WASHINGTON— Conservation groups sued the Trump administration today for scrapping decades-old rules protecting Americans’ right to participate in environmental reviews for logging, mining, drilling, road construction and other industrial projects on their public lands.

Environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, are often communities’ only way to obtain information and provide input into the thousands of projects up for approval each year on public lands.

“Trump is taking a wrecking ball to public lands so his industry cronies can make a quick buck, but we’re pushing back and demanding a voice for the American people,” said Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The National Environmental Policy Act is what keeps the public in the loop and lets people speak up when destructive projects threaten our backyards. Cutting the public out locks big decisions away in bureaucratic backrooms. That’s bad news for our wildlife, our beautiful public lands and our democratic right to participate in government decisions.”

Today’s lawsuit — filed in federal court in the Northern District of California — challenges procedures adopted by the Department of the Interior that make it much harder for people to learn about proposed industrial development on public lands, flag sensitive resources the agency has overlooked, and have a say in how air, water and public lands should be protected.

The Department of the Interior manages most of the nation’s federal lands and waters, including 245 million acres overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, 85 million acres managed by the National Park Service, 95 million acres of land and 760 million acres of marine habitat in the National Wildlife Refuge system, 3.2 billion acres of oceans and waters managed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and 7.8 million acres of land and water managed by the Bureau of Reclamation.

The complaint says the Interior Department, at Trump’s direction, unlawfully rushed its decision to discard public comment procedures that had been in place since the 1970s. It notes that the department violated the law by not seeking public comment before the new rules went into effect.

The administration has already begun applying the new rules to ongoing environmental reviews.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management — an agency within the Department of the Interior — recently moved forward with a supplemental analysis for an oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Cook Inlet without any public comment, reversing earlier commitments to allow the public to weigh in. A federal court had ordered the supplemental analysis after finding gaps in the agency’s previous environmental review of the lease sale.

“An oil spill in Cook Inlet would be devastating for the wildlife and coastal communities that depend on these rugged waters to thrive,” said Cooper Freeman, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Clearly the only voices this administration wants to hear from are the president’s industry buddies, not us locals trying to sound the alarm about these dangerous lease sales.”

The public will also not have a chance to review the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental analysis for the proposed South Railroad gold mine in northeastern Nevada until after the project is approved — a decision expected in June 2026. The mine would be located near greater sage-grouse mating grounds and creeks within the Humboldt River Basin, which supplies water to Elko, Nevada.

“Hunters, birders and communities depend on these lands’ life-giving resources,” said Megan Ortiz, a Nevada-based attorney at the Center. “People deserve to know the risks this mine poses and have their say. It’s unacceptable that the Trump administration is barreling ahead without giving them a voice.”

The National Environmental Policy Act was designed to require the federal government to consider environmental harms before authorizing industrial projects. The 1970 law has been under threat since President Trump’s first day in office, when he issued an executive order directing the Council on Environmental Quality to coordinate a government-wide rollback of all NEPA regulations.

“Preserving the right of the public to comment on projects on public lands is not only about democracy in action, but also leads to better outcomes,” said Nat Shoaff, a senior attorney at Sierra Club. “Instead, the Trump administration has undertaken a wholesale assault on the deployment of low-cost and clean wind and solar projects, blocking their development on public lands while re-opening public lands across the country to unneeded, unwanted and highly destructive coal, oil and gas development. Independent studies show that early and robust public processes improve clean energy projects and actually lead to faster clean energy deployment. ”