Today the BLM rescinded the Public Lands Rule. Memo 008 called this. The pattern held. Here is what actually changed, what didn't, what fills the vacuum, and what the Sovereign Circle should be demanding while the door at the Department of Interior is still open.
On May 11, 2026, the Bureau of Land Management published a notice in the Federal Register fully rescinding the 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule — the regulation widely known as the "Public Lands Rule." The rescission is official. The multiple-use mandate Congress wrote into law in 1976 is restored. The conservation lease mechanism — a private leasing instrument that would have allowed nonprofit organizations and other third parties to bid on public land for non-use — is gone.
"This action restores balance to federal land management under the principles of multiple use and sustained yield by prioritizing access, empowering local decision-making, and aligning the BLM's implementing regulations with statutory requirements and national energy policy."
Source 1 · GearJunkie / BLM Federal Register notice · May 11, 2026The Blue Ribbon Coalition fought this regulation since it was first proposed in 2023 — through formal comments, action alerts, and a sustained public education campaign. Thousands of BRC members submitted comments cited by name in the BLM's own administrative record. That work produced a real outcome today. It deserves acknowledgment. It is a genuine win.
Now here is what it isn't.
In Memo 008, published in April 2026, we argued that the public land access debate was not really about trails, tortoises, or travel management plans. It was about a foundational question nobody in the policy debate would say out loud: are human beings a problem to be minimized, or a solution waiting to be developed?
We identified the Public Lands Rule as one instrument in a broader regulatory architecture — one that elevated a non-use standard above every congressional authorization and made it structurally impossible to challenge because the standard it demanded could never be demonstrated as complete. We identified the legal mechanism that would challenge it: Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the June 2024 Supreme Court ruling that ended forty years of Chevron deference. The BLM's own rescission language confirms the argument:
"The BLM has determined that the 2024 Rule is unnecessary and violates existing statutory requirements. The 2024 Rule constrains agency flexibility necessary to manage under the principles of multiple use and sustained yield."
Source 2 · Federal Register · Rescission of Conservation and Landscape Health Rule · 2026The agency exceeded its authority. The courts now have standing to say so independently. The crowbar worked. The pattern held exactly as documented in Memo 008.
The rescission of the Public Lands Rule removed one instrument from a larger machine. The machine is still running.
43 CFR § 8342.1 remains on the books. The minimization criteria — the actual regulation that closed 2,200 miles of WEMO trails — are in the Code of Federal Regulations as of May 11, 2026, untouched by today's action. The Public Lands Rule was a conservation lease mechanism. The minimization criteria are the litigation weapon. They are different instruments. Today's rescission addressed one of them.
"On April 20, Rep. Celeste Maloy pressed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum during a House Appropriations hearing on expanding public land access and reviewing minimization criteria. Burgum agreed to work with her office to review the regulation and access. This is not a blanket commitment to rescind the minimization criteria, yet. But it is a door opening at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior."
Source 3 · Blue Ribbon Coalition · Q1 2026 Review · April 2026The idle lease machine is running at record pace. In 2025 alone, the BLM approved 6,027 new oil and gas drilling permits — more than any year in the past fifteen — and 21.3 million acres of BLM-managed land are under active oil and gas lease. Roughly half of all leased federal acres sit idle, producing nothing, held for market valuations while blocking recreational access for the full 10-year lease term. Only 3–10% of federal leases are ever developed at all. The conservation lease is gone. Its structural replacement, in practice, is an extraction lease that performs the same access exclusion through a different mechanism.
The 30x30 international framework is still the target. 190 nations adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022, committing to protect 30% of the world's land by 2030. The litigation infrastructure that produces 30x30 outcomes through domestic travel management challenges does not depend on which administration is in power. The minimization criteria, still on the books, still produce those outcomes regardless.
The debate over the Public Lands Rule was framed as conservation versus extraction. That framing obscures the real structural problem. The dispersed public user — the OHV rider, the overlander, the RoadSchool family, the hunter, the angler — is systematically excluded from public terrain not by one mechanism but by two parallel ones that present themselves as opposites.
"Over 60% of our public lands are managed with designated heavy restrictions. Of the 40% managed for multiple-use, less than 1% is ever directly impacted by motorized recreation — 0.4% of all public lands. And we are fighting constantly to keep even that open."
Source 6 · Blue Ribbon Coalition · 12 Days of Legal Updates · December 2025Both mechanisms produce the same outcome for the person who owns the land: the 340 million Americans whose public estate it is. Their access is extinguished. The paddle changes hands every four years. The public never gets to serve.
The door at the Department of Interior is open. Secretary Burgum is on record with Rep. Maloy. BRC has the legal argument on the minimization criteria ready and tested. The question is what the community asks for beyond the rescission of a single regulation — while the moment is real.
Our position is this: the public's right of reasonable recreational access to the terrain it owns is a sovereign right that cannot be extinguished by whoever holds the lease or the deed over the land between here and there. It should be codified as a permanent, non-negotiable condition of every federal land transfer — energy lease, conservation purchase, grazing permit, solar farm, or any other instrument. We call this the Terrain Covenant.
When the federal government transfers rights to public land — by oil lease, conservation purchase, grazing permit, or any other instrument — a public recreational access easement runs permanently with the land as a condition of the transfer. The land can be drilled, conserved, grazed, or managed — but the dispersed public user's right of reasonable access does not extinguish with the transfer. The public's path to its terrain cannot be sold away by whoever owns the land between here and there.
This is not a radical proposition. The Public Trust Doctrine already holds that navigable waterways cannot be privatized and that the public's right of access to water is superior to private riparian rights. Easements by necessity give landlocked property owners the right to cross adjacent land to reach a public road. The Terrain Covenant applies the same principle to federally designated recreational terrain — codifying a right that was never the government's to sell.
It is not anti-energy. An oil company can drill, and the public can still access surrounding terrain through a defined passage corridor. It is not anti-conservation. A nonprofit can retire a drilling lease, and OHV routes through adjacent terrain remain intact. It is one thing: a codified recognition that the public's access to its own land is not a privilege granted by the current leaseholder. It is a right that was never the government's to transfer.
Every time a rider veers off a designated route and tears up a meadow, it hands the litigation organizations that closed 2,200 miles of WEMO trails exactly the evidence they need to justify the next closure. The bad actor is not just damaging terrain. They are damaging the argument — that educated, invested, sovereign human presence on the land is stewardship, not degradation.
The OHV community has spent forty years building its own answer. Not through government mandates. Not through licensing bureaucracies. Through a voluntary, community-developed code of conduct that functions the way a parent code of ethics functions in youth sports — not as law, but as culture. Tread Lightly!, founded in 1985 by the U.S. Forest Service and operating as an independent nonprofit since 1990, leads over 500 trail maintenance and stewardship projects annually. The T.R.E.A.D. Principles are its foundation:
The free Responsible Rider Masterclass — launched February 2025 by Tread Lightly! and BRP — is available online for every rider. It is not a license. It is not a government program. Think of it the way PAYS — the Parents Association for Youth Sports — works in youth athletics. Parents sign a code of conduct acknowledgment before each season. No regulatory teeth. Mostly symbolic. Research showed 68% of parents had a positive reaction to it, and 76% had previously felt uncomfortable because of other parents' behavior. The program shifted culture not by stopping every bad actor, but by giving the majority of good actors a shared standard to point to — and removing the excuse of ignorance from everyone who remained. A completed Tread Lightly! certificate doesn't prevent a bad decision on the trail. But it documents that you knew the standard before you made it. If you are ever found liable for terrain damage, that documented knowledge will matter.
Mandating training or licensing heads deeper into the administrative state we have been documenting and opposing across every memo in this series. The answer is not preemptive control of behavior. It is proportional consequence for transgression. Ignorance is no excuse. If you damage public terrain — documented, measured, verified — you bear the full cost.
Documented warning. Mandatory remediation contribution — physical labor on trail restoration, not a payment to a government account. The rider fixes what they or others have damaged. Tread Lightly! volunteer programs already have the infrastructure to administer this.
Full cost of documented remediation paid by the rider, assessed by independent terrain survey. Loss of public land motorized access for two to five years — the same principle as losing a fishing license for poaching. Civil liability for documented downstream harm.
Permanent revocation of public land motorized access. Full civil liability for remediation cost plus documented ecological harm. Criminal trespass if the damage occurred in a formally designated sensitive area. No exceptions. No appeal to ignorance.
Three existing mechanisms enforce this — not a new agency. Fellow riders: the organized community already has the eyes on the terrain — give them formal standing to document and report violations through BRC and Tread Lightly! as the accountability layer. Existing law enforcement: rangers and BLM officers already have citation authority; mandate that fines reflect actual remediation cost, not a flat rate that bears no relationship to the damage done. Civil liability: if off-route riding causes documented damage to terrain that a recreation organization or downstream stakeholder has a demonstrated interest in, they are civilly liable. The Terrain Covenant gives organized recreation groups formal standing to bring that action — the same standing a property owner has to sue for trespass damage.
Support BRC's push to rescind the minimization criteria. The Public Lands Rule is gone. The minimization criteria — 43 CFR § 8342.1 — are the actual weapon that closed WEMO. They remain on the books. Burgum's door is open. The community pressure that opened it needs to stay on. Take action directly at blueribboncoalition.org.
Complete the Tread Lightly! Responsible Rider Masterclass. Free. Online. Available now at treadlightly.org. Not because the government requires it — because the community standard demands it, and because it documents that you knew the rules before you went out.
Ask your representatives one question. The Public Lands Rule is gone. What fills the vacuum? If the answer is only more extraction — more idle leases on terrain that produces nothing but blocks access — then the dispersed public user has traded one exclusion mechanism for another. The Terrain Covenant is what should fill the vacuum. Ask them where it is.
The public's path to its terrain cannot be sold away by whoever owns the land between here and there. That right was never the government's to transfer. It was never the leaseholder's to hold. No rescission, no administration, and no bilateral deal between concentrated interests changes that fundamental fact.
The minimization criteria measured process instead of outcomes. The conservation lease would have measured exclusion instead of stewardship. The idle oil lease measures market valuation instead of production. None of these frameworks measures the one outcome that matters: whether the American who owns this land can get to it, stand on it, teach their children in it, and come back next season to find it the way they left it.
That is the standard the Terrain Covenant establishes. That is the standard the T.R.E.A.D. Principles uphold. That is the standard the Sovereign Circle has been documenting since Memo 001.
The pattern held. The door is open. The vacuum is real.
Tymmber Outdoor is watching to see what fills it.
Right is Might. A better person makes a better world — and a better landscape.
— Mike Isaacs
Founder, Tymmber Outdoor
Sierra County, New Mexico · Nullius in Verba — Take Nobody's Word For It.