BLM Law: FLPMA, Mining, Grazing, and Wild Horses

BLM law is the body of federal statutes and regulations that tells the Bureau of Land Management how to manage the roughly 245 million surface acres and 700 million subsurface mineral acres of public land under its authority.¹ The framework is anchored by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, but it also includes older statutes on mining, grazing, and mineral leasing, mid-century laws on wild horses and wilderness, and a steady stream of newer legislation and executive orders that shift emphasis with each administration.

FLPMA: The Agency’s Governing Statute

Congress did not give the BLM a comprehensive charter until 1976. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act, known as FLPMA, is the agency’s “organic act” and still defines its mission.²

Two principles sit at its core. First, public lands stay in federal ownership unless a formal planning process shows that disposing of a specific tract serves the national interest. Second, the BLM manages those lands under a doctrine of multiple use and sustained yield, meaning a combination of energy, grazing, mining, recreation, timber, and conservation uses that meets present and future needs without permanently impairing the land or its environmental quality.³

FLPMA also imposes concrete procedural duties. The Secretary of the Interior must keep a continuing inventory of public lands and resources, develop land-use plans with public involvement and an interdisciplinary approach, coordinate with state, local, and tribal governments, and give priority to designating areas of critical environmental concern.²

Section 603 required the BLM to inventory its lands for wilderness characteristics and recommend candidates to the President. Lands identified through that process became Wilderness Study Areas, managed under a “non-impairment” standard that bars activities that would compromise a tract’s suitability for wilderness until Congress either designates it as wilderness or releases it.⁴ Only Congress can make that final call. The BLM currently manages 487 wilderness study areas and 263 designated wilderness areas.⁵

Mining and Mineral Leasing Laws

The BLM administers two very different mineral regimes, and the distinction matters.

The General Mining Law of 1872 covers hardrock minerals: gold, silver, copper, and similar metals. Under this law, individuals and companies can locate and develop claims on open public land. The BLM records claims, adjudicates their validity, and collects location and annual maintenance fees. In fiscal year 2020 the agency collected over $65 million from roughly 391,000 active claims.⁶ The 1872 law requires no royalty payments for hardrock minerals taken from public land, and operators are not required to report production.

The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 covers a different category: oil, gas, coal, phosphate, sodium, potash, oil shale, and geothermal resources. These are leased rather than claimed, and the federal government collects royalties on what is produced and sold.⁷ The Act imposes acreage caps by state and requires the Secretary of the Interior to consult with the Attorney General on coal leases to guard against antitrust concerns.⁸

Grazing on Public Land

Livestock grazing has its own statutory track. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 authorized the Secretary of the Interior to establish grazing districts on vacant public-domain land, issue permits to stockmen for up to ten years, and regulate occupancy to preserve the land.⁹ Permits give preference to local settlers and ranchers but create no ownership interest in the land. The BLM now administers nearly 18,000 permits and leases across 155 million acres and more than 21,000 allotments.¹⁰

Grazing fees follow a formula set by the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978 and cannot fall below $1.35 per Animal Unit Month. A 2014 law allows the BLM and Forest Service to automatically renew grazing permits for a decade if the agencies cannot complete required environmental reviews. By 2023, roughly 75 percent of BLM grazing land was being grazed without environmental review, up from 47 percent in 2013, and the BLM has no record of ever completing land health assessments for over 35 million acres.¹¹

In May 2026, the BLM proposed a new grazing rule that would apply land-health standards across all BLM programs, increase operational flexibility for ranchers, and automatically stay a BLM grazing decision when a permittee appeals it.¹² The public comment period runs through July 2026.

Wild Horses and Burros

The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 calls these animals “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and directs the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service to protect and manage herds in areas where they were found roaming when the law passed.¹³ Because the herds lack natural predators and can double every four to five years, the BLM uses helicopter roundups, fertility control, and adoption to manage populations. As of March 2026, roughly 73,130 animals roam BLM land, still nearly triple the agency’s target of about 26,000, and another 68,143 are held in off-range corrals and pastures at a cost exceeding $100 million per year.¹⁴

Two legal constraints shape the program. Appropriations riders since 2007 have barred the BLM from euthanizing unadoptable animals or selling them for slaughter. And in March 2025, Senior Judge William J. Martinez of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado ruled that the BLM’s Adoption Incentive Program, which offered $1,000 per adoption, failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act because its safeguards were insufficient to prevent adopted animals from being sent to slaughter. The judge ordered a new environmental analysis, and the program remains on indefinite hold.¹⁵

Conservation and Recreation Designations

Several laws let the BLM or the President carve out special-status units within the public lands. The Antiquities Act of 1906 lets the President designate national monuments. The National Trails System Act of 1968 and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 protect trails and free-flowing rivers. The Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009 codified the BLM’s National Conservation Lands system into law, giving statutory permanence to a collection of monuments, conservation areas, wilderness areas, and other protected units that now spans over 38 million acres across 906 units.¹⁶⁵

The Recreation and Public Purposes Act, first passed in 1926, authorizes the BLM to sell or lease public land to state and local governments and qualified nonprofits for schools, parks, firehouses, hospitals, and similar community uses. Since 1926, the BLM has transferred over 410,000 acres through more than 1,600 patents under this law and currently manages over 630 active leases covering about 76,000 acres.¹⁷

More recent conservation-related statutes include the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act of 2019, which permanently authorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and the Great American Outdoors Act, which funds deferred maintenance on public lands.¹⁸

Law Enforcement Authority

FLPMA authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to establish a law enforcement body on public lands. The BLM employs approximately 200 uniformed law enforcement rangers and 70 special agents (criminal investigators) who patrol landscapes ranging from arctic tundra to desert.¹⁹ Their work includes investigating vandalism and looting of archaeological sites, wildland arson, hazardous-materials dumping, mineral theft, and illegal marijuana cultivation on public land.²⁰

The BLM also manages nearly 200 miles of land along the southern border in New Mexico, Arizona, and California and runs Operation SABR (Securing America’s Border Resources) to address smuggling and environmental damage from unauthorized traffic.²⁰ Officers coordinate public safety at large recreational events, including Burning Man in Nevada, the King of the Hammers race in California, and off-highway vehicle events at the Imperial Sand Dunes, and work alongside sheriff’s offices, state agencies, and other federal law enforcement.

How BLM Law Shifts With Each Administration

The statutes stay put, but the regulations that implement them can change quickly. In April 2024, the BLM finalized both a renewable energy siting rule that reduced rental rates and capacity fees for solar and wind on public land, and its first comprehensive update to federal onshore oil and gas leasing regulations since 1988, which raised royalty rates, strengthened bonding requirements, and codified fiscal provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act.²¹²²

The direction reversed in early 2025. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed Secretary’s Order 3418, “Unleashing American Energy,” on February 3, 2025, directing the BLM to review and potentially rescind several Biden-era regulations, increase oil and gas lease offerings including quarterly sales, and ensure that agency policies do not favor renewable energy over fossil fuel or mineral development.²³

The main actions that followed:

The Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, finalized in 2024, had established conservation as a use of public lands on par with grazing and energy and authorized new “conservation leases.” The BLM proposed rescinding it in September 2025 and formally cancelled it on May 11, 2026, stating that it “threatened to restrict productive use of the public lands.” No conservation leases were ever issued.²⁴
The BLM held 22 oil and gas lease sales in 2025, generating over $356.6 million. In June 2026, the agency proposed another overhaul of its leasing regulations, restoring the 12.5 percent minimum royalty rate and lowering bonding minimums to $10,000 per lease or $25,000 per state, which the BLM said would remove “serious financial barriers” for small operators.²⁵²⁶
The 2016 coal leasing moratorium was rescinded and 13.1 million additional acres were opened for coal leasing in September 2025.²⁵
In Alaska, the BLM reopened nearly 82 percent of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to oil and gas leasing and reopened 1.56 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s Coastal Plain.²⁵
Effective September 2025, the BLM adopted 65 new categorical exclusions under NEPA, borrowed from other federal agencies, to streamline permitting for activities across recreation, minerals, forestry, fire management, wild horse operations, and rights-of-way. Each exclusion carries size or acreage limits, and the BLM must still evaluate whether “extraordinary circumstances,” such as endangered-species habitat or cultural resources, require a fuller environmental review.²⁷

Some of these changes are locked in by statute rather than by rule. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in 2025, requires the BLM to increase annual timber sales by at least 20 million board-feet per year from fiscal years 2026 through 2034, directs five oil and gas lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska by 2035, and sets coal-leasing benchmarks the agency has already exceeded.²⁸²⁵

The Ongoing Debate Over the 1872 Mining Law

One statute stands apart in how consistently it draws reform proposals. Because the General Mining Law of 1872 predates modern environmental law, it imposes no royalties, no production reporting, and limited reclamation obligations. The BLM currently holds $3.3 billion in financial guarantees for reclamation from active operators, but more than 500,000 legacy abandoned mine sites dot the western landscape with no dedicated funding mechanism to clean them up.⁶

Reform proposals have circulated for decades. The Biden administration outlined principles calling for fair-return royalties on all hardrock minerals, a reclamation fee modeled on the coal program to fund abandoned-mine cleanup, strict environmental and tribal-consultation standards, and faster but still protective permitting. Industry stakeholders generally favor reforms that minimize any new royalty burden. Congress has not enacted comprehensive mining-law reform, and as of mid-2026 the 1872 framework remains substantively intact.

1
Bureau of Land Management. About the BLM
2
GovInfo. Federal Land Policy and Management Act, Pub. L. 94-579
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. FLPMA, 43 U.S.C. Chapter 35
4
Every CRS Report. BLM Wilderness Study Areas
5
Bureau of Land Management. National Conservation Lands
6
Department of the Interior. Mining Law Reform
7
Bureau of Land Management. About Mining and Minerals
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Mineral Leasing Act, 30 U.S.C. § 181 et seq.
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Taylor Grazing Act, 43 U.S.C. Chapter 8A
10
Bureau of Land Management. Livestock Grazing
11
ProPublica. Grazing, Environment, and Public Lands Oversight
12
SBA Office of Advocacy. BLM Proposes Revisions to Grazing Regulations
13
Bureau of Land Management. About the Wild Horse and Burro Program
14
E&E News. BLM Ramped Up Wild Horse Removals, Costs Soared
15
E&E News. Judge Upends BLM’s Pay-to-Adopt Wild Horse Program
16
Bureau of Land Management. National Conservation Lands Build on BLM’s Versatility
17
Bureau of Land Management. Recreation and Public Purposes Act
18
Bureau of Land Management. Laws and Regulations
19
FLETC. Bureau of Land Management Law Enforcement: Protect the West’s Public Lands
20
Bureau of Land Management. What We Do – Law Enforcement
21
Bureau of Land Management. Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Rule
22
GAO. Rights-of-Way, Leasing, and Operations for Renewable Energy
23
Department of the Interior. Secretary’s Order 3418 – Unleashing American Energy
24
Oregon Capital Chronicle. Feds Officially Cancel Conservation Rule for Public Lands
25
Bureau of Land Management. Progress on Public Lands: BLM 2025 Trump Administration Accomplishments
26
SBA Office of Advocacy. BLM Proposes to Revise Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Regulations
27
Federal Register. Notice of Adoption of Categorical Exclusions Under Section 109 of NEPA
28
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. FLPMA, 43 U.S.C. Chapter 35 (as amended by Pub. L. 119-21)