Looting the American Public · Investigation · 2025–2026
Blocked from selling it, they leased it.
The same 2025 budget bill that couldn't force a sale of public land mandated leasing it for oil, gas and coal through 2040 — and cut the royalty the public collects back from 16.67% to 12.5%.
FACT
§2 · Thesis
The land sale was the loud fight the public won. The leasing terms were the quiet half — and they became law.
Sale stripped by the parliamentarian; royalty cut and leasing mandate enacted in the same bill.
The number
12.5%
the onshore oil-and-gas royalty rate the law restored, repealing the 16.67% rate set in 2022 — a smaller public share on every barrel produced from federal land.
OBBBA §50101(a) (Pub. L. 119-21); EY; API
§5 · Graded Claim
Section 50101(a) repealed the 2022 royalty increase, putting the onshore oil-and-gas rate back to 12.5% and restoring $1.50/acre rent and $3/acre minimum bids.
FACT
The royalty is the public's share of production value; the section repeals IRA §50262 and returns the rate to one-eighth.
§5 · Graded Claim
Sections 50101(b)–(d) mandate quarterly onshore lease sales, require offering at least half of nominated parcels, and force all nominated parcels to be offered within 18 months.
FACT
The provisions convert leasing from something an administration may do into something it must do, on a schedule with deadlines — removing the discretion a prior administration had used to slow it.
§5 · Graded Claim
Section 50102 mandates at least 30 offshore lease sales outside Alaska through 2040 (BOEM: 36 total in the Gulf and Cook Inlet), and §§50104–50105 reopen the Arctic refuge and petroleum reserve.
FACT
These are statutory floors, not discretionary plans; §50102(d) also repeals the offshore royalty increase.
§5 · Graded Claim
Section 50201 forces coal lease sales on all pending applications and §50202 lowers coal royalty rates — the same lease-more, collect-less pattern as oil and gas.
FACT
The bill also (§50301) sets minimum timber-sale volumes from national forests and BLM lands.
§6 · Record vs Narrative
Same bill, opposite fates.
The land sale (Lee)
- Mandated sale of over a million acres of BLM land.
- Checked by the Senate parliamentarian and public pressure.
- Defeated — Byrd-ruled out, withdrawn June 28, 2025.
The leasing terms
- Royalty cut to 12.5%; quarterly + offshore sales mandated through 2040.
- Drew far less attention; no comparable public fight.
- Enacted — now being written into agency rules (2026).
§5 · Graded Claim
12.5% is a restoration of the century-old federal rate the 2022 climate law had raised — not a secret new low.
FACT
Staged as the honest limit: the public collects less than it briefly did, and less than many states and private owners charge, on a larger mandated volume — that is the documented claim, not that the rate is unprecedented.
▦ Still unknown
The total dollar cost to the Treasury of the lower royalty on a larger mandated volume is not yet totaled here.
This line is still blank
That is a modeling question over the life of the leases; we do not put a single headline number on it absent our own analysis.
Help us fill it →§7 · Why it matters now
Two halves of one story.
The monument cuts removed the protections that kept land off-limits to drilling and mining; this law set the terms on which the newly available land gets leased, and trimmed the public's share of it. The Looting the American Public hub tracks both: a shared inheritance opened up, and the public's cut quietly reduced.
▸ Looting the American Public →
▦ Ledger gaps
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenHow much the lower royalty and larger leasing volume will cost the Treasury over the life of the leases.
- OpenWhich companies win the mandated sales, and how concentrated the winning bids turn out to be.
Help fill these →