President Donald Trump’s first year of his second term was marked by instability when it comes to federal regulations. Policies around energy development, environmental protection, and public lands management changed at breakneck speed, and many are anticipating further rollbacks for these policies in 2026.
Energy, climate, and regulatory changes
In 2025, the Trump administration rolled back longstanding environmental regulations and gave a leg up to the fossil fuel industry at the expense of green energy.
A key piece of the Trump administration’s energy policy is what it calls a “national energy emergency,” which was one of the president’s first declarations in office. The administration has been using it to speed up approvals for fossil fuel projects, mostly in Western states. That includes a uranium project in southeast Utah.
Chris Winter, the executive director of the Getches Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at CU Boulder’s School of Law, said the administration has drastically reduced transparency around energy development and public lands management as part of these sped-up review processes.
“Things like taking away public notice and comment opportunities, limiting the size of the documents, the amount of analysis, even not telling the public that there's an environmental assessment happening, and it just all happens behind closed doors with no public participation,” he said.
That’s exacerbated, he said, by the administration’s attacks on the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The nation’s bedrock environmental law.
In addition, Winter says the administration’s bolstering of fossil fuels and limiting renewables, like wind and solar, could make energy more expensive in the near future, especially in the West.
Winter said there could be political consequences, especially as the demand for energy increases due to growing population and the expansion of AI data centers.
“I think especially these issues of energy affordability, in the West—federal public lands, and some of these really key issues that people think about day in and day out, I think are going to play a more central role in the midterms,” he said.
Winter said that’s especially true because the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority has been deferring to the administration, leaving people to look for Congress to put a check on that executive power.
There have also been changes to key environmental regulations, like the Clean Water Act, and the Obama-era Endangerment Finding under the Clean Air Act, which is the determination that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare. This summer, the EPA sought to rescind the endangerment finding.
“These developments constrain the federal government's ability to make progress on climate change,” Winter said.
Public lands protections gone, but a sell-off avoided—for now
The first year of the second Trump administration also brought a lot of changes for federal public lands. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, 2025 was one of the worst years on record for public lands protections.
According to the group’s analysis, Donald Trump is the only president to have stripped more lands of their protections than to give new protections, and it says that the policies initiated by the administration would strip protections from 88 million acres of public lands.
“With deep funding cuts, firings, and the elimination of conservation protections along with this reckless push to mine and drill, that's what we're going to see in the future, is our historic sites, archeological resources, (and) sensitive wildlife habitat at risk,” said Drew McConville, the report’s author.
McConville said there’s also consequences to big changes at public lands management agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
“If President Trump's budget became the actual budget of the country going forward, you'd see more than a 35% funding cut across public lands, and some national park units permanently transferred away and requiring the states to fund and manage those units,” he said.
“I think we're going to continue to see other kinds of threats to the public land system, defunding the agencies, hollowing out the infrastructure that the country uses to manage all of these public lands,” said Winter.
The Trump administration has also made moves to rescind several rules that protect public lands, like the 2001 Roadless Rule, which restricts development on roadless areas in national forests, and the BLM’s newer Public Lands Rule, which gave the agency tools to manage conservation as a use the way they do for mining and grazing. The administration also sought to make big changes to the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to designate national monuments, including several in the West such as Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments in Utah.
Public lands advocates are also worried about the sale and privatization of public lands.
This summer, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) proposed an inclusion in the appropriations package that would have mandated the sale of millions of acres of Forest Service and BLM lands, ostensibly for housing. The backlash was swift and bipartisan.
Lee’s recent activities around public lands have drawn more scrutiny. He received initial approval for a bill that would transfer 24 acres of Forest Service land to the town of Brian Head in southwest Utah. Lee said that the land would allow the town to build new public works facilities.
But the bill included no environmental review processes or public comment for the transfer, nor does it have any mechanisms to make sure the land is used for a specific purpose—something that Steve Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, found alarming.
“If the United States is going to transfer land at no cost to Brian Head, the public should know what that land is going to be used for, and that it's going to be used for a discreet public purpose,” he said. “And if it's not used for that reason, it would revert back to public ownership.”
Bloch said the proposal is even more concerning when viewed in light of Lee’s track record with public lands, and his sell-off proposal this summer.
“That's how we view this bill, as perhaps a facet of that land sell-off, and as maybe the camel's nose under the tent, that if you're able to accomplish a 24-acre sell-off bill, then larger things are going to be possible,” he said.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
