Trump Drilling Dashboard
On July 4, 2025, the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) was signed into law, effectively handing control of the vast majority of our national public lands over to oil and gas companies and greatly reducing the cost of drilling on public lands. These changes, which Western voters overwhelmingly oppose, have rolled the onshore program back to what it was over forty years ago—when fraud, abuse, and speculation ran rampant in the public lands leasing system.
The new law mandates that the BLM hold a minimum of four oil and gas lease sales per year in nine states, including Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. In each sale, the BLM must offer at least 50 percent of the leases proposed by oil companies, and all industry-proposed leases must be offered within 18 months of being nominated. Companies are now able to request—at no cost—that any of the over 200 million acres of public lands that are open to leasing be put up for auction. The BLM is also no longer able to say “no” to leasing on any nominated lands—even if the leases are opposed by the public and local elected officials.
Prior to this historic attack on national public lands, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had already made clear its plans to offer as much land as possible for oil and gas leasing by any means necessary, despite oil companies already sitting on a glut of nearly 10 million acres of unused leases and over 7,000 approved-but-unused drilling permits. Now, the agency is statutorily required to lease—whenever industry makes the request—lands right next to more than 60 treasured national parks, along with family-favorite campgrounds, state parks, recreation areas, and even schools and medical centers. These irresponsible leasing policies will do little to reduce energy prices or alleviate economic uncertainty for the American people, and instead put iconic landscapes and lands adjoining important community institutions at ongoing risk of being leased for oil and gas, all while making it cheaper and easier for oil companies to drill them.
Along with ushering in an egregious new leasing regime, OBBBA rolled back many of the reformed leasing policies that had been put into statute in 2022 and updated in the BLM’s regulations in 2024. In direct contrast to the leasing policies now in place, these reforms brought about a more balanced and efficient approach to oil and gas leasing and development on public lands. These positive reforms made companies far less likely to nominate vast tracts of land for auction that they had no intention of bidding on, prioritized leasing in areas with high potential for development and minimal conflicts with other public land resources, and increased royalty rates, which did not deter companies from bidding on land they had legitimate interest in developing. As a result, lease sales informed by these “responsible leasing” practices generated increasingly greater per-acre bids and resulted in a significant decrease in the proportion of public lands being wastefully offered at oil and gas lease auctions.
This dashboard provides an at-a-glance look at federal onshore oil and gas activity in 2025, demonstrating the stark difference in stewardship of our national public lands resulting from the irresponsible leasing policies now in place, compared to the responsible policies that previously governed the onshore program thanks to the Biden-era reforms. This dashboard includes national and state-by-state numbers for the amounts of acreage both offered and purchased at competitive lease auctions, the numbers of leased public land acres and approved federal drilling permits that the industry already has access to and has yet to utilize, and annual onshore oil and gas leasing results. This dashboard will be regularly updated.
Understanding the leasing process
To understand this dashboard, it’s important to understand the overall process for leasing and development on America’s public lands. Industry is in the driver’s seat from the get-go. The process starts when companies nominate lands they’d like to see offered for lease–an easy action that can be done quickly and at no cost. In response, the BLM is obligated to evaluate nominated lands, and new law now mandates that the BLM include all nominated lands that are open to leasing in an auction within 18 months. At least four sales must be held every year in nine states, including Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Lands that go unsold at competitive auction become available for noncompetitive leasing, whereby companies can buy them over-the-counter without a bid.
Once a company has a lease, the next step is to get a drilling permit. It is very hard for the BLM to say “no” at this point and refuse to issue the permit, regardless of potential impacts on other values that the lands hold. The Interior Department also recently made it even easier and faster for companies to acquire permits via “emergency” procedures that allow for companies to apply for accelerated project review within as little as 14 days, without any ability for the public to weigh in on the project.
Prior to reforms being implemented to the onshore leasing program in 2022, the BLM routinely held massively irresponsible oil and gas lease sales. Between 2017 and 2019, more than 19 million acres of national public lands that were wastefully offered to industry went unsold. In 2020, spurred by significant political pressure, the BLM cancelled several sales due to the COVID-19 pandemic. DOI implemented a temporary leasing pause while undertaking a review of the federal leasing program in 2021; the only two sales held that year were carried out prior to President Biden’s inauguration.
More responsible leasing practices were first implemented in 2022. Among other changes, the BLM began directing leasing to areas with high potential for development and fewer conflicts with other public land resources. As a result, the proportion of offered lands that actually sold at competitive auction began far exceeding the proportion of lands that sold competitively when the agency had routinely been holding enormous, indiscriminate sales.
Since the Trump administration took office in 2025, the BLM has resumed holding larger lease sales that ignore the principles of the leasing preference criteria. As a result, leases in critical wildlife habitat areas, wilderness-quality and popular recreation lands, and lands adjacent to important drinking water sources have been offered and sold to the industry without any regard for the other important values they offer and that Westerners would like to see them managed for.
OBBBA reduced the royalty rate companies pay on oil and gas extracted from federal land by 25 percent—from 16.67 to 12.5 percent—allowing operators to deliver significantly less drilling revenue to taxpayers over the lifetime of a well. While both Congress and the Trump administration have misleadingly touted this change as making oil and gas development on public lands more economically attractive to industry, the federal royalty rate has little bearing on companies’ interest in acquiring leases in the places they’ve always wanted to develop. Rather, OBBBA’s reduction of the onshore royalty rate by 25 percent will do significant harm to oil and gas producing states by reducing important revenue that is used to fund schools and public infrastructure projects.
As a result of the irresponsible leasing practices that characterized the onshore program prior to 2022, oil and gas companies speculatively amassed tens of millions of public land acres. Since at least 2001, approximately half of the industry’s total leased acreage has been left idle and unused every year. Companies have also continuously stockpiled thousands of approved drilling permits that they could put to use at any time. The number of approved-but-unused permits the industry has access to has surged since January 2025, reaching a nearly 5-year high in March 2026.
Crude oil production on public lands has been steadily rising over the past two decades, regardless of how much public land has been offered or purchased for lease in any particular year. The vast majority of federal oil and gas is produced on leases that were issued decades ago. As of 2024, there is more oil flowing from public lands than at any point since at least 2003. Oil production on public lands is driven only in part by lease availability. Global demand is a more important factor in determining how much oil is produced on public lands, as is evidenced by the large amount of leased public land sitting idle.
In the wake of OBBBA, nominations for new oil and gas leases have surged and leasing of our public lands is now happening on an absolutely alarming scale and without any checks or balances. The BLM has already offered millions of acres of public lands across the West to the industry, and oil and gas companies have wasted no time taking advantage of how much cheaper and easier it has become to lease our public lands.
Unsurprisingly, companies have jumped at the chance to lease in highly productive areas like New Mexico’s Permian Basin, where drilling has ramped up over the past two decades and hardly needs further incentive. In places like Nevada, where no more than 6% of the industry’s leaseholdings have gone into production over the last two decades, leasing continues to predictably draw little return, with the majority of leases selling for the minimum bid of just $10 per-acre.