New plans unveiled by President Donald Trump apply to greater sage grouse habitat on Bureau of Land Management lands in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming.
Conservation groups say the plans strip protections for the greater sage grouse and put the species in even greater peril, with some threatening litigation.
“Trump’s reckless actions will speed the extinction of greater sage grouse by allowing unfettered fossil fuel extraction and other destructive development across tens of millions of acres of public lands,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Every president starting with Obama has screwed over these iconic Western birds and the hundreds of other wildlife species that depend on the beautiful sagebrush sea. We’re not letting these dancing birds go without a fight, so we’ll see Trump in court.”
But supporters disagree.
“This resource management plan amendment is the result of more than a decade of coordination between the Bureau of Land Management and all the states within the range of the species. Utah worked collaboratively with the BLM under two administrations — through the Western Governors’ Association Sage-grouse Task Force — to incorporate the most recent science in the (resource management plan) and account for local conditions important for conservation," said Utah Division of Wildlife Resources Director Riley Peck.
Peck added the resource management plan amendment was finalized under the current administration, with minor revisions to account for remaining concerns raised by the state.
The division director specifically pointed to strides made in Utah.
“Utah has a long history of successful wildlife management and conservation, and it continues to provide significant contributions to the science, management and conservation of greater sage-grouse. Utah also advocated for recognition of its management authority over this non-listed species,” Peck said, adding that continued conservation of the bird will continue.
Critics, however, assert the plans remove protections from 4.3 million acres of prime sage-grouse habitat and reduce the amount of protected habitat in Utah.
They say 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 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, they say.
Because of precipitous population declines, greater sage grouse were deemed eligible for protection under the Endangered Species Act in the early 2010s. Instead of protecting the bird, however, critics say federal officials adopted revised land management plans in 2015 that established protections from extractive uses across the bird’s range in 10 states.
These protections limited where mining, oil and gas, transmission lines and other heavy industry could operate within priority habitat areas. They specified limits on the amount of permittable disturbance within these habitat areas, which were designated to protect the sensitive birds and their mating grounds, called leks.
However, fossil fuel, energy transmission and mining industries continued to pressure the BLM to weaken these plans, critics assert. Many protective measures from the 2015 plans were never implemented and the plans were again revised and further weakened in 2018 and in 2024. The birds’ populations continue to spiral downward, declining nearly 80% between 1968 and 2023.
Some groups, like the Western Watersheds Project, called the new plans a “gift” to industry.
“The new plans shift the most sensitive areas of designated Priority Habitats from a prohibition on surface development to potentially open to industrial-scale oil and gas fields with only symbolic habitat protections that do nothing to prevent the habitat destruction, and this will result in emptying public lands of sage grouse and other sensitive wildlife,” said Erik Molvar, the group’s executive director.
Lawsuits and more lawsuits
The fate of the chicken-sized bird has been the subject of litigation over the years.
In 2016, Utah filed lawsuit over new regulations designed to protect the species.
At the time, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert was rankled by the impositions contained in the federal edict.
“The 2,000 pages of new regulations recently imposed by the federal government are in many ways more restrictive than an Endangered Species Act designation,” Herbert said in a statement. “This one-size-fits-all decision does not reflect the tremendous diversity in greater sage grouse habitats across the West.”
He defended the lawsuit by asserting the action would allow greater flexibility in protecting this unique species while allowing reasonable economic growth.
That same year, there was swift rebuke from the mining industry.
“This is just another reason why a lot of people feel this administration simply wants to exterminate the mining industry in this country,” said Luke Popovich from the National Mining Association.
“They’re using this as a rationale to drive this industry underground, no pun intended.”
In other years, environmental groups have brought their own lawsuits, asserting logging projects and industry activity put sage grouse habitat in jeopardy.
One lawsuit brought by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance was aimed at two logging projects in Utah.
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