February 08, 2018
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has finalized a set of recommendations that would overhaul the way it permits energy exploration and other activities on public land by streamlining environmental reviews, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.
The Sept. 27 report — which was issued in response to a March 27 memo from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, but never publicly released — amounts to a blueprint for how the Trump administration plans to expedite extractive activities on 245 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of the mineral estate below the surface.
BLM’s holdings, which can be used for mining and grazing as well as recreation and archaeological preservation, account for about a third of the nation’s mineral resources.