During his inaugural address at the US Capitol in January, Donald Trump used a slogan made famous by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin: “Drill, baby, drill.” It was a blunt promise, one that has long been championed—unsurprisingly—by the oil and gas industry. 

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the second Trump administration may play a key role in making that promise a reality, putting protected public lands in the crosshairs. While the public remains fixed on everything from massive federal job cuts to Trump’s chaotic tariff policies, the BLM is quietly shifting its mandate from custodianship and conservation to energy production. As a result, public lands could soon play host to a growing number of oil wells and fracking pads.

In his first term, Trump appointed Brian Steed, a conservative political figure from Utah, to head the BLM—an arm of the Department of the Interior that manages 256 million acres of land, for the most part across a dozen Western states. Steed moved the BLM’s headquarters to Colorado (the Biden administration’s interior secretary, Deb Haaland, later moved the agency back to Washington, DC). In 2019, Steed was succeeded by William Perry Pendley, a hard-line anti-conservation activist who managed to remain on the job well after Biden took office (he was ultimately removed by a judge).

Now Trump has nominated Kathleen M. Sgamma, a Denver-based energy lobbyist and a contributor to Project 2025, which has informed much of the second Trump administration’s approach to governance, to helm the BLM. 

The organizations that have supported Pendley, Sgamma, and like-minded figures have their roots in the Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 20th century, which sought to wrest Western lands from Washington’s control. Trump, who has shown little inclination toward spending time in the outdoors, has fomented a Sagebrush Rebellion of his own by arguing that the United States is not producing enough energy.

As some observers have noted, America is already the world’s dominant energy producer. In addition, opening federal lands for drilling would do little to lower gas prices, which are dependent on a complex set of global issues.  

“Demand for oil and gas is likely to decline over time, and most of the major companies understand this,” said Mark Squillace, an expert in natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School. That is why there was no enthusiasm for leases in Alaska’s Arctic Plain when land there was offered in the waning days of the Biden administration.

“I’m somewhat optimistic that they’re not going to be successful in pushing their oil and gas agenda,” Squillace said of the Trump administration. 

Still, there is little doubt that they’re going to try.

Sgamma’s organization, the Western Energy Alliance, says it advocates for “environmentally responsible exploration and production (E&P) of oil and natural gas in the West,” according to its website. Its political action committee donates almost exclusively to Republicans, despite claims of bipartisanship by the parent organization. Recent recipients of the group’s largesse have included Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, and Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as Trump’s first interior secretary but was forced to resign in the face of mounting investigations into his business dealings and inappropriate behavior.

In congressional testimony last year, Sgamma criticized the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that Democratic presidents starting with Bill Clinton have used to protect enormous swaths of Western land without having to seek approval from Congress. The law “has been inappropriately used over many years to create huge monument designations that are well beyond the original intent of the law,” Sgamma told House members, closely echoing the complaint of pro-industry conservatives.

While debates over land use have been a mainstay of American public life since colonial times, the new sagebrush rebels represent a radical departure from the norm, one that contradicts the preference of most Americans. According to the most recent iteration of Colorado College’s annual Western lands poll, residents of eight Western states support conservation over extraction by a 72 percent to 24 percent margin, “the highest in the poll’s 15-year history,” according to Inside Climate News.

Yet with Democrats out of power in Washington, Trump and his allies in the energy industry have free rein to remake the BLM in their own image, much as they have done with the Environmental Protection Agency, which is in the midst of a deregulatory push out of keeping with its original mission.

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The 900-page Project 2025 road map for conservative governance, “Mandate for Leadership”—which Trump renounced during last year’s presidential campaign but then quickly embraced once in office—said that during the Biden administration, the Interior had abused its authority in implementing a “radical environmental agenda.” Project 2025 argued that an Interior Department in Trump’s second term had “an obligation to develop the vast oil and gas and coal resources for which it is responsible,” a job for which Sgamma seems perfectly equipped. 

A representative for Western Energy Alliance declined to make Sgamma available for an interview.

The layoffs being conducted by Trump and Musk have devastated the US Forest Service and other land management agencies. Some worry that could be intentional, part of Trump’s idea for a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund, which will necessarily involve public land sales. “People will entertain the idea of privatization” if public lands are “managed into detriment,” Teal Lehto of the Resources Legacy Fund explained to The Nation. He has also proposed to address the nation’s housing shortage by using public lands for development.

Sgamma is just one of those officials who would be tasked with carrying out such initiatives. Conservationists have ardently opposed her nomination, fearing that she will open Western lands to extractive industries and other potentially ruinous activities. “Picking an advocate for the oil and gas industry like Sgamma shows just how little this administration values good stewardship of our nation’s public,” an Earthjustice executive said in a statement issued by the organization. 

After last fall’s bruising defeat in the presidential election, even some liberals say it’s time to embrace Trump’s plan for “energy dominance,” lest the Democrats come to be seen as the party of higher prices at the gas pump. “We’re sitting on a gold mine of energy in this country,” said Ruy Teixeira, who writes the Liberal Patriot newsletter and often excoriates Democrats for taking virtuous but politically damaging positions. “Your commitment should be to energy abundance,” Teixeira told Sierra in an interview, “and then within that context, you seek to reduce CO2 emissions.”

Squillace, the University of Colorado professor, expressed skepticism about going all-in on a resource whose utility is inevitably dwindling, especially as renewable energy sources become cheaper to harness. “Energy dominance, especially when it’s focused on fossil fuels, is just a silly policy,” he said.