Congress has delivered some key wins on federal land management for the Trump administration even as the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that manages roughly 10 percent of American lands, lacks a director confirmed by the Senate.
Using the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers have vacated three BLM rules regarding management of federal lands in Alaska, North Dakota and Montana. The nullifications remove resource management plans adopted by the BLM during the Biden administration that prevented mining and drilling on federal lands in the states.
The Senate last Thursday also voted to rescind a 2022 BLM record of decision that would close off 11 million acres of the 23 million acre Strategic Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to oil and gas leasing. Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, has a companion bill in the House.
The congressional actions have more immediate effect than would a time- and manpower-consuming rule reversal by the BLM, an agency that is working under an acting director whose authority is under challenge. They allow the Trump administration to implement policies to increase drilling and mining on public lands.
Congressional Republicans are critics of the BLM plans, saying the Biden administration was increasing energy prices by curtailing production on federal land.
Republicans saw President Donald Trump’s return to office in January as giving them a chance to repeal the Biden administration rules. The Government Accountability Office’s determination in June that the rules for the purposes of the Congressional Review Act gave them more time to act than is typical under the CRA.
Congress has also cleared three joint resolutions for the president’s desk that will vacate BLM resource management plans concerning eastern Montana, North Dakota and the central Yukon in Alaska.
The agency is also moving forward with other reversals of Biden administration actions that aren’t eligible for nullification under the CRA, including the repeal of a rule that considered conservation a “use” for public lands alongside grazing, mining, and oil and gas extraction. The change, which allowed leases for environmental mitigation and restoration, was criticized by Republicans.
But the agency actions could be jeopardized by the status of its acting director, Bill Groffy. The first Trump administration never had a BLM director confirmed by the Senate and the current Trump administration hasn’t nominated one since its first candidate withdrew.
District Judge Brian Morris in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana found during the first Trump administration that William Perry Pendley had served unlawfully as acting director of the BLM for more than a year. Pendley had been nominated by Trump, but the nomination was soon withdrawn after Republican senators expressed reservations.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which filed a challenge of Pendley’s tenure in 2020, sent a letter Friday to the Interior Department expressing concern that the various BLM acting heads, including Groffy, don’t satisfy the requirements of the law that outlines who can lead agencies without a Senate-confirmed leader.
“Without Senate confirmation, Interior’s leaders are more likely to be ‘fringe’ figures or otherwise unqualified. Further, official actions they take may be found by courts to be invalid,” the letter said.
The Interior Department said in an email it “will respond to non-shutdown related queries once appropriations have been enacted.”
Groffy was appointed the principal deputy director of BLM in June, a position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation, and was simultaneously named acting director. He was previously the senior director of legislative and regulatory affairs at the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, an industry group critical of the Biden administration’s land policies.
Trump nominated Kathleen Sgamma in February to BLM director. As director of the oil and natural gas industry group Western Energy Alliance, she was a vocal advocate for the industry and challenged a number of Biden administration decisions in court.
Her nomination was pulled in April just hours before her confirmation hearing was set to begin. Sgamma has previously criticized Trump’s actions during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, writing in a message to WEA members she was “disgusted” by his role in “spreading misinformation.”
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