For over a century, the federal oil and gas program has favored oil and gas development on our public lands over all other uses.
Through the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and the finalization of the BLM Oil and Gas rule in 2024, the Biden Administration enacted critical, common-sense reforms to provide a fair return to taxpayers, protect wildlife habitat, and ensure that our public lands are managed for multiple uses, not just oil and gas development.
But in 2025, Republicans in Congress rolled back key reforms through the One Big Beautiful Bill and instituted policies that amount to industry handouts, including:
- Cutting the public out of decisions about the management of their public lands by mandating that the Bureau of Land Management make available for lease all lands that oil and gas companies nominate for drilling;
- Slashing royalties that companies pay for the oil and gas they extract from our publicly owned lands, which states uses to fund schools and other critical community services, by 25% – to a rate first set in 1920;
- Bringing back noncompetitive leasing, which lets companies lease public lands for just $3.00 an acre; and
- Eliminating the $5 nomination fee, allowing companies to nominate lands for drilling at no cost to them.
Now, the Trump Administration has set their sights on reducing or eliminating bonding requirements that ensure companies can’t walk away when they’re done drilling, leaving taxpayers with the bill to clean up their pollution and destruction.
Reducing or eliminating bonding requirements would pass billions of dollars in potential liabilities back onto local communities and taxpayers:
- By rolling back strong, common-sense bonding requirements for oil and gas companies that drill on public lands, the Trump administration is potentially putting taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars to clean-up orphaned wells – wells that are abandoned by oil companies.
- The drillers take the profits, and the taxpayer is left with the mess to clean up, straining state and local budgets and endangering public health and safety.
This rollback exacerbates the public health and safety threat of abandoned “orphaned” wells to residents across the West, leaving taxpayers on the hook to the tune of billions of dollars.