MAGA continues to pillage public lands

Plus: Trump issues oodles of drilling permits; national park visitation; inane coal policy

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

An idle drill rig with Raplee Ridge in the background near Mexican Hat, Utah, an oil and gas hotspot back in the early 1900s. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Remember back in the pre-Trump II days, when every six months or so the environmental community would harp on Biden for issuing more oil and gas drilling permits than Trump did during his first term? If so, you probably also remember the Land Desk harping on the greens for making the comparison in the first place, saying it doesn’t really mean anything.

Well, it looks like it does mean something to Trump. And, wanting to demonstrate his fondness for those big fat drill rigs, his administration has been handing out drilling permits at a mind-bending rate. Between Jan. 21 and Jul. 21 of this year, the BLM has issued 2,660 permits, or about 524 per month. And since everyone likes comparisons: That eclipses Biden’s biggest year of 2023, when he issued 317 per month.

But do you know who likes drill rigs more than Trump? George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who issued a whopping 569 per month in 2007. Yet this is a good example of why these comparisons are not really meaningful.

Most of George W.’s APDs (approved permit to drill) were for coalbed methane wells (which is just natural gas extracted from coal seams) in places like New Mexico’s and Colorado’s San Juan Basin, Wyoming’s Sublette County, or Colorado’s Piceance Basin. They are smaller and lower-producing than the horizontal “fracking” wells that sparked the “shale revolution” in about 2008, altering the industry and the geography of oil and gas extraction. Most new wells are aiming for oil rather than gas with drilling centered in the Permian Basin. The Farmington office of the BLM has issued just 48 APDs in the past six months, while the Carlsbad office has handed out 2,565.

Whether these permits are ever used is another question altogether. So far this year, the rig count is down from last year. There certainly are not enough rigs operating to burn through all of these new permits anytime soon, meaning the companies will just sit on them until oil prices increase again and then go on a frenzy.

Back in the San Juan Basin, where the natural gas industry pretty much collapsed in 2009 and has stayed that way since, rig activity is beginning to pick up just a bit, according to Hart Energy. But it’s all relative: There are only about six rigs operating in the basin currently, compared to more than 90 in the Permian.

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Fresh off legislatively pillaging the public lands — and so much else — in the “One Big Beautiful” law, MAGA is looking to rub a little bit of acid in those wounds with the House’s 2026 fiscal year budget. Last week, they released their appropriations bill for Interior, environment, and related agencies, and it robs the public lands of cash and environmental protections, while handing concessions to the extractive and fossil fuel industries. It is, like so much that this administration and its lackeys do, straight out of Project 2025, the radical right wing’s roadmap for crushing democracy and turning America into a a corporate-run oligarchy.

Basically every public lands and environment related agency is getting its funding cut, not out of some sort of fiscal responsibility (Defense and Homeland Security are getting massive infusions of additional taxpayer funding), but because today’s GOP is dead set on taking out their resentment on the planet and in offsetting a small portion of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. The only good news is that some of the cuts are less than what Trump asked for. Some examples:

• The Bureau of Land Management would take a $110.4 million cut below fiscal year 2025’s level, or an 8% decrease.

• The U.S. Geological Survey’s budget will be slashed by 5.6%, or $82 million.

• The National Park Service will see it’s budget cut by about $176 million, a 6% decrease.

• The Environmental Protection Agency will have its funding slashed by $2.12 billion, or a whopping 23%. That includes huge cuts to Science and Technology, Environmental Programs and Management, and State and Tribal Assistance Grants.

• The U.S. Forest Service’s budget will be reduced by $16.8 million.

• The National Institute of Environmental Health Science will see a budget cut of $27.9 million, or 35%.

• Some good news: The Indian Health Service would get a $182 million increase under the bill and the Bureau of Indian Affairs is getting about the same funding as last year, in defiance of Trump’s request to slash its budget by more than 30%.

• Also taking deep cuts under the Interior et al appropriations bill: Smithsonian, National Gallery of Art, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Presidio Trust’s funding will be totally eliminated, after receiving $90 million last year. This could open the way for the Presidio to be developed or become a “Freedom City.”

But this is more than just about bean counting. It’s also a way for lawmakers to exert their will over federal agencies by way of funding.

For example, since the Trump administration has yet to shrink or eliminate any national monuments, congressional Republicans are doing some de facto national monument shrinkage of their own. The appropriation bill would freeze funding for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s new management plan, forcing the relevant agencies to revert back to the February 2020 plan enacted under the previous Trump administration and applying only to the vastly reduced, Trump I-era monument boundaries. This effectively voids Biden’s restoration of the monument’s original boundaries and trashes the new management plan and all of the work that went into it.

The GOP’s bill also would suffocate the BLM’s 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, aka the Public Lands Rule, which aims to put conservation on a par with drilling, mining, and grazing on public lands.

Can a new rule fix the Bureau of Livestock and Mining?

The appropriation bill is also a sort of MAGA love letter to the fossil fuel industry, including provisions such as:

• Cutting off funding for — and thereby killing — the Biden administration’s Fluid Mineral Leasing rule, which increased oil and gas royalty rates from 12.5% to 16.67% to reflect modern times and give taxpayers a slightly better deal; increased minimum leasing bids to $10 per acre; established an “expression of interest” fee for leases; eliminated non-competitive leasing; increased minimum reclamation bonds for oil and gas wells from $10,000 to $150,000 and eliminated blanket nationwide operator bonds. It also directed leasing towards areas with high oil and gas potential and away from more sensitive cultural, wildlife, and recreation resources. In other words: All very common sense, some might say watered-down, provisions.

• Cutting off funding for and killing the Biden administration’s methane fee aimed at incentivizing oil producers to sell natural gas — a byproduct of oil drilling — on the market rather than simply venting or flaring the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. The bill would also eliminate the greenhouse gas reporting system for the oil and gas industry.

• Mandating quarterly oil and gas leases on public lands in nine states (WY, NM, CO, UT, MT, ND, OK, NV, AK) and expanding the definition of lands eligible for leasing.

• Cutting off all funding for the Biden administration’s environmental protections in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

• Cuts off funding for a 2024 coal combustion waste disposal rule that had been in the works for decades as part of an effort to tackle one of the nation’s largest and nastiest solid waste streams.

The GOP isn’t too fond of wildlife. The bill takes aim at numerous endangered species — from the lesser prairie chicken and grizzly, to the gray wolf, wolverine, and long-eared bat — and blocks funding for bans or restrictions on lead ammunition, even though that’s a leading killer of condors and some birds of prey.

The condors of Marble Canyon

I’ve been really curious about how the Trump administration’s policy chaos might affect visitation at national parks. Would the threat to privatize public lands through various means (from selling it off to turning reservation systems over to private concessionaires) inspire folks to get to their parks while they’re still around? Would the administration’s hostility towards non-Americans (tariffs and trade wars, deportations) keep international tourists at bay? Or would the declining value of the U.S. dollar bring more foreign tourists to America?

We’re six months in to this nightmare … er … administration, and there aren’t any obvious trends in the year-to-date visitation statistics. A lot of parks have actually seen an increase in visitation over the last couple of years so far. Drill down a bit, however, and something else becomes apparent: While visitation was unusually high in the winter and spring in Zion, Grand Canyon, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Chaco Canyon, and other parks, it dropped off relative to previous years in May and June.

This may be due to heat and drought, but it also may be tied to the drop in international tourism into the U.S. Federal data show that incoming international air travel during the first half of the year is down 3.6% from the same period last year. (Meanwhile, more U.S. citizens are flying overseas, despite the weak U.S. dollar. Perhaps they are fleeing something?).

I’ve always been interested in visitation patterns at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, as well. It seems like it used to correlate with water levels: No one wants to visit Lake Powell when many of the boat ramps are high and dry, the shores are mudflats, and Rainbow Bridge isn’t accessible by boat. Or that’s what I used to think. But more recently it seems that visitation rates are driven by other factors, perhaps because people are coming to the recreation area for different reasons, such as the spectacular landscape that surrounds the reservoir.

That said, visitation this year is down again along with the water levels.

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🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡

Yes, the Department of Energy’s social media account did tweet this stupidity, I’m sorry to say.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb … One of the many, many stupid, ugly provisions in the Big Beautiful (I cringe every time I write it) law was a royalty reduction for coal production on federal lands. The rate has been at 12.5% for about a century. If you think of that as the wholesale price that Peabody, Arch, Oxbow, and other corporations have been paying to purchase Americans’ coal, then you could say they are marking the product up by about 800%.

It seems like a pretty good deal for the corporations — and a crappy one for us taxpayers. But it wasn’t enough, apparently, so the Republicans lowered the royalty rate to a measly 7%. And just so you understand, this isn’t just for new coal leases, it’s for all existing and future coal leases on public lands and for the public’s coal.

What that means is that all of those coal mines in the Powder River Basin, Colorado, and Utah are now paying the federal government only about 56% as much as they paid before the bill was signed into law. So that means if production levels remain flat and coal prices remain steady — which is not a given — then the federal government will bring in about $250 million from coal royalties this year, which is about $200 million less than last year. What about that is fiscally responsible, may I ask?

But here’s the kicker: The states where the coal is mined get 50% of that royalty revenue back. This means Wyoming will receive something like $50 million less per year from coal royalties, according to a report by Wyoming Public Radio’s Caitlin Tan. That’s My estimates say Wyoming could take an even bigger hit of more like $80 million annually, depending on the price of coal and production levels. That’s $50 million to $80 million less for the state to spend on schools, public services, roads, and so forth. Heck, it may even spur Wyoming to finally implement a corporate and individual income tax!

Federal coal royalty revenues from calendar year 2024. This is from a 12.5% royalty rate. Congressional Republicans just dropped it to 7%, meaning the taxpayers are going to be shorted about $200 million per year.

The pushers of this plan claim to be doing it to boost production, which would then offset some of the losses. But that’s not how it works. Coal mines aren’t going to produce more just because it’s cheaper to do so; they produce more when demand goes up. Production will remain the same or, more likely, drop, since fewer and fewer utilities are interested in burning coal. The corporations will make more profit. Everyone else will get screwed.