The Trump administration has opened thousands of acres of land in Nevada and New Mexico to oil and gas drilling, geothermal development and hard-rock mining, reversing protections that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enacted during his final weeks in office.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the decision on Friday as part of a sweeping emergency order to allow logging on more than half of national forests, or nearly 113 million acres. Ms. Rollins said that move was designed to increase timber production. Critics said the government was helping private industries at the expense of the environment.
Tacked onto the logging announcement was a little-noticed addendum: The agency also ended protections that covered federal land in Nevada and New Mexico in order to “boost production of critical minerals.”
On Monday, the agency confirmed that the affected land is in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada, where about 264,000 acres had been protected from oil, gas and geothermal energy development, and in the Upper Pecos watershed in north-central New Mexico, where the Biden administration had barred mineral mining.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said in a statement that it was “removing the burdensome Biden-era regulations that have stifled energy and mineral development to revitalize rural communities and reaffirm America’s role as a global energy powerhouse.”
The Biden administration enacted protections, which were supposed to last 20 years, for both areas at the request of Native American tribes and local communities. Lawmakers from both states said they were furious and vowed to fight the move.
“The Trump administration’s decision is a betrayal of trust,” Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, said in a statement. “This kind of top-down decision-making, with zero attempt to discuss or even listen to the communities impacted, is exactly what’s wrong with this administration.”
Ralph Vigil, an organizer for the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, an environmental nonprofit group, said mining would hurt the area’s outdoor recreation economy.
“No one in this community wants any extractive industries or any threats to our watershed,” he said.
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat, wrote on the social media site X: “The Rubies have extremely low energy potential, but they’re critical to our local tourism economy. I will not stop fighting to defend the Ruby Mountains.”
Mr. Biden, who prioritized the fight against climate change, restricted drilling, mining and other activities across 674 million acres of public lands and federal waters, the most of any president.
President Trump maintains that climate change, an established scientific fact, is a hoax. He has directed federal agencies to reverse all policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet. Instead, he wants to increase demand for and production of fossil fuels, including on public lands and in federal waters.
Mr. Trump also has invoked wartime powers to increase the production of so-called critical resources, including uranium, copper, potash, gold, and “any other element, compound, or material” deemed critical by a national energy council that the president created.
The Ruby Mountains does not have known oil or gas reserves, and in 2019 the Forest Service concluded that oil and gas leasing was not viable there. At the time, environmental groups called the finding a victory against the Trump administration’s efforts to expand drilling.
Russell Kuhlman, the executive director of the Nevada Wildlife Federation, said he now feared oil companies would try to lease parcels in the Ruby Mountains anyway. He called the area “the heartbeat of Nevada’s outdoor recreation” and home to the largest mule deer population in the state. There have been bipartisan efforts in Nevada to protect the area.
“Forces outside of Nevada are now dictating how we would like our public land managed,” Mr. Kuhlman said.
The lands of the Upper Pecos watershed had been of interest to hard-rock miners, who extract minerals like gold and copper from rock. In the 1990s, a spill from a closed mine contaminated the Pecos River, affecting local water supplies. In 2019, an Australian company applied for permits to conduct exploratory drilling for gold, copper, zinc, lead and silver. That set off a movement to permanently protect the area.
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