President Donald Trump is driving a 21st-century gold rush that’s supercharging conservation battles on public lands across the West.

While individual conflicts grab day-to-day attention, it’s the rapidly growing cumulative total that’s astonishing even longtime environmental activists concerned about the effect of mining coal and critical minerals on federal land and wildlife.

The effort is focused on spurring new projects and, with the help of Republicans on Capitol Hill, opening up areas that the Biden administration made off-limits to mining. The Trump administration is also swiftly advancing mines that were already in the pipeline, in many cases envisioned under former President Joe Biden as vital for a renewable energy future. Under Trump, the priority is no longer digging up minerals to feed construction of electric vehicle batteries and renewables, but instead to bolster supply chains for technology like artificial intelligence, as well as military applications.

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“What’s scary about this time around with the administration is that it’s so much more coordinated,” said Sam Zeno, a senior policy analyst for conservation policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, about the mining projects already moving forward.

Marc Fink, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, added that Trump’s team seems to be making a strategic choice. “It’s kind of the shock-and-awe approach of this whole administration, to throw so much stuff out there that it’s hard for the public to know what to focus on,” Fink said.

Trump officials contend the U.S. must get into mining to keep the nation secure and that the Biden administration stifled the industry, despite its own rhetoric about bolstering domestic supply chains.

During a March interview with CNBC, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that the nation can produce minerals “cleaner, smarter, safer, healthier” compared to competitors like China, which currently dominates mining and processing of valuable materials. China is also heavily invested in Africa and Indonesia, where some mines have been tied to human rights abuses and environmental degradation.

“We’re not solving any global environmental problems, we’re just offshoring it and creating dependence on major power adversaries,” Burgum said. “We need to bring that mining and refining of critical minerals back to the U.S. for national security purposes.”

The administration has already pushed forward a regulatory shakeup.

In March, Trump inked an executive order that calls on federal officials to inventory mineral-rich federal lands where digging up critical minerals is to be prioritized. A month later, the Interior Department proposed cutting environmental reviews for certain projects down to a month or less, a process that some experts warn is rife with legal risks for both developers and regulators. Interior said Monday that it would complete within 14 days the environmental review to reopen a Utah uranium and vanadium mine.

The Trump administration has also added 20 proposed hardrock and coal mines and exploratory bids to a FAST-41 transparency list, providing public data about the pace and contents of environmental reviews and permitting.

And on Capitol Hill, Republicans through a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill are trying to reverse Biden-era decisions that blocked mining near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and construction of a 211-mile road in Alaska that would boost mining but potentially harm permafrost and wildlife. The administration has also scrapped a Biden-era land withdrawal that blocked mining around a tributary of the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

The Trump administration is not alone in arguing the U.S. mine approval process is too long. Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said this country needs a transparent and reasonable timeline for deciding on whether or not projects can be built.

“The thing that we really want to avoid is just a years and years and yearslong permitting process with no end in sight,” he said. “Whether you want the projects to be stopped or to go forward, we should all generally agree that a good system of government would be able to come to a decision … without taking a decade.”

But environmental groups warn that attempts to move projects — many owned by companies based outside the U.S. — through faster reviews would likely result in damage to beloved landscapes. They also argue legal challenges are inevitable if reviews don’t comply with bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, or leave out critical buy-in from the public or affected tribes.

The Ivanpah Mountains in California’s Mojave National Preserve. | National Park Service

Mining battles are being teed up across the country.

In California, the Bureau of Land Management recently approved Australia-based Dateline Resources’ plan to continue mining — and explore for rare earth elements — inside the Mojave National Preserve, which conservation groups argue is a protected area that’s home to several endangered species such as the Mojave Desert tortoise.

In Arizona, the Trump administration has vowed to advance the proposed Resolution Copper mine despite ongoing litigation. Some members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe have warned the project will decimate land they consider sacred and are asking the Supreme Court to block the mine.

“They’re purporting to move forward with as many projects as they can, as quickly as they can,” said Aaron Mintzes, senior policy counsel for Earthworks. “It’s not clear to me how many will be successful.”

Permitting and the ESA

The push for more mining and expedited reviews is occurring as top Trump officials move to shrink the reach of the Endangered Species Act.

Burgum’s truncated NEPA reviews, for example, would allow Interior — leaning on the president’s national energy emergency designation — to soften requirements for ESA consultations. Yet another move the administration is proposing: to redefine what it means to “harm” a protected species. Actions that directly hurt or kill animals and plants would be considered “harm” but not those actions that alter the habitats that species rely on.

Along with questions around Indigenous rights and water protection, challenges to mines have often focused on threatened and endangered species that could be harmed by proposed projects.

For example, groups rallying to halt mining near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — more than 1 million acres of pristine forests, glacial lakes and streams in the Superior National Forest — warn the area is home to three federally protected species, including the gray wolf, the Canada lynx and the northern long-eared bat.

In Idaho, conservation groups suing the Trump administration over Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite gold project, an open-pit project in the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River, say the mining operation could decimate chinook salmon, steelhead, bull trout, wolverine and whitebark pine, which are protected as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The proposed site of the Stibnite mine in central Idaho. | Dylan Brown/POLITICO’s E&E News

The Stibnite mine, which received a final record of decision from the Forest Service under the Biden administration, is now awaiting approval from the Army Corps of Engineers. If approved, it would be the nation’s first mine to produce antimony, a mineral at the center of a national trade spat with China.

Perpetua Resources counters that its project has already undergone eight years of science-based interagency permitting and that its inclusion on the FAST-41 dashboard will add transparency and improve oversight. The Stibnite mine, the company says, is also designed to clean up legacy mine waste, improve water quality and reconnect native fish to spawning habitat they have been blocked from for more than 80 years.

“With too many mining projects tied up in decades of red tape, we applaud this administration’s efforts to ensure responsible mining projects move forward in a well-vetted and timely manner,” Marty Boughton, a spokesperson for Perpetua, said in an email.

Boughton also pointed to the project’s final environmental impact statement, which says the project would benefit chinook salmon and steelhead by allowing them to access habitat that’s been cut off for decades through the creation of new passageways.

National parks

Environmentalists warn that an executive order signed by Trump in March could open up vast amounts of public lands to mining.

Under the Mining Law of 1872, most federal lands are already open to mining claims. Zeno with the Center for American Progress in a recent report pointed to an analysis by the National Parks Conservation Association, which found that more than 3,700 mining claims exist within the boundaries of national parks and national monuments.

Zeno also noted that the Trump administration has revived a fight over a plan to expand a mine on National Park Service lands in California.

BLM last month approved Australia-based Dateline Resources’ plan to look for rare earth minerals at a mine site inside the Mojave National Preserve. BLM in a release referred to the Colosseum mine as the nation’s “second rare earths mine.”

But Chance Wilcox, the National Parks and Conservation Association’s California desert program manager, pointed to internal emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showing that the National Park Service in 2022 found that owners of the Colosseum mine were conducting unpermitted road work on federal land.

Wilcox also said the company is operating under a 1985 plan of operations from BLM that allowed the company to mine for gold and reclaim the land but doesn’t allow for exploratory work or digging up rare earth minerals. Wilcox said the company needs legal approval from the National Park Service and to go through the NEPA process given the effects the project would have on the Mojave ecosystem, which hosts the second-highest concentration of rare plants in California and is an important habitat for desert bighorn sheep.

The Colosseum mine was originally authorized under a 1985 plan approved by BLM. When Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act in 1994, the land became part of the Mojave National Preserve.

The Colosseum mine is now subject to the Mining in the Parks Act. Passed in 1976, the legislation states among other elements that all mining in the national park system “should be conducted so as to prevent or minimize damage to the environment and other resource values.”

Wilcox asserted the mine is operating using an expired plan of operations and has failed to show there are rare earths at the site.

“The Trump administration is blatantly ignoring process and commonsense in encouraging mining in one of America’s largest national parks,” said Wilcox.

Kerry Shapiro, an attorney at the law firm Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell representing Dateline and its subsidiary, Colosseum Rare Metals, said in an email that Interior reaffirmed the company’s right to mine and explore under its “valid” and “existing plan of operations” at the Colosseum mine site.

Shapiro said the site has been mined for over 100 years, long before the creation of the Mojave National Preserve.

The Colosseum mine, Shapiro added, operates under federal oversight and complies with federal law, saying that there are no claims against Dateline or CRM for environmental damage in the area. “One unsubstantiated allegation of damage to an access road was rescinded by the National Park Service,” Shapiro added.

As for proving the existence of rare earths, Shapiro noted the U.S. Geological Survey has identified an area about 100 miles long spanning the Mojave Desert area that includes the Colosseum mine site, as well as the Mountain Pass rare earth-bearing system. Mountain Pass is the nation’s only mine commercially producing rare earth elements.

“Rare earths have been found at the Colosseum mine site,” Shapiro said.

The Bureau of Land Management manages approximately 1.3 million acres of forests and woodlands in Wyoming. BLM manages nearly 12 million acres of public land across Idaho, and roughly 47 million acres in Montana and the Dakotas. Photo courtesy BLM

by Madison Dapcevich

The White House last month announced its intention to rescind a landmark public lands management rule published last year and built on decades of conservation efforts. The rule established environmental protection as equally important as extractive industries on public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

On April 14, the Trump administration published its notice announcing the potential rescission of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, also known as the Public Lands Rule.

The rule, put into effect by the Biden administration in June 2024, formally required BLM to recognize “conservation as an essential component of public lands management, on equal footing with other multiple uses of these lands.” The policy also established that the agency will “support ecosystem health and resilience” by protecting intact landscapes, restoring degraded habitat and using available science data when making management decisions, further codifying conservation tools.

Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation with the Montana Natural Resources Defense Council, called the potential repeal a “liquidation” of the resources on public lands. Whether that is feasible under the current administration remains to be determined. Many of the proposals in the leaked strategy require the same personnel and resources that are being dismantled by existing executive orders.

“The original intent of this law and others like it was to task the BLM with managing public lands for health and productivity,” said John Zablocki, river protection director at the nonprofit American Rivers. “In the past, a lease on public land by a private entity would effectively give them control over that site regardless of its public status.”

BLM spokesperson Brian Hires confirmed that President Donald Trump, by pending executive order, plans a rescission of the rule and that it was “made official by way of notice of planned rulemaking” and published on the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs website.

A leaked version of the Department of the Interior’s 23-page “strategic plan” outlines opportunities to capitalize off of natural resources on public lands and even give some management to states. A team of investigative journalists at the independent environmental news desk publicdcomain.media first posted the draft to Substack on April 22.

“The Public Lands Rule] was meant to help improve how we conserve and use public lands, to gain efficiencies over the long term, to make sure that the BLM can comply with what Congress directed back in 1976.” – Alison Flint, Senior Legal Director, The Wilderness Society

The Interior Department provided a timeline for issuing a Federal Register notice by June 15, and a full rescission to be published as soon as August.

Hires declined to comment on the alleged draft plan of the rule, writing that BLM does “not have comments on or details to share about the proposed rule before it publishes in the Federal Register.”

Supporters of the White House plan say repealing the rule could help balance the federal budget by generating revenue through land sales, which would offset the cost of a Congressional budget reconciliation package. This allows Congress to adjust laws to meet budgetary goals while fast-tracking spending, revenue and debt limit changes to align federal expenditures.

Conservation groups argue that repealing the Public Lands Rule undermines decades of work to prioritize conservation and instead allows private companies to extract resources through mining and timber harvesting, among other activities.

Zablocki highlighted the differences between the use of public lands by private entities through leasing versus their sale.

“Companies can now effectively tie up public lands for private use but they’re still technically public lands, just operating on a lease,” said Zablocki, adding that under current regulations, private groups are still required to follow existing regulatory processes designed to protect public lands owned and managed by the federal government. “[That] is concerning because there are none of those protective processes in place,” he added, “like environmental reviews or considerations of impacts to endangered species.”

Currently, BLM manages approximately 245 million acres of public land described by the agency as “some of the nation’s most historic and scenic landscapes, as well as vast natural resources, for the benefit of all Americans.” In 2023, the agency reported generating a total economic output of $252.1 billion, supporting 949,000 jobs.

The total economic output of public lands by use in 2024. Chart courtesy BLM

There has been speculation that the Interior Department intends to not only increase development of public lands but also sell them to states. That concern prompted John Tubbs, former director of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, to study what that might mean for management costs to states like Montana.

Tubbs argued alongside other conservation groups in a new report that transferring the control of federally owned public lands back to state control can be “staggering and disproportionately impactful for a rural state with large swaths of national public lands.”

States could become responsible for maintaining these lands for wildfire mitigation and response, which would disrupt rural states’ reliance on federal funding. Montanans could face an estimated $7.9 billion tax burden within the next 20 years.

“This massive new state tax burden would be primarily driven by the stateʼs need to take on wildfire management, the deferred maintenance backlog, and abandoned mine reclamation on public lands,” the report reads. “The state would be left shouldering a massive fiscal burden, with no capacity to manage the soaring costs of wildfire suppression, a ten-fold increase from current federal support, an ever-growing half-billion-dollar maintenance backlog, and nearly a billion dollars of abandoned mine reclamation work.”

Currently, Montana shares wildfire management costs with federal agencies. According to the report, if public lands were to be transferred entirely back to the state, the financial burden of wildfire mitigation and response costs alone would largely be on state taxpayers, amounting to up to $5.5 billion over two decades.

Nearly half of Wyoming, the nation’s 10th-largest and least populated state, is federal public land. BLM manages almost 12 million acres of public land across Idaho, and roughly 47 million acres in Montana and the Dakotas.

“The notion that the [Trump] administration may intend to move forward unilaterally without following any public engagement process is deeply troubling,” said Kaden McArthur, director of policy and government relations of the group Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, in an April 16 press release. “The Public Lands Rule reflects years of work, including extensive input from stakeholders, to ensure the long-term health of the landscapes we rely on for healthy fish and wildlife habitat. To abandon the Rule in its entirety – and the overwhelming public support behind it – is a direct affront to those who value America’s wild places, and the democratic process used to steward them for the benefit of all of us as public land owners.”

If public lands were to be transferred entirely back to the state, the financial burden of wildfire mitigation and response costs would largely be on state taxpayers, amounting to up to $5.5 billion over two decades.

Alison Flint, senior legal director of The Wilderness Society, said the principles at the basis of the Public Lands Rule date back 50 years to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which obligated BLM to manage public lands under a multiple-use and sustained-yield mission for “conservation and consumptive uses.”

“Congress imposed a half-century ago what the conservation side of that multiple-use coin would look like, and how to balance those into the future,” Flint said. “Those conservation mandates have in the best of times been unevenly applied, and in the worst of times been fully ignored or abrogated due at least in part to a lack of regulatory direction for the land managers charged with making decisions that impact our public lands and resources.”

Although Congress established rules to incorporate conservation into land management, there was a lack of clear regulatory direction for how to do so, according to Flint. The Public Lands Rule gave BLM the opportunity to provide guidance, tools and direction for land managers to better incorporate conservation and restoration.

Flint added that while public lands do indeed have a role for extractive industries, their use must be balanced to protect against potential impacts on communities, wildlife habitats, cultural resources and the future of the climate.

“All of these things the Public Lands Rule was trying to recognize and give a seat at the table and bring into the decision-making of those charged with managing public lands,” she said. “The Public Lands Rule was poised to give these sorts of values a more meaningful seat at the decision-making table and provide a range of options for those charged with managing public lands for how to protect them.”

Public land use isn’t just about recognizing multiple uses, but also the sustained yield of resources for current and future generations to enjoy, she said.

“Americans at heart care really deeply about these shared resources. It’s where they camp, fish, hike and where their water comes from,” Flint said. “It’s our common ground. We also know that our partners in Indian Country and tribal nations care even more deeply — these are their ancestral lands. Concerning the Public Lands Rule, it was meant to help improve how we conserve and use public lands, to gain efficiencies over the long term, to make sure that the BLM can comply with what Congress directed back in 1976.”

Zablocki says that access to unadulterated public lands is unique to Americans, who have a deep-rooted connection to the wild places they call home.

“Public lands are such an integral part of the American experience, and people here often take it for granted because it’s so rooted in American life,” he said. “But the threat of rapid degradation through unrestrained leasing and extractive industries is very real.”

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On Wednesday evening, the Trump administration unveiled emergency permitting procedures to fast-track oil, gas and mining projects on national public lands – sharply curtailing public participation and environmental review. The changes, issued under a declared “National Energy Emergency,” purport to allow the Department of the Interior to bypass key safeguards under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Endangered Species Act and National Historic Preservation Act. The move ignores the fact that the country is currently at record production levels.

“This directive, based on an emergency that doesn’t exist, silences the public and guts NEPA’s core purpose – informed decision making,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, President of The Wilderness Society. “By skipping over the public, science and impact analysis, the administration skips over threats to our wildlife, water and cultural resources. And while claiming to create certainty for developers, this move guarantees the opposite: more litigation, more delay and less certainty.”

A recent report from The Wilderness Society titled Open for Drilling: The Outsized Influence of Oil & Gas on Public Lands underscores the lopsided nature of federal energy policy. As of January 2025, more than 81% of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in the West – over 200 million acres – are open to oil and gas leasing. Nearly half of the acreage already leased is not producing, much of it held speculatively by industry.

The administration’s move also aligns with recent legislative proposals that would mandate oil and gas lease sales across all eligible public lands on a quarterly basis – further tipping the scales toward fossil fuel extraction and away from recreation, conservation and cultural uses that federal law is meant to protect.

These policies could have profound consequences for communities across the West. Areas targeted for extraction often overlap with critical wildlife habitat, cultural and historical sites and lands valued for recreation and tourism. By removing meaningful review and public input, the emergency permitting scheme puts those resources and the people who depend on them at risk.

AT A GLANCE

Leading environmental organizations sent questionnaires to federal political parties. The responses received from four of the five main parties are reproduced on this page (one party did not respond). Please note that the parties’ responses are reproduced below exactly as submitted, and have not been edited, translated, assessed or checked for accuracy.

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We asked the five main federal parties to respond “yes,” “no” or “partial” to our questions, and to provide details. Responses are summarized in the table below. Scroll down to see detailed responses to each question from each party.