Interior’s New Strategic Plan: Promote AI and Put Public Lands Up for Sale

The Department of the Interior’s new 2026–2030 Strategic Plan cites demand from “Super Intelligence data centers” to justify expanding drilling, mining, and other development on public lands, while cutting the public out of decisions about those lands. The plan, if implemented, would be a disaster for our public lands and our nation’s offshore resources.

The plan calls for:

1. 1. Selling off public lands. Interior commits to “decrease the size of the federal estate” by selling land to states, localities, and Tribes, with no acreage limit and no role for the public in these sales.
   2. Cutting the career workforce. The plan promises to “consolidate” staff and reduce operating costs, adding staff only in law enforcement. Parks, refuges, and field offices are already stretched thin by the Trump Administration’s chaotic cuts; further reductions threaten visitor safety, resource protection, science and wildfire response.
   3. Putting extraction ahead of conservation. The plan centers on more fossil fuel production, including “clean coal,” and on deep-sea mining, while never mentioning wind, solar, or climate change.
   4. Weakening wildlife protections. The plan treats the Endangered Species Act as something to weigh against “the Administration’s other priorities,” and moves the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s protected-species office into the Fish and Wildlife Service to speed up permits.
   5. Shutting the public out. The plan promises to “streamline environmental reviews” and speed up permits without any clear way for the public to comment meaningfully on major decisions.

Because this plan undermines conservation, public participation, and the development of a professional, merit-based workforce, PEER is calling on the new Congress to step up its oversight of the Department of the Interior’s work and to pressure Interior to:

1. 1. Withdraw the land sell-off objective and commit to keeping public lands in public hands.
   2. Place a moratorium on building data centers on public lands. First, we must address whether this new industrial use is a legal or appropriate use of our public lands.
   3. Make conservation a cross-cutting mandate with measurable goals for habitat, species recovery, clean air and water, and climate resilience.
   4. Include renewable energy in its plans and account for the environmental and climate costs of fossil fuel and mineral development.
   5. Guarantee meaningful public participation, including full environmental review and comment periods of at least 90 days for major land-use plans.
   6. Maintain a fully staffed, professional workforce across parks, refuges, public lands, and science programs, and protect the scientific integrity of its work.

What the Department of the Interior Does

Interior is the nation’s principal steward of public lands and natural resources. It manages more than 500 million acres of land, roughly one-fifth of the country, along with 700 million acres of subsurface minerals and more than three billion acres of offshore resources. Through the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Geological Survey and other bureaus, Interior hosts more than 565 million visitors a year, delivers water to farms and cities across the West, protects threatened and endangered species, upholds trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations, produces the science communities rely on to prepare for floods, earthquakes, and wildfire, and leases public resources for energy, mining, timber, and grazing.

Chandra Rosenthal is PEER’s Western Lands and Rocky Mountain Advocate.

Tim Whitehouse is the Executive Director at PEER.