Former President Donald Trump has promised on the campaign trail to take a sledgehammer to the Biden administration’s energy and environmental policies.
That means the Interior Department — a vast agency that oversees public lands, the national parks, Western water conservation and endangered species protections — is sure to witness drastic policy shifts if Trump reclaims the White House in January.
Trump and his running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, have made “drill baby, drill” one of their key campaign talking points as they repeatedly vow to boost domestic fossil fuel production.
Trump and his allies have floated ideas for dramatic changes at the Interior Department, including an interview over the summer where the former president suggested cuts. Asked in June what government programs he’d like to slash, Trump said, “We’re going to do, like, Department of Interior,” he said, adding, “The environmental agencies have stopped — they’ve stopped you from doing business in this country. And we did a great job.”
Trump has been clear about his plans to use the department to expand energy production, said William Perry Pendley, who served as a senior Interior appointee during the Trump administration.
“He’s going to dramatically increase oil and gas drilling to drive down the price of energy,” Pendley said. “He said that it’s going to be his agenda from Day 1.”
David Hayes, who served as Interior’s deputy secretary during the Obama and Clinton administrations, expects a second Trump administration would mean a “redo” of his first term at the department. That’s not to infer “that everything will be fine,” he said. “Everything was not fine under the previous administration.”
Interior’s primary driver under Trump was “pro-oil and gas policy, anti-renewable energy policy,” Hayes said. “That’s completely backwards in terms of what America needs now.”
Here’s what a Trump administration could mean for key issues at the sweeping Interior Department:
A workforce shakeup
Personnel is policy, or so the Washington saying goes, and with more than 100 presidentially appointed seats to be filled at Interior, there are a lot of different hands on the wheel.
Trump’s first Interior secretary, former Navy SEAL officer Ryan Zinke, for instance, devoted considerable energy to an organizational restructuring inspired in part by his 23 years in the military.
A second-term Trump appointee would likewise bring their own personal passions, much as President Joe Biden’s Interior secretary, Deb Haaland, directed a good deal of her focus toward tribal issues.
Apart from naming a new roster of political appointees to lead the department, an incoming Trump administration could mean shakeups for career employees at the roughly 70,000-person agency. Trump and his allies have vowed to take another pass at their effort to make it easier to fire federal workers, a pledge that has fueled anxiety among employees at Interior and across the government.
Another BLM move?
Arguably, the most significant Interior workforce change during the Trump years was the relocation of the Bureau of Land Management’s national headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado. The rationale for the shift, completed in 2020, was that top leaders of the agency overseeing massive swaths of public lands throughout the West should be located there.
Almost 300 employees, including some of the most senior career staffers, left the bureau instead of moving to Colorado or other BLM offices. Haaland then reversed the Trump-era headquarters move in 2021, saying top staff needed to be in Washington to work with Interior decision-makers.
Trump 2.0 could very well see another push to move the headquarters back to Grand Junction.
David Bernhardt, the second Interior secretary under Trump who helped shepherd the BLM headquarters’ move, is now one of the key players at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that’s expected to have significant sway in a second Trump administration.
The conservative policy road map known as Project 2025 also calls for putting BLM’s headquarters back in Colorado. Trump has publicly disavowed the blueprint, but its authors include many former Trump-era officials, including Pendley, who wrote the Interior section and called the headquarters move the “epitome of good governance.”
Endangered species
A second Trump administration would bring a case of déjà vu in the handling of major environmental laws, such as the 51-year-old Endangered Species Act.
Even if supported by a Congress controlled in whole or in part by his fellow Republicans, Trump would have a very hard time actually rewriting the ESA, which has grown into one of the most reviled laws on the political right.
But while the statute might remain fixed, a second Trump administration is almost certain to propose yet another round of revisions to the regulations that govern their implementation.
The Trump administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service moved to rewrite the ESA regulations that determine how critical habitat is defined and whether costs are tallied as part of a threatened or endangered listing decision.
The Biden administration, in turn, pulled the plug on the Trump-era rules and set about recasting them. Much if not all of that work stands to be uprooted in a second Trump term.
‘Liquid gold’ vs. renewables
Expanding fossil fuel production on federal lands and waters has been one of Trump’s key promises on the campaign trail.
“President Trump will free up the vast stores of liquid gold on America’s public land for energy development,” Trump says on his campaign website.
Although Biden campaigned on a promise to end drilling on public lands, his administration ultimately saw a record boom in domestic oil production, and the Biden Interior Department outpaced Trump’s administration in approving new drilling permits.
Biden did, during his first 18 months in office, lease the smallest amount of public land for drilling since any president dating back to Harry Truman. The administration also throttled offshore oil lease sales until some were mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Biden administration finalized several major regulations that impact the oil and gas industry. The Trump administration could move to unravel those, but that process is sure to take a while.
When it comes to renewable energy, Trump’s approach in a second term could depend on whether projects are on land or out to sea.
The former president has repeatedly expressed his disdain for offshore wind farms — a position made clear in Interior policy during his administration — and would be expected to shift away from the current Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s push to rapidly expand that sector.
On the other hand, BLM during the Trump era did approve some renewables: eight solar farms, four geothermal projects and one wind energy project on its public lands across the West, a fact former Interior officials have noted.
Still, that’s a lot less than the renewable projects approved during the Obama years — and it remains an open question whether a second Trump term could spell doom for the dozens of projects currently in the pipeline.
For his part, Trump recently questioned utility-scale solar in the desert, a major BLM priority. “I saw a solar field the other day that looked like it took up half the desert. … It’s all steel and glass and wires and looks like hell,” he told a group of voters.
National monuments
The boundaries of the Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah have expanded and contracted as the White House changed hands from Democratic control to the GOP and back again.
A second Trump administration would be expected to test the elasticity of those boundaries again, along with the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southwestern Utah and others across the country.
But some, including Pendley in his Project 2025 section, want to see Trump go further this time, calling for the abolition of the 1906 law that allows presidents to set aside federal lands to preserve areas of history, cultural or scientific importance.
At the same time, a Trump Justice Department could be asked to weigh in on two battles in federal court launched by Utah state officials.
In the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Utah’s governor is urging the court to reopen its challenge to Biden’s reset of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante boundaries, and in the process limit the size of all future national monuments.
In a separate case filed to the Supreme Court, Utah’s officials want to force the federal government to cede control of 18.5 million acres of land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
Upending Biden’s conservation rule
Trump’s administration would almost certainly stop implementation of one of the Biden BLM’s signature policy initiatives — the conservation and landscape health rule.
Referred to as the public lands rule, it seeks to elevate conservation as a specific use of federal lands, on par with livestock grazing, energy development, recreation and other activities.
The Trump administration could seek to revoke the rule and to settle pending federal lawsuits filed by six states and energy, mining and ranching groups challenging the rule as illegal.
Western water
Trump’s most concrete statement about the ongoing drought crisis in the West has been his pledge to loosen environmental restrictions to give California farmers more water.
That could mean a new direction for Bureau of Reclamation plans for managing water in the key Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta in the northern part of the state — or a continuation of work that some environmentalists have complained fails to adequately protect endangered fish.
A second Trump administration could also find itself leading key negotiations on several waterways, as increasing demands on key water supplies across the West and Pacific Northwest — often putting agricultural users, growing cities and environmental needs at odds.
Most notably, state officials in the Colorado River Basin — which includes Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — are in the midst of hashing out a new long-term operating plan for the waterway, which supports 40 million individuals and irrigates 5.5 million acres of farmland.
But even with a change in Reclamation leadership, Colorado River negotiators primarilyface pressure to find a deal among themselves, presenting a unified front to the federal government.
Reporter Heather Richards contributed.
