Victory! Court Lays Down the Law for Incoming Trump Administration

Advocates for the West won a significant victory in our sweeping case challenging thousands of oil and gas leases in sage-grouse habitats. On Friday, 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. 

Advocates for the West and our client-partners at the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project have been awaiting this Ninth Circuit ruling for over two years, since the case was first argued by Advocates for the West Executive Director Laird Lucas in May 2022. 

“Its issuance on the eve of the second Trump administration is significant,” said Lucas. “Our sprawling case covers hundreds of other oil and gas leases across the West, which will be off-limits to the incoming Trump administration—at least for a good while. And it lays down the law about upholding public lands laws and regulations against Trump’s unlawful ‘energy dominance’ directives.”

The leases were located in greater sage-grouse habitats designated for protection by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2015. Under the first Trump administration, BLM promoted Trump’s “energy dominance” policy for public lands, and slashed public involvement and environmental review of oil and gas leases across the West—including the 677 leases covering 900,070 acres at issue in the Court’s decision on Friday.

The leases all lie within intact sagebrush areas that provide essential remaining habitats for sage-grouse and 350 other species, as the Ninth Circuit Court acknowledged. The Court ordered that BLM must prevent any further drilling or development of the leases, until it has lawfully reviewed and approved them.

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 incoming Trump administration cannot make similar “energy dominance” policy changes on a whim, as he has promised. 

Led by Staff Attorney Sarah Stellberg, Advocates for the West brought this case in April 2018 as Trump was rolling out his “energy dominance”  policy for public lands in the West. We won an initial preliminary injunction from the Idaho federal court in September 2018, ordering Trump BLM to reinstate policies for public involvement and environmental review of oil and gas leasing previously in place.

In February 2020, the federal court then voided hundreds of leases covering nearly 1 million acres that had been issued under the unlawful policy. The Ninth Circuit confirmed that ruling in its decision on Friday, sending the leases back to BLM for further review and prohibiting them from being drilled for now.

To date in this case, we have succeeded in holding unlawful a total of 1,066 federal oil and gas leases—more than one-quarter of all leases BLM issued during the first Trump administration in the lower 48 states.

The Ninth Circuit also ruled on a companion case out of Montana, brought by our allies at Earthjustice, and approved vacating leases challenged there because BLM violated its own land use plan requirements to prioritize oil and gas development outside of sage-grouse habitats. This ruling is important in confirming that oil and gas leases on public lands can be invalidated entirely for substantive legal violations. 

Read more about this case.