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The Interior Department has formally repealed a Biden-era rule that required the federal government to weigh conservation equally with drilling, mining, logging, and grazing on public lands.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: If you’re unaware, the Bureau of Land Management is the federal agency that oversees roughly 10% of all land in the US and is responsible for around 245 million acres of public surface land along with over 700 million acres of mineral rights underground. Most of that acreage sits in Western states like Alaska, California, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. The agency was established under the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act with a “multiple use” mandate balancing things like grazing, mineral extraction, recreation, and conservation, but in practice the BLM has spent decades handing out grazing permits and energy leases that have largely favored industry. As of right now, oil and gas drilling is allowed on 81% of the National System of Public Lands, livestock grazing happens on about 60%, and just 14% has any kind of long-term conservation status. The 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule (usually just called the “Public Lands Rule”) was adopted under President Biden to refocus the agency’s mandate by requiring science-based decision-making and putting conservation on equal footing with extraction. It also opened the door for conservation-specific leases, modeled after the kind of leases energy companies already use to drill, although the BLM never ended up handing out a single one before this repeal.

What’s going on now: The Trump administration took the axe to the Public Lands Rule by publishing the formal repeal in the Federal Register Tuesday, with the rescission taking effect 30 days after publication. BLM said in its notice that it had taken in and addressed close to 140,000 public comments before finalizing the decision, with around 98% of those commenters telling the administration to keep the rule in place. In the notice, officials wrote that the 2024 rule “threatened to restrict productive use of the public lands and introduced uncertainty and unnecessary burdens in planning and permitting.”

In a statement, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said, “The previous administration’s Public Lands Rule had the potential to block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of multiple-use land – preventing energy and mineral production, timber management, grazing and recreation across the West. The most effective caretakers of our federal lands are those whose livelihoods rely on its well-being. Overturning this rule protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on.”

Industry groups that had lobbied for the repeal celebrated the move while conservation groups went the other way and slammed the repeal as a giveaway to extractive industries.