up running the agencies.
The Forest Service is run by Tom Schultz. Before his appointment he was vice president of resources and government affairs at Idaho Forest Group, one of the largest lumber producers in the country, where by USDA’s own account of him he led timber procurement and managed relationships with government officials at all levels. The agency’s official biography treats his industry years as a qualification, crediting him with a deep understanding of raw material availability, quality, and price.
Interior’s third-highest official is Karen Budd-Falen, a Wyoming attorney who spent her career representing ranchers against the agencies she now helps run. She and her husband hold stakes in at least five ranching operations each worth over a million dollars, carrying grazing permits on more than a quarter-million acres of BLM land. In 2018 she signed a statement promising to recuse herself from any discussion of grazing matters. In March, Interior’s ethics office handed her a partial waiver to work on exactly those matters, which E&E News called rare. In May the Washington Post reported she’d acknowledged on video being involved in grazing policy changes benefiting businesses like her family’s. Two months later, BLM proposed the grazing rule narrowing who’s allowed to object.
BLM is run by Steve Pearce, the former New Mexico congressman who built his fortune in oil and gas and whose ethics agreement required divesting millions from fossil fuel companies. Pearce is the man who called gathering perspectives a vital part of the process while his agency gave America seven Holy Week days to comment on reopening Chaco Canyon to oil and gas leasing. We’ve been tracking him since he took the job.
Line those three up against the inventory. The timber executive runs the agency cutting the objection window on timber projects. The rancher with a quarter-million acres of grazing permits worked on the grazing rules and on the comment rules both. The oil and gas man runs the agency compressing comment on oil and gas leasing to ten days. And the president who appointed all three of them sat in a room full of oil executives and called the arrangement a deal.
Efficiency has nothing to do with it and we’re certainly not in any sort of crisis the way they explain it. A comment period is only a burden if the answer you’re planning to give won’t survive being asked about out loud. Good acts don’t need hiding and this has been a hell of a year for hiding.
Why we keep going
The pendulum swings. It always has. And when it turns, how much of this actually gets undone will depend on how many of us there are, how much we remember, how much we care, and how organized we are on the day it happens. So we keep the docket numbers, and the seven-day windows, and the ethics waivers, and the name of every official who called public input vital while running out the clock on it.
And for now we keep the pressure on because if we let up they take more. If no one reports on this, or comments on this, or calls their reps about this the gap grows and the losses mount inexorably.
What to do
If you’re new here, PLAN is our free public lands action tool. It tracks every open comment window, explains what’s at stake, and hands you a draft to make your own. BLM leasing closes August 24 and Bear Lodge closes August 28, both live there now. The Roadless draft could publish any week, so get on the list before it does.
And use our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard grades all 535 members of Congress on their public lands votes.
Until next time,
Will
As the founder of the Audubon Center (now Osprey Wild) in Minnesota, as the founding director of the International Wolf Center, part of the founding of the Friends of the Boundary Water Canoe Are and the Minnesota chapter of the Sierra Club and engaged in many other efforts over my 80 years I can tell you that all the environmental requirements that you describe so well were essential to combat bad decisions and protect the Earth. Thank you for your education!
We vote. Then Congress votes. However, the only vote that counts is the president’s vote. Not a democracy at all.