The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, also known as H.R. 1 which passed into law last summer, introduced sweeping legislative reform. Under its vast umbrella, protections for public lands were cut drastically and these changes are already posing threats to many treasured outdoor recreation resources. In a recent article published on RE:PUBLIC, a new non-partisan public lands media platform, Alex Heard reports that the BLM is selling lease rights to oil and gas parcels that could open up more extraction along North Dakota’s Maah Daah Hey Trail, a 144-mile IMBA Epic singletrack route:
“The threat to the Maah Daah Hey is more than a local land dispute. It’s the clearest example yet of a fundamental reversal in how the federal government values public land—one in which recreation interests, more recently afforded equal footing alongside ranchers, loggers, and energy companies, have effectively been erased by the Trump administration’s aggressive push for oil and gas development. And with last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act stripping the BLM of its discretion to protect any area from leasing, few recreation destinations on federal land are safe from the same fate.”
Read the full story on RE:PUBLIC.
Cover photo: Brian Hueske