Doug Burgum Moves To Rein In ‘Oversized’ Buffer Zones On Federal Land

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wants to rein in the size of conservation zones on federal land that ranchers, miners and others share.

The Interior Department said Thursday in a press release that it wants to rewrite the planning rules the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has followed since 1979 and “right-size” its Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACECs). The proposal is not yet final and will get 60 days of public comment once it appears in the Federal Register, the department said.

The department said in the release that the BLM would focus on what each designation is meant to protect “rather than on oversized buffer zones when those lands are supposed to be managed for multiple use.”

The BLM said in a May final rule that it manages about 245 million acres, roughly a tenth of all U.S. land. A Ford-era 1976 law, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), generally requires that acreage to serve “multiple use.” As the BLM puts it, that means balancing uses such as grazing, timber, mineral development and recreation along with scenic, scientific and historic values.

“Public lands are set aside for the benefit and use of the American people,” Burgum said in the release. “They should be managed by the people closest to the land, not held back by outdated bureaucracy in D.C.”

“By empowering state and local leaders and cutting decades-old red tape, we’re making it easier to conserve our natural resources, boost production and create a more affordable and abundant supply of food and energy for American families,” he added.

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ACECs cover public lands where “special management attention is required to protect and prevent irreparable damage” to historic, scenic or cultural values, fish and wildlife or natural systems, according to the BLM’s website, which cites FLPMA. They can also shield people from natural hazards.

As of Sept. 30, 2025, the BLM had 1,172 sites listed as ACECs or research natural areas. They covered about 24.3 million acres combined, according to the agency’s yearly Public Land Statistics report.

That total was about 2.7 million acres higher than a year earlier, when the BLM counted 1,171 such sites covering about 21.5 million acres, according to its 2024 report. The agency notes that its acreage figures fluctuate as its land database is refined and updated.

The Interior Department said in written answers to the House Natural Resources Committee after an April 2023 hearing that 254 of the 377 ACECs the BLM designated over the previous 10 years came in 2016 alone. That was President Barack Obama’s last full year in office.

No other year in that span came close. The next highest was 2015, with 97 designations, according to the same answers.

The Interior Department, the Public Lands Council, The Wilderness Society and the Center for Western Priorities did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

Jonathan Wood, vice president of law and policy at the Property and Environment Research Center, a group that pushes market-based conservation, told the DCNF that ACECs “often include buffers surrounding them.” The rule text isn’t public yet, so Wood said he was going off the department’s release.

An ACEC set up for one cultural site will still take in “some area around it,” he said. Near oil and gas development, “some of these buffer zones can be pretty significant” because the impacts of a spill or accident “could be further reaching than other types of uses,” Wood added.

He doesn’t expect a hard acreage limit on individual ACECs, Wood said, but added that was only a guess.

“What I suspect they will do, and what’s probably the safer approach, is to set in the rules some guidance on how to set buffer zones and making the process somewhat more demanding, the bigger an ACEC is,” he said.

Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, told the DCNF that anything “the Trump administration can do to retain the mission of the BLM lands is good.”

“BLM lands, by their very nature, are multiple use, are designated for multiple use, and for years and years and years, the Democrats, the Biden administration, the Obama administration before that, has systematically tried to lock up those lands and prevent that multiple use function of those lands,” Pyle said.

Aaron Johnson, vice president of public and legislative affairs at Western Energy Alliance, said in a statement to the DCNF that the group cannot weigh in on details until the proposed rule is posted.

But the alliance, which speaks for independent oil and gas producers in Western states, is “pleased that Interior is looking to address abuses of how Areas of Critical Environmental Concern have been used in the past,” he said.

“They were a backdoor land grab by the previous administration, which proposed closing off more than 2.1 million acres through various land management plans in western states where energy is produced,” Johnson added.

“ACECs are a legitimate tool under federal law, but they should be carefully targeted to protect resources that warrant special management, not used to broadly restrict multiple-use public lands,” he continued.

“The current planning process is too slow, too complicated and weighed down by outdated requirements,” BLM Director Steve Pearce said in the release. “These proposed changes would help the BLM make decisions more efficiently, reduce costs for taxpayers and improve coordination with the people and communities that rely on public lands.”

The department said in the release that the planning rules have been changed just twice since 1979, mostly to deal with cooperating agencies and outdated provisions.

It also said the rewrite would track FLPMA more closely, cut duplicate requirements, update some planning terms and strip out program-specific procedures that belong elsewhere in agency regulations.

The federal regulatory agenda lists the rulemaking as deregulatory under a Trump executive order. Its entry says the rule “will provide clarification of the process the BLM uses for designating Areas of Critical Environmental Concern.”

Back in May, the administration scrapped the Biden-era Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, better known as the Public Lands Rule. When that repeal took effect June 11, the ACEC rules reverted “to the framework in place since 1983,” according to the Federal Register.

The 2024 rule had rewritten the ACEC regulations “to better meet FLPMA’s requirement that the BLM prioritize designating and protecting” the zones, its Federal Register summary said.

Many commenters saw the ACEC provisions in the 2024 rule as regulatory overreach and worried they “would lead the BLM to make overly broad ACEC designations that would incidentally — or even intentionally — crowd out productive uses of the public lands,” the BLM wrote in the May rescission.

Opponents of the rescission cast those provisions as “necessary updates to improve designation processes,” the agency added.

The Property and Environment Research Center urged the BLM in a Nov. 10, 2025, comment to keep the 2024 rule’s conservation leasing provisions, calling such agreements “a free-market tool to reduce conflict and encourage voluntary conservation on public lands.” The group rejected the agency’s position that conservation falls outside FLPMA’s meaning of “use.”

“I think BLM is simply wrong,” Wood told the DCNF. He also noted the agency “confused use of land with use of particular resources on that land.”

The BLM “may, in a separate process, pursue further rulemaking to address the ACEC regulations in a manner that could address some of the issues raised,” the agency wrote in May.

Development can continue inside an ACEC, though “additional information may be needed to ensure that a proposed project or activity will be consistent with special management attention,” the BLM says on its website.

When the full text comes out, Wood said people “should look for how much the rules seek to impose policy from above.”

The BLM will hold an online information session on the proposal Dec. 3 at 5 p.m. Mountain Time, according to the release.

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