No one is above the law? Biden’s Bureau of Land Management thinks it is.

 One central characteristic of the Biden administration is its contempt for the letter of the law. When laws interfere with overriding political objectives, they are cast aside, and the courts are often forced to clean up the mess.

Nowhere is this norm-busting reality more pronounced than at the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), whose leasing of federal lands for fossil-fuel production has become ever-more politicized since the day Biden took office.

The BLM is authorized to manage federal lands under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976. Under the explicit language of the FLPMA, the “principal or major uses” of the public lands “includes, and is limited to, domestic livestock grazing, fish and wildlife development and mineral exploration and production, rights-of-way, outdoor recreation, and timber production.”

Notwithstanding the statutory inclusion of “mineral exploration and production” as one of the “principal or major uses,” total acreage under lease for oil and gas operations on federal lands is at its lowest level since the 1940s. The number of new leases declined from 1,729 in fiscal 2012, and 1,841 in fiscal 2019, to 120 last year. Acreage in new leases has declined from 1.75 million in fiscal 2012, and 2.25 million in fiscal 2019, to just 74,758 in fiscal 2022.

Not content with this slow strangulation of fossil-fuel leasing on federal lands, the Biden BLM has now decided simply to remove whole swaths of land from leasing consideration altogether. The latest example of this new approach is the recent BLM regulatory proposal — its “preferred alternative” — to bar new oil and gas leasing across roughly 1.6 million acres in Colorado...MORE