The Trump Administration last Thursday announced a change rectifying an unscrupulous Biden Administration move that locked away vast portions of the U.S. from energy exploration – exploration that the first Trump administration had allowed and on which Biden reneged.
It’s a move that many Americans, sore from high gas prices, hurting from U.S. blocks on Russian imports, and struggling to keep up with fiat currency inflation – might cheer as a dose of long-overdue sanity.
Valerie Volcovici reports for Reuters that Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to open a total of 20 million acres within Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve (NPR) and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil, gas, and mineral exploration.
“Burgum said the agency plans to reopen the 82% of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve that is available for leasing for development and reopen the 1.56-million-acre Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing.”
It’s a dramatic re-set, resurrecting arrangements to which Mr. Trump’s first administration already agreed, and which Mr. Biden cut back, only allowing a tiny portion of the areas to be utilized as had been arranged.
In fact, back in September 2024, I wrote for MRCTV about Biden’s energy attack, which was the most restrictive in U.S. history, and which saw his administration lock up 28 million acres in Alaska and 625 million acres of federal waters, all under the guise of “environmentalism.” Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland played the green card hard, reversing Trump-era promises to let energy flow and sticking it to Native tribes and consumers alike.
At the time, the Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy (R) laid out the betrayal, saying:
“Today the Biden Administration announced that it is cancelling legally-issued leases for oil and gas in the section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge designated for oil and gas development.
The Secretary of the Department of the Interior has the authority to cancel oil and gas leases issued in violation of statute or regulation, but there is no such violation in the ANWR leases. The leases that the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority hold were issued properly as mandated by Congress in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.”
Biden did not care. He flouted the law, Alaskans suffered, and Americans were deprived of energy that they could have had at much lower prices, allowing their lives to be better and allowing savings that could have been leveraged to start new business endeavors. We are talking multiple BILLIONS of dollars each year lost to energy costs – all because Biden restricted supply and reneged on the original Tax Cuts and Jobs Act agreement.
Yes, gas prices soared, grocery bills ballooned, and the feds shrugged while pretending it was all for the planet.
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But, now, Burgum is repairing the most of the damage, acting on President Trump’s January 20, 2025, executive order entitled, “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.” That order demanded agencies expedite energy projects and ditch every regulation Biden’s crew slapped on between 2021 and 2025, targeting nearly 80 executive orders which had turned Alaska’s LNG dreams into a regulatory nightmare. The U.S. Geological Survey pegs ANWR’s coastal plain at up to 11.8 billion barrels of oil, yet Biden’s team auctioned a measly 400,000 acres in January 2025, with such draconian rules that no corporations actually offered any bids.
Dunleavy has heralded the changes as “amazing,” and, at CERAWeek on March 14 was seen hustling to promote LNG deals in Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, knowing this could fire up production in under three years and produce about 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day.
Interior Department head Burgum, also chairing the National Energy Dominance Council, doubled down at the same conference, arguing America’s 500 million acres of public land, 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights, and 2.5 billion offshore acres could erase the $36.5 trillion U.S. debt if the central government would stop “mismanaging” them.
But this affords Americans a profound learning opportunity. In fact, every facet of this news of federal policy change DEMANDS acknowledgment that the federal government has no business running this flickering, permutating, dependent-on-President shadow-play.
The US Constitution limits federal land ownership to military garrisons, territories, and a 10-square-mile area for the capital. That’s it. No National Monuments. No National Parks. No sprawling Alaskan empires, no NPR, and no ANWR under D.C.’s thumb. The rest belongs to the states or the people, per the Tenth Amendment, and these stretches of land and fathoms of water only can reflect the interests of people if, in the end, they are privately owned and risking only the capital of the owners.
Biden’s land grabs -- preceded by decades of federal overreach -- were part of a multi-generational government power trip, not a God-given mandate, and, because every action of the polis is forced on a subset of the population, no political action is morally valid. Burgum’s change might appear to be beneficial to those who want lower gas prices, but others across America, and even some living at the local level in Alaska, might hold different views.
Due to the collectivist nature of all governmental action, the claim of government ownership and “control” pits these disparate interests against one another.
And, while one can applaud Burgum for fixing the land-lease problem Biden created, the government framework, itself, is improper.
Biden’s policies jacked up costs for every American family while pretending to save the planet. Burgum’s betting on a different reality, something Mr. Trump put in terms of, “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
But there is no such thing as a “collective political resource” and this back and forth over Alaskan land is just one example of the constant tug o’ war, the interminable struggle between disparate views and goals that collectivism cannot handle, even as those who take control of the collectivist machine try to paint their particular approach as “the answer.”
The answer lies in individual freedom to own and control private property, freedom to see other parties invest or turn away based on their preferences… and the closer American politics can get to that goal, the better.