How BLM’s repeal of the Public Lands Rule could slow clean energy deployment
Last month, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finalized the repeal of its Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, also known as the Public Lands Rule. The original rule, issued in 2024, was a landmark action to improve management of public lands, including by facilitating development of renewable energy and electric transmission. The rule, one of several actions taken by BLM at the time to responsibly expand the deployment of clean energy infrastructure, included the ability for the agency to offer mitigation leases to offset land use impacts. The Conservation and Landscape Health Rule was a step toward facilitating stable and effective permitting processes that promote investor confidence, regulatory credibility, and public trust.
Unfortunately, over the course of its first year-and-a-half, the federal administration has taken a range of actions across agencies that undermine permitting stability for clean energy deployment, especially – though not exclusively – for projects on federal lands. These include:
- Changing National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations from governmentwide binding regulations to nonbinding, agency-specific procedural guidance that weakens public participation and analysis of impacts
- An August 2025 order from Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, to consider the “capacity density” of energy projects for making land-use decisions – an explicit directive against wind and solar projects, which he deemed “highly inefficient uses of Federal lands”
- The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s December 2025 issuance of five stop-work orders for offshore wind farms that were already fully permitted and actively under construction
- The Department of Defense’s recent pause on conducting military reviews for more than 150 onshore wind farms on private lands, which is threatening 30 gigawatts of needed clean electricity capacity
While several of these actions have been paused or struck down by federal courts, the overall effect has been to threaten energy affordability, grid reliability, and confidence in the federal permitting process. Unfortunately, federal agencies have doubled down on these counterproductive actions, and BLM’s recent rescission of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, including its mitigation leasing element, is the latest example of the elimination of a well-crafted permitting policy that will slow the deployment of much-needed clean energy infrastructure.
Mitigation is a key aspect of permitting infrastructure projects on public lands
The Conservation and Landscape Health Rule implemented BLM’s statutory mission. The agency has an obligation to manage public resources for multiple use, sustained yield, and to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation. BLM carries out this forward-looking mission over 245 million acres of public lands and 700 million acres of the mineral estate. For decades, BLM has implemented its statutory authority through conservation measures, including specifically by requiring mitigation of project impacts.
For instance, in 2005, BLM issued an interim mitigation policy to carry out its statutory responsibilities by requiring mitigation for its oil, gas, geothermal and energy right-of-way programs. And the agency’s roots on mitigation go back much deeper than that, with a track record of requiring compensatory mitigation back to 1980 and, starting with a precursor agency, over a century of mitigation requirements and policies for oil and gas operations.
There are many ways mitigation might be required, including by BLM, other federal agencies, state or local governments, or Tribes. Across a number of federal policies, mitigation typically involves application of the well-established mitigation hierarchy, which includes the ordered sequencing of avoiding, minimizing, and compensating for project impacts. Existing models, such as the federal mitigation program under the Clean Water Act, illustrate how market-based mechanisms such as mitigation banks or other options like in-lieu fee programs can effectively conserve the environment while efficiently satisfying permitting requirements.
One way the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule facilitated effective mitigation was through mitigation leasing. Under § 6102.4 of the now-rescinded rule, BLM officers had the ability to issue leases on both degraded and intact landscapes to qualifying entities, defined as individuals, businesses, nonprofits, Tribal governments, conservation districts, and state fish and wildlife agencies (with a prohibition on leasing to foreign individuals or entities). The purpose of the mitigation leases was to “offset impacts to resources resulting from other land use authorizations,” such as energy infrastructure permitted on public lands, for a maximum term of ten years. Once issued, the leaseholder – for instance, an energy developer – would be obligated to follow the mitigation plan laid out in their application, regularly monitor mitigation activities, and report activities, barriers, information, and data to BLM on an annual basis. In the meantime, casual uses of the leased land, such as recreation, hunting, and fishing, would be generally allowed to continue. Leases had to comply with approved land use plans and with NEPA.
As CATF noted in both a 2024 comment to BLM supporting the proposed rule and a 2025 comment opposing its rescission, mitigation leases can play an important role in meeting mitigation requirements for electric transmission lines and renewable and zero-carbon energy projects on or near public lands. Complying with mitigation requirements can be a challenge that delays infrastructure projects, including federally permitted transmission lines and geothermal projects that could tap the enormous potential of public lands. Providing flexible options to meet compliance obligations and policy consistency can reduce those project delays.
CATF’s evidence-based research on barriers to transmission deployment has illustrated both the many challenges facing linear infrastructure projects and the importance of efficient and clear permitting frameworks. In particular, meeting mitigation requirements has been a problem for federally permitted transmission lines—one that has delayed projects, including those crossing BLM lands. Mitigation leases provide the efficient and clear avenues for developers of linear infrastructure to compensate for project impacts that are sorely needed.
In addition, effective and efficient permitting processes for geothermal energy on public lands are essential. CATF’s work has shown that federal permitting for geothermal projects “can be slow and uncertain, which creates serious financing barriers for the emerging next-generation geothermal industry” in particular. Furthermore, the technical potential of geothermal energy on federal lands is substantial: according to modeling by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (since renamed the National Laboratory of the Rockies), there is 130 GW of hydrothermal potential and 975 GW of enhanced geothermal systems potential on federal lands, much of it administered by BLM. Mitigation leases are a useful tool for enabling geothermal developers to efficiently move through the permitting process on BLM lands and therefore help realize this energy potential.
BLM unnecessarily eliminates a valuable permitting tool
Instead of using mitigation leases both to speed infrastructure permitting and to protect the environment consistent with its mission, BLM has unfortunately eliminated this tool as part of its repeal of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. This misguided action does not remove a burden for permitting, but rather reduces the options available to project proponents and BLM field staff.
The reasons BLM gave for taking away this option for permitting processes are woefully inadequate. Despite legal requirements to do so, at no point in the repeal rule does the agency engage with the specific substance of public comments, including CATF’s comments raising the issues described here. The repeal also fails to consider key legal arguments, including what courts have said about BLM’s antidegradation mandate, how mitigation serves BLM’s mission, or how “the use of some land for less than all of the resources” is not counter to the notion of multiple use – it is the statutory definition of multiple use.
The repeal misses the mark on several substantive aspects of the mitigation leasing program, too. Without providing any explanation or even awareness that it understood its own policies, BLM agrees with comments mischaracterizing whether mitigation leases would preclude other uses and whether the existence of other conservation mechanisms is adequate. Sadly, the rule also echoes arguments about a distrust of BLM’s own line officers to carry out agency policies. None of these thin explanations come even remotely close to meeting the legal standard for an agency policy reversal, which requires an agency to provide good reasons for the new policy being better and, in some circumstances, a more detailed justification than when writing on a blank slate.
The removal of the mitigation leasing policy on this flimsy rationale does not lessen the need for infrastructure projects to satisfy mitigation requirements. It just makes it more challenging by taking an efficient process off the table entirely. For transmission lines, geothermal projects, or solar generation on public lands that might face mitigation requirements, losing this option is another unnecessary impediment created by the administration.
Improving federal permitting through government capacity building and regulatory certainty
CATF research has identified a range of policy measures that would speed federal permitting timelines and protect essential environmental and community protections for clean energy infrastructure. Core among these is improving federal agency coordination and capacity. BLM is significantly understaffed, which limits its ability to process geothermal permits and leases and conduct environmental reviews, and existing staff may have little experience with next-generation geothermal projects, leading to unnecessary delays. Government capacity concerns also carry through to transmission. From in-depth review of 37 transmission projects, supporting data analysis of the federal environmental transmission permitting process, and conversations with transmission stakeholders, CATF and the Niskanen Center found that lack of federal agency leadership and prioritization of transmission, coupled with insufficient support for agency coordination, cooperation, and capacity, contribute to longer permitting timelines.
It is as essential to restore regulatory certainty as it is to build government capacity. While much attention has been paid to permitting reform conversations in Congress, there has been less focus on the many actions that can be taken to improve infrastructure deployment at the agency level. Chief among these is ending the unfavorable treatment of wind and solar on federal lands, which is stifling much-needed energy development. The administration should also take action to reinstate pragmatic environmental review and permitting policies, including stable governmentwide NEPA regulations and the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, rather than moving in the opposite direction.
Such actions will help to realize BLM’s mission of managing public lands so that, as its founding statute requires, they “best meet the present and future needs of the American people.”
Read CATF’s 2024 comment to BLM on the proposed Conservation and Landscape Health Rule here.
Read CATF’s 2025 comment to BLM opposing the rescission of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule here.
