The House Natural Resources Committee has unveiled its piece of President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that proposes new oil and gas leases as Republicans pursue deep savings across the board.
The Republican-led panel’s offering is just one piece of the broader filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process that Congressional Republicans are using to try to ram through sweeping tax and spending cuts, border and defense funding, and energy policy changes.
Natural Resources Committee Chair Bruce Westerman, Arkansas Republican, has teed up the committee’s markup hearing of the bill for Tuesday. The committee expects to generate roughly $15 billion over the next decade from the policy tweaks, a figure that represents a small fraction of the House GOP’s lofty goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.
This part of the puzzle seeks to make good on the president’s vow to “drill baby drill,” and includes proposals for new onshore and offshore oil and gas drilling leases, changes to oil and gas royalties and tweaks to Biden-era resource management rules, among others.
The policy proposals have riled up environmental groups like the Sierra Club. Athan Manuel, the director of the organization’s Lands Protection Program, said in a statement that the committee’s proposal was a “corporate polluter’s wishlist.”
“The only way it could be friendlier to Big Oil CEOs would be if they wrote it themselves. Let’s be clear, this proposal is a means to an end,” Mr. Manuel said Friday. “The end is tax cuts for billionaires, and the means are selling off the public lands that belong to the American people.”
Natural Resources Committee spokesperson Rebekah Hoshiko told The Washington Times in a statement that it was no surprise “radical environmentalists oppose this bill since they’ve been the ones weaponizing federal laws against rural Americans for decades.”
“Now that we’re eliminating their slush funds and ensuring sound fiscal policy, their only option is to resort to straw man fallacies,” she said. “We welcome bipartisan discussion on budgetary policy, but these groups didn’t even take the time to read what’s actually in the bill (for example, no public land sales) before regurgitating old talking points.”
The committee’s legislation would require Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “immediately resume” quarterly onshore lease sales and a minimum of four oil and gas lease sales each year in Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada and Alaska, and expedite drilling permitting on public lands and waters.
It also proposes new sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and new offshore lease sales in the Gulf of America and Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The legislation also proposes a drop in oil and gas royalties to 12.5% for onshore and offshore leases after they were cranked up under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
The conservative-leaning American Petroleum Institute lauded the proposals, and said that the legislation “creates an unprecedented pathway for developing our vast natural resources on federal lands and waters for generations to come.”
“This is what American energy dominance looks like, and we urge the House to include these historic provisions in its final package,” API CEO Mark Sommers said.
