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The Bureau of Land Management has issued a final rule fully rescinding the 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, the regulation widely marketed to the public as the "Public Lands Rule." The final rule was filed on May 11, 2026, is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on May 12, 2026, and takes effect 30 days after publication. It restores the multiple-use mandate Congress wrote into law in 1976 and ends a regulatory experiment that the agency now openly acknowledges exceeded its own statutory authority.
For BlueRibbon Coalition, this result comes after our multi-year fight. Since the rule was first proposed in 2023, BRC has consistently opposed it through formal comments, action alerts, and a sustained public education campaign. Thousands of submissions came through BRC's action center, building an independent public record when the agency moved to finalize rescission.
The legal foundation for the Public Lands Rule was always thin. After the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo eliminated Chevron Deference, that foundation collapsed entirely. The agency's own final rule preamble is unusually direct on this point. BLM states plainly that the 2024 Rule "inappropriately elevated conservation as a discrete 'use' of the public lands, contrary to FLPMA's intent and statutory framework" and concludes, in language we will be quoting for years, that "it is not appropriate, or logical, to treat conservation as a 'use' under FLPMA".
This point matters, and lawmakers, agency leadership, and the public-land community need to keep it in front of mind: conservation is not an oversight in FLPMA. It is written directly into the statute, in multiple operative sections. Section 102(a)(8) of FLPMA states as a matter of national policy that "the public lands be managed in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values" (43 U.S.C. § 1701(a)(8)). The statutory definition of multiple use itself requires "harmonious and coordinated management of the various resources without permanent impairment of the productivity of the land and the quality of the environment" (43 U.S.C. § 1702(c)). Section 302(b) directs the agency, in Congress's own language, to "take any action necessary to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation of the lands" (43 U.S.C. § 1732(b)). Congress even created the Area of Critical Environmental Concern designation in the statute itself, specifically to "protect and prevent irreparable damage to important historic, cultural, or scenic values, fish and wildlife resources or other natural systems or processes" (43 U.S.C. § 1702(a)). On top of FLPMA, the agency is bound by a long list of federal conservation laws and statutes that govern every decision it makes.
That is the question proponents of the rule have never answered honestly. If conservation was already a binding statutory mandate under FLPMA and a dozen other federal laws, what did the Public Lands Rule actually add? The answer is now confirmed by the agency itself: a leasing mechanism that allowed private entities to obtain operational control of federal land. The rule was never about protecting resources the law already protected. It was about building a legal vehicle to convert federal land into long-term private holdings, marketed as conservation. Strip the branding away and the architecture is clear. The rule advanced the 30x30 agenda by handing influence over public lands to well-funded organizations that could buy leases, exclude other uses, and lock landscapes into single-purpose management without congressional action. That is the ulterior goal the marketing was designed to obscure, and it is the reason the rule needed to go.
The agency goes further. In its formal response to comments, BLM acknowledges that the restoration and mitigation leasing provisions at the heart of the 2024 Rule "exceed the Bureau's statutory authority" and "go beyond what the BLM may legally grant under FLPMA," which only authorizes third parties to "use, occupy, and develop" the public lands under 43 U.S.C. 1732(b). The agency itself has now confirmed the central legal argument BRC has been making since 2023.
The rescission also addresses a basic credibility problem with the original rule. BLM's own regulatory impact analysis for the 2024 Rule claimed it would not produce economic impacts exceeding the $100 million threshold that triggers heightened review. That estimate strained belief on its face. Multiple-use activities on BLM lands generate roughly $201 billion in economic output and support more than 783,000 jobs across grazing, energy, mining, recreation, and timber. A regulation that explicitly empowered private leaseholders to block those uses could not credibly be described as economically neutral.
The mainstream messaging of the Public Lands Rule has been remarkably consistent and remarkably inaccurate. Outlets and advocacy groups have described the rule as a long-overdue effort to balance conservation with extractive uses, suggesting that without it, BLM lands operate as a giveaway to drilling, mining, and grazing interests. That framing falls apart under any honest reading of federal law and is now contradicted by BLM itself.
Conservation is not a neglected stepchild of BLM management. It is written into FLPMA multiple times, as referenced above. It is also woven into every decision the agency makes through a long list of statutes: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Antiquities Act, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the Great American Outdoors Act, and dozens of additional protective measures. Anti-access groups file hundreds of lawsuits every year leveraging exactly these statutes. To claim BLM was somehow ignoring conservation before 2024 is not a serious argument.
The Public Lands Rule did not balance conservation with other uses. It elevated a single newly invented mechanism, the conservation lease, above every other use authorized by Congress. The final rule preamble describes commenter warnings almost verbatim from BRC's own published analysis: that the leasing provisions "could create a market-based system for monetizing conservation outcomes, allowing well-funded entities to obtain quasi-exclusive control of public lands and, as a result, encourage speculative behavior." That is the privatization argument BRC has been attacked for making for two years, now part of the agency's own rulemaking record in the Federal Register.
This was not balance. It was privatization disguised as "conservation."
The final rule removes 43 CFR Part 6100 in its entirety, eliminating the restoration and mitigation leasing apparatus, the Land Health Standards expansion, the "intact landscapes" planning requirement, and the supporting monitoring framework. It also restores the Areas of Critical Environmental Concern regulations at 43 CFR 1610.7-2 to the framework that governed ACEC designation from 1983 until the 2024 Rule took effect. The "presumption in favor of designation," the "temporary management" of nominated ACECs without first completing planning, and the elevated bar for de-designation are all gone. ACEC designations once again must be site-specific, grounded in real relevance and importance criteria, and made through transparent land use planning.
In practical terms, the rescission also eliminates 1,459 annual burden hours and 63 annual responses in public paperwork the 2024 Rule required. That is a small number on its own, but it is a tangible signal that the rule was generating more bureaucracy than it was producing public benefit.
The most damaging element of the rule for the off-road and motorized recreation community was its treatment of access. BLM has long maintained that motorized recreation does not qualify as "casual use," a position courts have affirmed. Conservation leases issued under the rule would have protected only casual use recreation, meaning OHV routes, snowmobile areas, e-bike access, vehicle-supported hunting, dispersed camping, organized rides, races, guided tours, and filming permits all sat squarely in the crosshairs.
The rule also dramatically expanded BLM's authority to designate Areas of Critical Environmental Concern through third-party nominations, with broad subjective criteria like "resilience," "connectivity," and "intactness" that had no statutory definition. The consequences of that expansion were not hypothetical. Before the ink dried on the rule, BLM Wyoming designated roughly one million acres as ACECs in the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan. Because Wyoming is exempt from the Antiquities Act, ACECs became the vehicle for locking up enormous landscapes without congressional oversight.
The rescission removes that vehicle. ACEC designations are once again governed by the 1983 framework, which requires site-specific analysis, formal land use planning, and a 60-day public comment period before designation. Access decisions return to transparent planning processes with real public input rather than opaque lease agreements negotiated behind closed doors.
The defenders of the Public Lands Rule have built their case on three claims, each of which collapses under examination.
The first claim is that the rule was needed to make BLM finally honor its multiple-use charter. The opposite is true. FLPMA defines multiple use. The Public Lands Rule subverted that definition by inserting a category Congress never authorized and giving it priority over the categories Congress did authorize. BLM itself now states the rule "vested too much discretion in individual authorizing officers to preclude productive uses of the public lands" and that the leasing provisions were "contrary to the BLM's mandate and statutory authority." An agency rule that overrides the congressional statute it claims to implement is not faithful execution. It is regulatory overreach.
The second claim is that conservation was being shortchanged on BLM lands. This is the framing that 81 percent of BLM lands are "open to oil and gas leasing," often repeated by anti-access groups. The figure conflates eligibility with activity. The vast majority of those acres are not leased, will never be leased, and remain available for hiking, hunting, camping, OHV use, grazing, and every other lawful activity. The figure is rhetorical, not factual, and it ignores the layered statutory protections (referenced above) already governing every acre.
The third claim is that the rescission tilts the scales back toward extraction. The actual effect is to restore the scales Congress built. Conservation leases were the only mechanism the rule contributed. Removing them does not remove conservation from BLM management. The agency expressly affirms in the final rule that "this deregulatory action does not alter the BLM's authority under FLPMA to take management actions to conserve public lands and resources, as appropriate." Conservation continues. What ends is the use of conservation as a privatization tool.
There is also a quieter argument worth surfacing. BLM's own preamble notes commenter concerns that passive management of leased land in arid ecosystems could worsen wildfire risk, accelerate invasive species spread, and degrade wildlife habitat. The same groups warning that rescission would undermine climate resilience were defending a leasing regime that would have locked land into passive management precisely where active stewardship is most needed. The wildfire framing they raised against rescission is more accurately a description of what the leasing program itself would have produced.
The deeper hypocrisy is harder to ignore. Organizations that have spent decades warning the public about the dangers of privatizing public lands rallied to defend a regulation whose central feature was a long-term private lease over public lands, available to the highest bidder, with no clear cap on duration, no transparent vetting of leaseholders, and no enforcement mechanism. A Chinese billionaire's private acquisition of tens of thousands of acres of so-called wilderness land made national news. The Public Lands Rule would have built the same dynamic into federal land management, at scale, across 245 million acres.
BRC will continue to defend the principle that public lands belong to the American public, managed under the law for shared, balanced use. The rescission of the Public Lands Rule is one of the most significant policy victories for motorized recreation and multiple-use advocates in a generation. It would not have happened without the thousands of BRC members and supporters who submitted comments, contacted their representatives, and refused to accept the dominant media narrative at face value.
The fight to restore lawful, transparent, accountable management of federal lands is far from over. BLM has signaled it may pursue separate rulemaking on ACEC procedures, Land Health Standards, and special recreation permitting in the months ahead. BRC will be at the table for each of those, and we will continue to make sure the next attempted regulatory end-run around Congress meets the same fate as this one.
Download the BLM final ruling here.
Continue reading...
For BlueRibbon Coalition, this result comes after our multi-year fight. Since the rule was first proposed in 2023, BRC has consistently opposed it through formal comments, action alerts, and a sustained public education campaign. Thousands of submissions came through BRC's action center, building an independent public record when the agency moved to finalize rescission.
Why the Decision Was Made
The legal foundation for the Public Lands Rule was always thin. After the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo eliminated Chevron Deference, that foundation collapsed entirely. The agency's own final rule preamble is unusually direct on this point. BLM states plainly that the 2024 Rule "inappropriately elevated conservation as a discrete 'use' of the public lands, contrary to FLPMA's intent and statutory framework" and concludes, in language we will be quoting for years, that "it is not appropriate, or logical, to treat conservation as a 'use' under FLPMA".
This point matters, and lawmakers, agency leadership, and the public-land community need to keep it in front of mind: conservation is not an oversight in FLPMA. It is written directly into the statute, in multiple operative sections. Section 102(a)(8) of FLPMA states as a matter of national policy that "the public lands be managed in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values" (43 U.S.C. § 1701(a)(8)). The statutory definition of multiple use itself requires "harmonious and coordinated management of the various resources without permanent impairment of the productivity of the land and the quality of the environment" (43 U.S.C. § 1702(c)). Section 302(b) directs the agency, in Congress's own language, to "take any action necessary to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation of the lands" (43 U.S.C. § 1732(b)). Congress even created the Area of Critical Environmental Concern designation in the statute itself, specifically to "protect and prevent irreparable damage to important historic, cultural, or scenic values, fish and wildlife resources or other natural systems or processes" (43 U.S.C. § 1702(a)). On top of FLPMA, the agency is bound by a long list of federal conservation laws and statutes that govern every decision it makes.
That is the question proponents of the rule have never answered honestly. If conservation was already a binding statutory mandate under FLPMA and a dozen other federal laws, what did the Public Lands Rule actually add? The answer is now confirmed by the agency itself: a leasing mechanism that allowed private entities to obtain operational control of federal land. The rule was never about protecting resources the law already protected. It was about building a legal vehicle to convert federal land into long-term private holdings, marketed as conservation. Strip the branding away and the architecture is clear. The rule advanced the 30x30 agenda by handing influence over public lands to well-funded organizations that could buy leases, exclude other uses, and lock landscapes into single-purpose management without congressional action. That is the ulterior goal the marketing was designed to obscure, and it is the reason the rule needed to go.
The agency goes further. In its formal response to comments, BLM acknowledges that the restoration and mitigation leasing provisions at the heart of the 2024 Rule "exceed the Bureau's statutory authority" and "go beyond what the BLM may legally grant under FLPMA," which only authorizes third parties to "use, occupy, and develop" the public lands under 43 U.S.C. 1732(b). The agency itself has now confirmed the central legal argument BRC has been making since 2023.
The rescission also addresses a basic credibility problem with the original rule. BLM's own regulatory impact analysis for the 2024 Rule claimed it would not produce economic impacts exceeding the $100 million threshold that triggers heightened review. That estimate strained belief on its face. Multiple-use activities on BLM lands generate roughly $201 billion in economic output and support more than 783,000 jobs across grazing, energy, mining, recreation, and timber. A regulation that explicitly empowered private leaseholders to block those uses could not credibly be described as economically neutral.
What the Rule Actually Did
The mainstream messaging of the Public Lands Rule has been remarkably consistent and remarkably inaccurate. Outlets and advocacy groups have described the rule as a long-overdue effort to balance conservation with extractive uses, suggesting that without it, BLM lands operate as a giveaway to drilling, mining, and grazing interests. That framing falls apart under any honest reading of federal law and is now contradicted by BLM itself.
Conservation is not a neglected stepchild of BLM management. It is written into FLPMA multiple times, as referenced above. It is also woven into every decision the agency makes through a long list of statutes: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Antiquities Act, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the Great American Outdoors Act, and dozens of additional protective measures. Anti-access groups file hundreds of lawsuits every year leveraging exactly these statutes. To claim BLM was somehow ignoring conservation before 2024 is not a serious argument.
The Public Lands Rule did not balance conservation with other uses. It elevated a single newly invented mechanism, the conservation lease, above every other use authorized by Congress. The final rule preamble describes commenter warnings almost verbatim from BRC's own published analysis: that the leasing provisions "could create a market-based system for monetizing conservation outcomes, allowing well-funded entities to obtain quasi-exclusive control of public lands and, as a result, encourage speculative behavior." That is the privatization argument BRC has been attacked for making for two years, now part of the agency's own rulemaking record in the Federal Register.
This was not balance. It was privatization disguised as "conservation."
What the Rescission Actually Does
The final rule removes 43 CFR Part 6100 in its entirety, eliminating the restoration and mitigation leasing apparatus, the Land Health Standards expansion, the "intact landscapes" planning requirement, and the supporting monitoring framework. It also restores the Areas of Critical Environmental Concern regulations at 43 CFR 1610.7-2 to the framework that governed ACEC designation from 1983 until the 2024 Rule took effect. The "presumption in favor of designation," the "temporary management" of nominated ACECs without first completing planning, and the elevated bar for de-designation are all gone. ACEC designations once again must be site-specific, grounded in real relevance and importance criteria, and made through transparent land use planning.
In practical terms, the rescission also eliminates 1,459 annual burden hours and 63 annual responses in public paperwork the 2024 Rule required. That is a small number on its own, but it is a tangible signal that the rule was generating more bureaucracy than it was producing public benefit.
Why Rescission Is Good for Access
The most damaging element of the rule for the off-road and motorized recreation community was its treatment of access. BLM has long maintained that motorized recreation does not qualify as "casual use," a position courts have affirmed. Conservation leases issued under the rule would have protected only casual use recreation, meaning OHV routes, snowmobile areas, e-bike access, vehicle-supported hunting, dispersed camping, organized rides, races, guided tours, and filming permits all sat squarely in the crosshairs.
The rule also dramatically expanded BLM's authority to designate Areas of Critical Environmental Concern through third-party nominations, with broad subjective criteria like "resilience," "connectivity," and "intactness" that had no statutory definition. The consequences of that expansion were not hypothetical. Before the ink dried on the rule, BLM Wyoming designated roughly one million acres as ACECs in the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan. Because Wyoming is exempt from the Antiquities Act, ACECs became the vehicle for locking up enormous landscapes without congressional oversight.
The rescission removes that vehicle. ACEC designations are once again governed by the 1983 framework, which requires site-specific analysis, formal land use planning, and a 60-day public comment period before designation. Access decisions return to transparent planning processes with real public input rather than opaque lease agreements negotiated behind closed doors.
The Hypocrisy and the Misinformation
The defenders of the Public Lands Rule have built their case on three claims, each of which collapses under examination.
The first claim is that the rule was needed to make BLM finally honor its multiple-use charter. The opposite is true. FLPMA defines multiple use. The Public Lands Rule subverted that definition by inserting a category Congress never authorized and giving it priority over the categories Congress did authorize. BLM itself now states the rule "vested too much discretion in individual authorizing officers to preclude productive uses of the public lands" and that the leasing provisions were "contrary to the BLM's mandate and statutory authority." An agency rule that overrides the congressional statute it claims to implement is not faithful execution. It is regulatory overreach.
The second claim is that conservation was being shortchanged on BLM lands. This is the framing that 81 percent of BLM lands are "open to oil and gas leasing," often repeated by anti-access groups. The figure conflates eligibility with activity. The vast majority of those acres are not leased, will never be leased, and remain available for hiking, hunting, camping, OHV use, grazing, and every other lawful activity. The figure is rhetorical, not factual, and it ignores the layered statutory protections (referenced above) already governing every acre.
The third claim is that the rescission tilts the scales back toward extraction. The actual effect is to restore the scales Congress built. Conservation leases were the only mechanism the rule contributed. Removing them does not remove conservation from BLM management. The agency expressly affirms in the final rule that "this deregulatory action does not alter the BLM's authority under FLPMA to take management actions to conserve public lands and resources, as appropriate." Conservation continues. What ends is the use of conservation as a privatization tool.
There is also a quieter argument worth surfacing. BLM's own preamble notes commenter concerns that passive management of leased land in arid ecosystems could worsen wildfire risk, accelerate invasive species spread, and degrade wildlife habitat. The same groups warning that rescission would undermine climate resilience were defending a leasing regime that would have locked land into passive management precisely where active stewardship is most needed. The wildfire framing they raised against rescission is more accurately a description of what the leasing program itself would have produced.
The deeper hypocrisy is harder to ignore. Organizations that have spent decades warning the public about the dangers of privatizing public lands rallied to defend a regulation whose central feature was a long-term private lease over public lands, available to the highest bidder, with no clear cap on duration, no transparent vetting of leaseholders, and no enforcement mechanism. A Chinese billionaire's private acquisition of tens of thousands of acres of so-called wilderness land made national news. The Public Lands Rule would have built the same dynamic into federal land management, at scale, across 245 million acres.
What Comes Next
BRC will continue to defend the principle that public lands belong to the American public, managed under the law for shared, balanced use. The rescission of the Public Lands Rule is one of the most significant policy victories for motorized recreation and multiple-use advocates in a generation. It would not have happened without the thousands of BRC members and supporters who submitted comments, contacted their representatives, and refused to accept the dominant media narrative at face value.
The fight to restore lawful, transparent, accountable management of federal lands is far from over. BLM has signaled it may pursue separate rulemaking on ACEC procedures, Land Health Standards, and special recreation permitting in the months ahead. BRC will be at the table for each of those, and we will continue to make sure the next attempted regulatory end-run around Congress meets the same fate as this one.
Download the BLM final ruling here.
Continue reading...