6 threats to public lands in the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act

The United States can and must reach a clean energy future as soon as possible. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is presented as a false choice between building renewable energy and protecting public lands, cultural resources, and the public’s ability to engage on what impacts shared landscapes. These tradeoffs are neither necessary nor acceptable—under this administration or any future administration. We can move toward a clean energy future while ensuring that America’s public lands, waters, and wildlife habitat are not sacrificed for future generations, and that is the standard elected officials should insist on as well.  

This bill would: 

• Lock in drilling and mining projects making it impossible for future administrations to correct permits, even if they are unlawful; 
• Weaken public participation in decisions affecting shared lands; 
• Erode Tribal consultation and Tribal sovereignty while threatening sacred sites and cultural resources; 
• Limit judicial review and make unlawful projects harder to correct in court; and 
• Expand industry access to public lands without adequate safeguards. 

It is necessary to view this bill in the broader context of escalating threats to public lands and waters, wildlife, Tribes and communities, and the agencies responsible for managing them: 

• The fossil fuel industry is already benefiting from the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and multiple recent rollbacks and revisions of common-sense reforms that better balanced public lands values with energy development, including the Public Lands Rule and Oil and Gas Leasing Rule. 
• Counter to the public’s wishes, the Administration has stripped protections from and already granted hardrock mining and fossil fuel industries the green light to mine and drill some of our most iconic public landscapes, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the Arctic, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Bears Ears National Monument and the Greater Chaco Region. 
• Federal agencies that would be responsible for meeting the deadlines in the bill are decimated – recent layoffs and forced early retirements mean there’s limited staff to review permits, consult with Tribes and communities, enforce safeguards, and follow through with the bill’s new requirements. And a provision in the bill would force the government to pay companies for missed deadlines, even if they missed them because of lack of staffing. 

The Wilderness Society has grave concerns about the provisions that threaten public lands listed below and calls on Congress to fix them: 

1. Sec. 1401 is the final nail in the coffin for threatened landscapes. 

This section bans future administrations from taking any action on permitted projects on public lands, even when permits were approved unlawfully, except under extremely limited circumstances. This means permanently entrenching drilling and mining projects on public landscapes that are currently targeted for shortsighted, corporate control. This includes the Greater Chaco Canyon region, Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the Arctic, all national public lands in the lower 48 that are currently available to oil and gas leasing, and increasingly, data center construction. Simply put, the “project certainty” provision in this bill would wedge the door open for these cherished landscapes to be permanently developed and exploited. 

While entrenching existing sell-outs of treasured landscapes, this section also further emboldens the current administration to make reckless, unlawful decisions over the next two-plus years that hand over even more public lands to drilling and mining, while also restricting access to the courts and limiting the ability of the public and public interest organizations like TWS to challenge unlawful project decisions. 

2. Div. A, Title I enacts sweeping changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), harming the public interest and disregarding the voices and welfare of communities. 

Participation in public lands management decisions ensures our shared lands serve the common good rather than private interests. Since 2025, the administration and Congress have weakened transparency and narrowed the ability of local communities and Tribes to raise concerns about projects that affect their lands, waters, cultural resources and health. Simply put: This bill’s proposed changes to NEPA effectively turn the bedrock environmental law into a dead letter. 

The bill provides broad loopholes for actions that would no longer be subject to NEPA and eliminates meaningful judicial review (and therefore government accountability) for communities that seek to challenge agency decisions. If this bill becomes law, most public land management decisions will go under the radar, and communities will be severely limited in their ability to comment on or oppose them. New science and research that could have informed a project will not be considered after the publication of a notice of intent. And communities will have to conform to stricter standards to prove harm from a project and challenge decisions in court. 

3. Sec. 2301 threatens cultural resources and historic sites by drastically undermining the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). 

This bill is not only an affront to Tribal sovereignty, but it would also directly threaten sacred sites and cultural resources across ancestral lands. Places of cultural significance like Chaco Canyon or Bears Ears National Monument would be at risk. For example, under these new standards, negative impacts from oil and gas rigs or mines on the border of protected areas would not be considered a direct harm. 

This section proposes to rewrite the provision that is used to identify historic places, consult with Tribal Nations and affected communities, consider alternatives, and seek ways to avoid, minimize, or mitigate harm before federal undertakings move forward.  

It would make consultation with Tribes and communities optional, arbitrarily restrict what is considered an important cultural site, allow more projects to skip review and require fewer environmental impacts to be taken into consideration. 

Taken together, these changes would restrict the power of Tribal Nations and communities to define the places that matter to them, silencing those who should have a voice in decisions that impact their lands. Congress must heed the call of Tribes and Indigenous groups speaking out against these provisions. 

4. Sec. 2215 is an unprecedented giveaway of public lands to the mining industry. 

The bill closely reflects the Mining Regulatory and Clarity Act (MRCA) and would reverse over a century of public land law precedent and severely undermine the federal government’s ability to safeguard cultural, environmental, water, and economic resources. Similar to the MRCA, the bill would allow companies to occupy and industrialize vast areas of public land, including waste dumps and infrastructure, without holding valid mineral rights, paying royalties or undergoing rigorous environmental review. It would shut out competing uses such as recreation, renewable energy and cultural preservation. 

The bill also would codify a dangerous loophole that prioritizes private mining interests over public good, threatens Indigenous lands and ecosystems and burdens underfunded federal agencies without providing resources or accountability. This bill opens the floodgates to unchecked exploitation of public lands.  

5. Sec. 1402 bans the ability to pause projects such as data centers on public lands for better analysis of impacts to communities and natural and cultural resources. 

This section gives a developer the ability to sue the administration if a project approval is taking too long. The provision could be weaponized against a future administration that might try to deprioritize harmful development like fossil fuel projects or data centers. It would also seemingly make it impossible to put forward a pause or moratorium on an activity, even if the pause would only be to allow time for closer review of potential impacts. For example, it would have prevented the pause on offshore drilling permits and development following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the coal leasing moratorium  enacted by the Obama administration, and could block a future moratorium on data centers on public lands. At a time when the public and local officials are clamoring for transparency and input into the rapid buildout of data centers across the country, this provision runs counter to the moratorium TWS has called for from the administration. 

6. Sec. 2211 eliminates landowner and public input opportunities for imminent drilling projects on split estate properties. 

This section takes this assault to public input a step further by exempting hundreds of thousands potentially millions—of acres of split-estate lands from the federal permitting process, eliminating key public input opportunities that are currently often the only way neighbors and landowners know drilling is imminent. This also eliminates a key federal decision point where BLM can make sure an operator’s bond can fully cover the costs of reclaiming the well when production ends. In short, this provision could grow our national tally of orphaned and abandoned wells that leech into our rivers and streams and leak methane into our atmosphere. 

Overall Takeaway:  The irreversible destruction these provisions would cause to treasured places like the Arctic, the Boundary Waters, Bears Ears, and Chaco is simply not a reasonable or necessary tradeoff.  

Congress must eliminate or significantly amend these provisions before advancing this legislation.   

The Wilderness Society is a national conservation organization dedicated to protecting America’s wild places since 1935. Through science, advocacy and partnerships with communities and policymakers, we champion the protection of wilderness, national monuments, forests, and other public lands that provide clean air and water, wildlife habitat and the freedom to connect with nature. For more information, visit www.wilderness.org.