House Natural Resources Committee Package Delivers Big Windfalls to Polluting Industries and Billionaires

The House Natural Resources Committee recently held a markup of its text of the budget reconciliation bill, part of a larger effort underway in Congress to force deep cuts to the federal budget to pay for President Trump’s billionaire tax cuts and inhumane immigration agenda. The text Republicans released represents one of the most anti-environmental bills ever debated in the U.S. Congress. It’s a list of handouts to wealthy polluters, cheating the American public to sell off its natural resources to the lowest bidder.

If there is one common theme in the bill, it’s this: To protect corporate polluters from scrutiny and accountability. The bill seeks to do lasting damage to our democracy by shielding polluting industries from legal challenges, weakening the ability of everyday people and local communities to challenge polluting industries in court. From enormous lease sales in the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico to drastic changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the bill attempts to allow for federal agencies to quickly approve large projects with little rigor and oversight and allow industry to weasel their way out of accountability.

Here’s some other ways the bill would do lasting damage to our public lands and waters, our environment, and our democracy.

Opens more of our public lands and waters to polluting industries.

Instead of protecting some of our most pristine wilderness areas, the bill declares open season on our public lands. It mandates lease sales for big oil polluters in sensitive ocean ecosystems like the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet. It mandates no fewer than four annual lease sales across Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, Oklahoma, and Nevada, and any other state eligible for oil and natural gas leasing. In a reversal that seems more fit for a 1925 budget bill than 2025, it voids the Obama-era moratorium on new coal leasing, opens at least 4 million acres of public land to coal leasing, and requires the approval of all current coal leasing applications and future coal leasing applications within 90 days. This means more polluting energy development and climate-warming emissions at a time when we should be quickly transitioning to renewable energy.

But the bill singles out the Arctic in particular for an oil and gas drilling bonanza. It mandates four lease sales in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — the calving grounds of the 200,000 plus member Porcupine caribou herd and an area sacred to the local Gwich’in people. It reinstates previously cancelled oil and natural gas leases in the refuge while mandating more lease sales in the Western Arctic. These actions would be shielded from any lawsuit, leaving local communities unable to protect their health, communities, and livelihoods from reckless development.

And it’s not just big oil that stands to gain, but the timber industry and logging on our public lands as well. The bill mandates the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to enter into a long-term timber contract in each USFS region and increase timber harvests by 25% — regardless of the impact timber production could have on wildlife, clean water, communities facing wildfire threats, or climate harms.

Rescinds Unobligated Inflation Reduction Act Funds for Coastal Community Resilience

The Inflation Reduction Act appropriated $2.6 billion for investments in coastal community resilience. With climate change worsening storms like hurricanes and exacerbating rising sea levels, these funds were designed to help coastal communities invest in conservation, restoration, and protection of coastal and marine habitats. Despite the popularity of the program, Republicans are clawing back funding while simultaneously giving handouts to the industries that are worsening climate change. We should be investing in our coastal communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis, not leaving them to fend for themselves while enriching the entities that contribute to climate change the most.

Recklessly fast-tracks permits for large projects.

Laws like the National Environmental Policy Act have helped federal agencies consider the reasonably foreseeable outcomes of large-scale projects and given local communities an opportunity to participate in the project development process. This bill would amend NEPA to provide polluting industries with a major loophole that reeks of corruption. If they pay 125% of the costs associated with an environmental impact statement or environmental analysis, project sponsors can receive an expedited environmental review and shield themselves from any sort of court oversight. These changes to NEPA would result in more poorly planned projects impacting communities already feeling the consequences of pollution and environmental injustices. Most insidiously, it would prevent those communities from seeking the redress they deserve in the courts.

Provides more handouts to polluting industries.

This bill is nothing more than a wishlist for companies seeking to pollute and devastate our public lands and waters. After the Inflation Reduction Act raised royalty rates on oil and gas producers on public lands to ensure a fair return to taxpayers, this bill would lower it. Ostensibly this is about driving investments, but with record oil and gas production and increasing profits for oil and gas companies, that’s hard to believe.

Additionally, this bill would jeopardize the future of endangered species, like the critically endangered Gulf of Mexico Rice’s whale, by legislating that an illegal 2020 Trump era Biological Opinion is sufficient for protecting endangered species for all mandated lease sales and subsequent development for 40-50 years. With 50-100 whales remaining, this giveaway would line the pockets of oil and gas companies and give them a free pass to skip required environmental reviews and public accountability, all at the risk of causing the first extinction of a whale species by humans in history.

The bill also attempts to unilaterally approve the controversial Ambler Road project in Alaska that has long faced legitimate legal challenges and shield any further approvals from judicial review. Similarly, the bill removes the mineral withdrawal protecting the beloved Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Watershed and reinstates the previous leases. In a blatant giveaway, the right to judicial review is waived for everyone but the mining company.

Sells off our public lands.

In a late-night amendment to the bill’s original text, hidden from the public until the last minute, House Republicans voted to sell off hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands across Utah and Nevada to private hands. That’s like selling off almost the entire area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited national park in America. Introduced by Reps. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) and Celeste Maloy (R-Utah), the amendment was crafted in the backrooms of D.C. without an input or oversight from Democrats or from all impacted communities. Selling public lands to private interests and industry has been a long-term goal for many Republicans, including notable voices in the Trump administration. While they make overtures to using public lands to alleviate housing shortages, selling public lands to private developers means they don’t have to ensure those lands are developed in a way that guarantees public benefit. This sets a dangerous precedent for the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that are set aside for the benefit of all of us.

This bill is more than policy. It’s a statement of values. It’s a clear signal that House Republicans are prioritizing the interests of polluting industries and wealthy billionaires over the rest of us. They are robbing us of our natural resources that benefit all of us to line the pockets of those already flushed with wealth. We all deserve to live in communities with clean air, clean water, and strong environmental and public health protections that allow us to live our best, healthiest lives. This bill puts that future at risk.