House Republicans begin attack on public lands with passage of Rules Package

(WASHINGTON, DC) On Monday evening, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a Rules Package to govern the chamber for the 118th Congress. Among several problematic provisions, this package includes rules that drastically lower safeguards to selling off public lands while mandating the broad expansion of lease sales. 

“We believe our public lands should benefit all communities in our country—not just the highest bidders,” said Lydia Weiss, The Wilderness Society's Senior Government Relations Director. “These provisions are nothing short of an underhanded attempt at stripping the public of its lands while doubling down on our dependence of fossil fuels.”   

The proposed House Rules package would grease the skids to give away the nation’s shared public lands, with a change to make it easier to dispose of public lands by completely ignoring the costs of these transfers for taxpayers—or the value of these lands to the public. Rules requiring spending offsets would be abolished, meaning that regardless of the tremendous value of these lands to the public and taxpayers, Congress could simply ignore that and would no longer have to find spending offsets for bills that give away federal land at significant cost to the American public.  

The Rules Package also advances legislation to force the Administration to lease more of our public lands and waters to big oil companies at a time when our nation should be transitioning to a clean energy economy. Specifically, the Strategic Production Response Act would require that all non-emergency drawdowns of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) be accompanied by a plan to lease a percentage of federal lands for fossil fuel production in line with the percentage of oil scheduled to be released from the SPR, capped at 10 percent. Under this rule, if the Administration plans to release 30 million barrels from the SPR – roughly 8 percent of current stocks—it would need to also develop a plan to lease 8 percent of federal lands and waters. The federal government has jurisdiction over approximately 640 million acres onshore and over 2.5 billion acres in the Outer Continental Shelf, meaning an 8 percent drawdown of the SPR could be read to require the Administration devise a plan to offer up 250 million acres—an area more than twice the size of California and five times the combined size of all U.S. national parks—to big oil companies. 

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For more information, contact Tony Iallonardo at newsmedia@tws.org.