A Big, Ugly Boost for the Oil and Gas Industry

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the “One Bill Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBA), ushering in sweeping spending cuts on social services to pay for huge tax cuts for billionaires and investments in border “security.”

The bill guts clean energy tax credits, vehicle fuel efficiency standards, environmental protections, and pollution-reduction programs. Its rollbacks will increase pollution affecting the health of communities and our environment, and exacerbate climate change.

Plus, the bill mandates widespread and extensive fossil fuel leasing, rolls back environmental regulations on the oil and gas industry, and contains other provisions intended to boost oil and gas production, including:

• Reduced Leasing Discretion: OBBBA changes the mineral leasing process primarily by reducing the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) discretion to choose whether to lease and which parcels are leased. The bill requires quarterly oil and gas lease sales for public lands across more than 200 million acres in nine western states, expanding areas open for exploration and production, including by requiring at least half of all available parcels to be offered during each sale. OBBBA also hampers BLM’s discretion to dictate the terms of oil and gas leases.
• Noncompetitive Leasing: OBBBA restores the noncompetitive leasing process. Previously, under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Secretary of the Interior had discretion in whether to hold a new round of competitive bidding for parcels that did not receive bids above the minimum dollar amount. Now, the Secretary has the option to dispose of these parcels noncompetitively, through lotteries or a first-come-first-served basis.
• Fast-tracked Environmental Reviews: The Secretary is required to conduct lease sales “immediately on completion of all applicable scoping, public comment, and environmental analysis required under the (Mineral Leasing Act and National Environmental Policy Act).” Additionally, the Secretary must ensure that environmental review is done in a “timely manner.”
• Reduced Royalty Rates: The OBBBA reduces the minimum royalty the BLM must charge lessees from 16⅔% to 12.5%.
• Drill Permit Terms: Permits to drill are valid for 4 years, rather than 3.

Advocates for the West has a large portfolio of cases challenging harmful oil and gas leasing and development on our public lands, and we’ve won important precedent-setting victories.

This January, we won a major victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the first Trump administration illegally approved hundreds of oil and gas leases on public lands and prohibited any further development of those leases. The Court emphasized that the first Trump administration’s energy dominance policy was an arbitrary and capricious change in position—laying down the law that the new Trump administration cannot make similar “energy dominance” policy changes on a whim, as he has promised. In total, Advocates for the West’s sweeping litigation held unlawful more than one-quarter of all oil and gas leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management in the lower 48 states under the first Trump administration, covering over a million and a half acres.

Despite OBBBA’s threats, Advocates for the West’s talented and hard-working attorneys are paying close attention and adjusting our strategies accordingly. We won’t let the anti-environmental, pro-industry agenda pursued by Trump and his allies in Congress prevail.