President Donald Trump signed legislation Monday repealing the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Planning 2.0 rule.
Trump signed the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to repeal the rule, which critics claim seizes power from local officials and makes energy development much more difficult. BLM and Democrats claim the rule would help federal agencies better take care of public lands.
The House repealed the BLM rule in February, with four Democrats voting to repeal it. The Senate voted to repeal the rule in early March on a straight party line vote. This is the fourth CRA bill signed by Trump.
Planning 2.0 took effect in December, and never really had a chance to be implemented. Critics of the rule say that’s a good thing.
“This rule would have given even more power to the bureaucracy in Washington when what we need is the exact opposite,” Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said in a press statement.
“Reversing this rule is just one of many actions we will take to shift land management decisions back to the people who live in these areas and away from unelected, and in many cases unaccountable, bureaucrats,” Bishop said.
Congress has been on a roll, using the CRA to begin repealing Obama administration regulations. Congress also began repeal efforts on another major Obama-era regulation called the Stream Protection Rule. The U.S. Senate repealed the rule earlier this month, and Trump signed the bill shortly thereafter.
Ending BLM and other agency restrictions to energy development on federal lands would create 2.7 million jobs and add $663 billion to the economy each year for the next 30 years, according to a new study published in December by Louisiana State University and the free-market Institute for Energy Research.
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