House Committee Offers Fossil Fuel Industry a ‘Once in a Generation’ Opportunity to Develop on Public Lands

Environmentalists call the draft text for the energy, tax and national security bill a handout to oil companies and warn of impacts to wildlife and protected landscapes.

Sacred Native American sites, public lands and undeveloped landscapes on and off shore are once again under threat from President Trump and congressional Republicans after the House Natural Resources Committee released draft legislation Friday that would make substantial changes to how fossil fuel companies doing, or hoping to do, business on public lands are regulated. 

The text—the release of which is one in a series of steps oversight committees in Congress take in the formulating of bills authorizing government spending—cuts fossil fuel royalty rates, expands drilling on public lands and in the Arctic, reinstates canceled mining leases and cancels Western resource management plans that balanced conservation with development.

Environmentalists lambasted the draft for its possible effects on public lands, wildlife and the environment. “Republicans are treating our most precious wild places as nothing more than opportunities for industry to plunder, profit and pollute,” said Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement.

The draft made little sense at a time when the federal government is projected to lose revenue as President Trump and Republicans eye more tax cuts for billionaires, Nunes added in an interview with Inside Climate News, noting she and her organization do not support the tax breaks. 

“They’re undermining their own ability to pay for that,” Nunes said.

If passed, the draft would cut the royalties fossil fuel companies pay the government for drilling on public lands to 12.5 percent—a rate first implemented in 1920 that remained unchanged until the Inflation Reduction Act raised it to 16.67 percent in 2022. 

The draft legislation would increase fees for operating renewable energy on public lands by charging companies an “acreage rent.” Such a fee could handicap wind and solar projects that cover much more land than drilling projects.

“This legislation is for the benefit of polluters and to the detriment of a clean energy transition,” Nunes said. 

The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group representing all segments of America’s natural gas and oil industry, called the draft a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” in a statement responding to the legislation. “From lease sales to expedited permitting processes, the committee’s proposal creates an unprecedented pathway for developing our vast natural resources on federal lands and waters for generations to come.”

Some of the most controversial impacts of the draft legislation may be felt in the West, where local communities say expanding oil and gas drilling is not only redundant—oil and gas production in the U.S. is at an all-time high—but counter to how communities want to use public lands.

Under the proposed text, the Secretary of Interior would be barred from enforcing Bureau of Land Management (BLM) resource management plans in Miles City, Montana, and Buffalo, Wyoming, which ban new coal mining leases in the Powder River Basin, and environmentalists and ranchers in the area do not want to see them overturned. The proposed text would also bar the Department of Interior from enforcing a BLM resource management plan in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where locals went through over a decade of painstaking debate and collaboration to arrive at a controversial compromise plan that elevated conservation onto equal footing with development. 

“Congress should not be getting in the way of these local land-use plans,” said Julia Stuble, Wyoming state director for the Wilderness Society. Stuble said she was prepared for Trump’s BLM to write a new management plan for Rock Springs, but congressional involvement is not only redundant, it’s unprecedented. “Anybody who says they believe government closest to the people is the best government because that honors local community input should oppose the [resource management plans] prohibitions in this bill,” she said.

The House Committee on Natural Resources will convene on May 6 to begin debating and marking up the legislation, at which time lawmakers can strike language and make amendments. The draft then heads to the budget committee and from there, to a vote to the House floor.

Cover photo:  Heavy vehicles stop moving as a timed detonation brings down a wide coal face at the Buckskin Coal Mine, in Gillette, Wyoming. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg via Getty Images