Does this make your comments meaningless?
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act took the BLM's power to pull a bad parcel from an oil and gas lease sale. The comment box is still open. What it can do now has changed.
There is a fundamental shift in public input on public land oil and gas lease sales. Historically, the BLM said it had the authority to offer or defer any parcel in any sale.
If a piece of land had conservation value like an elk winter range, a parcel next to a monument, or an auction was upstream of drinking water, the agency could pull it.
That was the agreement. The public would raise their hand and say, “Hey, not here,” and sometimes a parcel would come off.
Earlier this year, the Montana Wildlife Federation and a couple other groups asked for that review through a comment period on a lease sale happening in Montana and the Dakotas. They asked to defer the parcels that run into wildlife and water. The BLM provided a new type of response.
They claimed that they no longer have that power. The agency pointed to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, proclaiming it took away their discretion to pull individual parcels once a sale was underway. Decisions now get made upstream, in land use plans – Resource Management Plans (RMP), some of them created 20-30 years ago, before a collared deer showed us where it goes in winter.
BLM in this administration is trying to tell you nothing was taken from you. The place to weigh in was always in the planning stage, and that you can still shape an RMP. But planning grinds on for years, and many plans are aging, and the science behind new research is being stripped. Oh, and as you’ve probably heard, some of these expert-driven plans are being erased because the “experts” in Congress want better terms.
Some RMPs are being erased through a process called the Congress Review Act. A new way to strip entire plans. Plans that take decades to create because of the input it takes across the public land spectrum- ecologists, biologists, oil and gas industry folk, ranchers, anyone who has a stake in public lands all get a say. One of my favorite writers on Substack, Wes Siler, wrote about it here. Please go check it out.
There is cause for concern here, because there are more negative things stacked on top of it:
The law requires at least 4 lease sales a year in 9 Western states. Not up to 4. At least 4, on a schedule, whether or not a single company wants the ground. Just last month, Colorado held a large lease sale, about 134,000 acres, 2/3s of it just south of Dinosaur National Monument, some of it near a reservoir that supplies drinking water to people in Aurora.
The royalty rate on federal oil and gas went from 16.67 percent back down to 12.5. That’s the share that comes back to the states and the taxpayer, and it just got smaller by millions of dollars.
In June, Interior proposed cutting the bonds a company has to post before it drills. That’s the money that pays to plug the well when the company folds and walks off. Unfortunately, when the bond doesn’t cover it, the bill comes to us.
We’re not short on already leased ground. About 21 million acres of BLM land are already under lease and only about 12 million are producing anything at all. We are leasing more anyway.
So does this mean your comment is meaningless?
Absolutely not, but I’d understand if you’re feeling that.
Your comment does not fall into the ether; it goes on the official record. The record is what a judge reads years later when a group sues over a lease falling on a migratory route or next to a protected area. These sales get challenged all the time, and the challenges live and die on what’s on the record. The court looks at what the public raised and whether the agency actually answered it. A concern nobody put in writing is a concern nobody can point to later.
The discretion isn’t gone forever. Congress wrote it out, which means Congress can write it back in, and those people do count the calls from home even when they never read a comment file. The plans get rewritten too, on their own slow clock, and that’s now the comment period with real teeth, because the BLM just told us that’s where the decisions live. The weight moved. It moved off the sale in front of you and onto the plan behind it and the law above both.
Wyoming's December sale alone puts up 284 parcels across 378,305 acres. That is not a typo. Three hundred seventy-eight thousand acres, one state, one quarter. Comments close August 5. Write all you want.
BLM eplanning: Click on Participate Now
Where does this leave us?
The comment box is being left open on purpose, as a formality, so the file shows a form got filled out on a decision the agency says it isn’t allowed to make. That’s a lousy way to run public land. It’s still not a reason to stop writing.
If you still feel you want to take more action, there are some things I’d encourage you to do. Share what’s happening with friends and family on both sides of the aisle who may not be as plugged in as you are but still care for the outdoors. Encourage them to comment. Please join a conservation group and push for them to write public comments.
Your comment on one sale probably won’t pull a parcel the way it would have 2 years ago. That’s gone for now. It still builds the record, still feeds the lawsuit, still puts it in writing that people showed up and said no. Meaningless would mean giving up the fight. Send it, and then find the plan.
Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in clean energy and progress but it must be done ethically.
I write this, build this, and fund this myself. If you find any value in this, a coffee goes a long way.
Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.