At an all-hands meeting of Interior Department employees last week, Secretary Doug Burgum stressed that managing and protecting federal public lands “must be held in balance.”
“It says in the mission statement the job of Interior is to ‘manage and protect,’” he said. “It doesn’t just say ‘protect,’ it says ‘manage and protect.’”
Better balance on public lands was precisely what the Biden administration was after with a rule it finalized last year.
