DOI gutting Alaska land protections to enable proposed Ambler Road

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA (February. 20, 2026) — Today the U.S. Department of the Interior announced it is revoking Public Lands Orders 5150 and 5180 as part of the administration’s effort to convey up to 2.1 million acres of public lands to the State of Alaska and force construction of the proposed Ambler Road.  

 

DOI’s revocation of the orders and potential conveyance of the lands would remove federal subsistence priority protections for local hunters – protections that are vital to Indigenous communities in the remote and mostly roadless region – and threatens to open the region to industrial mining. In response, The Wilderness Society released the following statement from Alaska Senior Manager Matt Jackson: 

 

“These lands have protected communities in northern rural Alaska from unwanted developments for generations. This destructive, short-sighted giveaway is intended to pave the way to transfer potentially millions acres of public lands to the State of Alaska to facilitate road building and development in one of Alaska’s wildest areas. We must preserve the freedom of rural Alaskans to continue hunting, fishing, and exploring these places now and for future generations.  

 

“The Wilderness Society stands with the local communities who oppose industrial infrastructure and extractive uses that will forever scar the landscape and that threaten the clean air, safe water and healthy wildlife on which we all depend.”  

 

These land orders protected public lands around the Dalton Highway and Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline, north of the Yukon River in Alaska, and prevented those lands from being conveyed to the State of Alaska. 

 

The federal government believes that revoking the orders allows it to transfer lands in the proposed Ambler Road corridor to the state, thereby making it easier to begin constructing a 211-mile road from the Dalton Highway to the Ambler Mining District.