GREAT FALLS, Mont.— Conservation groups sued the Bureau of Land Management today to challenge its final plans governing greater sage grouse management across 71 million acres of federal public lands in nine Western states.

Today’s lawsuit covers the dwindling species’ habitat in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming.

The Trump administration finalized the plans in December, stripping protections approved in 2015 by Western states and federal officials to prevent the need to list greater sage grouse as endangered. Those 2015 plans have failed to protect the imperiled greater sage grouse and its disappearing habitat.

“The Trump administration’s destructive, illegal plans could nail the coffin shut on our country’s incredible dancing birds unless the courts intervene,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s no scientific support for claims that these plans will save sage grouse, and no public support for them either. The greater sage grouse’s fate is tied to hundreds of other animals who all rely on the Sagebrush Sea. We’ve got to preserve these Western landscapes for future generations, and we do that by stopping Trump’s giveaways to corporate billionaires.”

Today’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Montana, says the plans violate several federal laws by disregarding the best available science showing that expanded oil and gas and other development cause sage grouse populations to decline. The plans also give states the authority to dictate whether the BLM may strengthen sage grouse protections on federal land, even after significant sage grouse population or habitat declines.

“After a decade of tepid sage grouse protections, now the Bureau of Land Management is completely abandoning its responsibility to manage commercial activities in sage grouse habitats to allow the birds to survive,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “The limitations on livestock grazing, oil and gas development, and mining in the original plans are now being cast aside in a rush to accelerate industrial and commercial activities and destroy the wild places and wildlife that make the American West unique.”

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey found that most greater sage grouse breeding sites have a 50% chance of disappearing over roughly the next six decades if conditions remain unchanged. The changes to the sage grouse plans will make sagebrush habitat conditions worse.

“BLM has once again failed sage grouse,” said Sarah Stellberg, an attorney with Advocates for the West who is representing the conservation groups in the case. “These new plans fall short of conservation measures scientists say are needed to recover this species, opening millions of acres of public lands to expanded industrial development. For a species already in decline, we are out of time for half-measures. We are back in court to hold BLM accountable for meaningful conservation before it is too late.”

“The sage grouse are iconic birds who makes their home across the West, yet society takes their habitual lands for granted and in so doing we undermine this bird’s ability to survive,” said Clint Nagel, president of the Gallatin Wildlife Association. “It is past time to take these urgent steps to fight rampant habitat destruction and fragmentation.”

This is the second time Trump has tried to undermine critical protections for greater sage grouse. In 2019 the Trump administration weakened the plans to appease industry and allow more drilling, mining, livestock grazing and other destructive activities in greater sage grouse habitat. Later that year a federal judge ruled that those plans were illegal.

“The Trump administration tried, and failed, to dismantle sage grouse protections once before, yet here we are again,” said Joanna Zhang, endangered species advocate with WildEarth Guardians. “We’re going to court once more to ensure that our public lands are managed for wildlife and future generations, and that sage grouse aren’t sacrificed for corporate gain.”

“These plans ignore best available science and open public lands to expanded oil and gas drilling and other industrial development, even though evidence shows this drives sage grouse declines,” said Ben Greuel, national wildlife campaign manager at the Sierra Club. “For more than a decade, we’ve fought to protect this iconic species and the landscape it depends on from industry-backed rollbacks that put corporate profits before conservation. We’re taking this fight to court because corporations aren’t above the law, and they don’t get to push a species closer to extinction for short-term gains.”

The new plans repeat many of the 2019 rollbacks of the 2015 BLM plans’ important safeguards, including:

• Removing protections from 11 million acres of prime sage grouse habitat;
• Eliminating requirements to prioritize new oil and gas leasing outside of sage grouse habitat;
• Making it easier for BLM officials to disregard protective buffers around sage grouse mating and nesting areas, called leks;
• Eliminating a requirement that developers offset harms to public land habitat through beneficial mitigation projects elsewhere.

Other changes include weakening habitat protections in Nevada to allow construction of the Greenlink North transmission line, which would destroy nesting and mating grounds. The plans also allow states to override a warning system designed to detect declines in local sage grouse populations before they become irreversible. They also remove science-based grass-height standards for nesting habitat, a shift driven by livestock-industry pressure in Nevada, California, and Idaho that further threatens the birds’ existence.

Background
Greater sage grouse were deemed eligible for protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2010 because of steep population declines. Instead of protecting the birds under the Act, however, federal officials adopted revised land management plans in 2015 that limited where mining, oil and gas, transmission lines and other heavy industry could operate within priority habitat areas in 10 states.

Much of the 2015 plans were never implemented and they were further weakened in 2018 and in 2024. The birds’ populations continue to spiral downward, declining nearly 80% between 1968 and 2023, with more than half of that loss occurring over the last two decades.

As many as 16 million greater sage grouse once ranged across 297 million acres of sagebrush grasslands, a vast area of western North America known as the Sagebrush Sea. Over the last 200 years, agriculture, oil and gas drilling, livestock grazing and development have reduced the grouse’s range by nearly half, and sage grouse populations have steadily declined to perhaps 1.3% of their original number.

Protecting greater sage grouse and their habitat benefits hundreds of other species that depend on this sagebrush landscape, including pygmy rabbits, pronghorns, elk, mule deer, burrowing owls, golden eagles, native trout, and migratory and resident birds.