BLM Wyoming Lease Sale Uses Last Quarter's Parcel Data — SkimNews
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- The Bureau of Land Management announced in July a quarterly lease sale of 284 parcels across nearly 380,000 acres in Wyoming — the second-largest offering for the state since 2016 — but its environmental assessment backed up its "high preference" finding with a table of parcels from the previous quarter's auction.
- Aimee Delach, director of energy and biodiversity at Defenders of Wildlife, called the carryover error a "fatal flaw" in the lease sale; a BLM spokesperson said the current-quarter parcels were analyzed but the prior list "inadvertently carried over," and the agency will share an updated list before leases are awarded.
- The Trump administration's proposed rule revisions would scrap the preference criteria analysis entirely, cut public comment periods from 90 days to 10 days, lower royalty rates from 16.67% to 12.5%, and drop cleanup bond minimums from $150,000/$500,000 to $10,000/$25,000.
- The BLM lost 23% of its staff in the first year of the second Trump administration through Department of Government Efficiency cuts and voluntary departures, even as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act mandated the agency increase lease offerings on public lands.
- Many of the offered parcels sit in Wyoming's Red Desert, providing sage-grouse habitat and migration corridors for mule deer, elk, and pronghorn — species whose long-term population declines have been linked by researchers to oil and gas drilling disturbances.
- Over 99% of public commenters opposed the rollback of the oil and gas leasing rules, according to an analysis by the Center for Western Priorities, with most objections targeting the reduced bonding minimums that conservationists say let financially insolvent operators take on wells they cannot clean up.
Why it matters: An agency already down 23% in staff is simultaneously being directed to lease more land faster, with the analytical step that flagged this error on its way to being eliminated entirely — meaning future Wyoming lease sales could proceed without the environmental or financial-risk review that just failed publicly.
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