They Opened the Gate for the Drill Rig, Not Your Dirt Bike

What actually happened

On May 29, 2026, the President signed an order titled "Removing Unnecessary and Counterproductive Restrictions on Access to Federal Lands." It was published in the Federal Register on June 3.¹ It rescinded EO 11644, signed by Richard Nixon in 1972, and EO 11989, signed by Jimmy Carter in 1977.^1,2

Those two orders are where the so-called minimization criteria came from. They told the BLM, the Forest Service, and other agencies that when they designate where off-road vehicles can go, they have to locate routes to minimize damage to soil, vegetation, water, and wildlife, and to minimize conflict with other users.^3,4

Be clear about one thing up front, because it is real: those criteria have been used hard against riders. They are the legal hook behind a lot of trail closures, and the frustration in the community is legitimate. The roughly 2,200 miles of dirt roads now closed in the Western Mojave trace to a federal court fight in which the judge found the BLM had not shown how its routes minimized harm to the desert tortoise.¹¹ That is a genuine loss, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

But notice what the new order does and does not do. It does not reopen a single closed route. It directs agencies to start rulemakings to revise or rescind their own regulations, which takes years and which can be sued over the entire way.¹ The order even tasks the Secretary of War, alongside Interior and Agriculture, because military training lands are in the mix too.¹ This is not a gate swinging open. It is the removal of a legal speed bump.

The trick: this was never about your UTV

Here is the move most riders are missing.

The minimization criteria were the principal legal brake on building and keeping roads across federal land. A route designation is not an abstraction. It is road infrastructure. Under the old rules, an agency had to justify every motorized route against resource and wildlife harm before it could exist. That requirement is exactly what makes road building slow, expensive, and easy to challenge in court.

Strip it out and the cost of getting a graded road into a remote parcel drops. And roads are the gating infrastructure for everything extractive. You cannot drill a well, sink a mine, or haul logs where you cannot drive heavy equipment in and product out. The well pad, the mine portal, the log deck all start with a road.

You do not have to take a critic's word for the real target. The order itself says the old criteria created barriers to energy and timber production and to access to remote areas.⁵ One off-road outlet put it bluntly: the order said the quiet part out loud, that it is meant to expedite industrial extraction, not improve recreational access.² A conservation group reading the same text said it plainly prioritizes resource extraction over conservation.¹²

This is one tile, not the whole picture

The off-road order did not land alone. It landed inside a stack of moves all pointed the same way:

The Forest Service moved to open roughly 58 million acres of national forest to road construction and development by unwinding the Roadless Rule.⁶ The BLM repealed the Public Lands Rule, which had put conservation on equal footing with extraction under the multiple-use mandate.¹³ And the biggest one: Senator Mike Lee's repeated effort to force the sale of public land outright.

In 2025, as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Lee wrote reconciliation language that would have mandated the sale of up to 3.3 million acres and made more than 250 million acres eligible for disposal across eleven Western states.^14,15 After the Senate parliamentarian ruled it out of bounds and a public revolt, he narrowed it, then withdrew it.^16,17 He has run this play for years, through the HOUSES Act in 2022 and 2023. Utah even took a case directly to the Supreme Court seeking control of 18.5 million acres of federal land.¹⁸

Disposal and extraction are not in tension. They are two hands of the same project.

Follow the people

If you want to know who a fight is really for, look at who is running it and who is paying.

The BlueRibbon Coalition is the loudest voice telling riders this is a victory. BRC's executive director is Ben Burr. Burr worked for Senator Mike Lee in the Senate from 2011 to 2018.⁷ He is also Lee's nephew by marriage, a relationship Lee's own office confirmed years ago when a watchdog flagged that Lee had paid Burr more than a quarter million dollars over his Senate years, the most of any senator in that category at the time.⁸

It goes further. Burr is a trustee of the Utah Public Lands Alliance (UPLA), a foundation that also helps fund BRC.^9,10 And when Lee's land-sale amendment hit the budget bill, Burr and UPLA did not fight it. They publicly backed it, in an article written after they sat down with Lee's staff for the talking points.⁹ Sit with that. The access organization endorsed selling the public land you ride on.

Then there is the legal muscle. BRC's lawsuit to reopen the Moab trails is not rider-funded litigation. It is run by the legal arm of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank whose leaked donor list included Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Devon Energy, and which runs a program built to make the moral case for fossil fuels.^10,19,20

None of this means oil companies are writing checks straight to BRC. The honest version is more useful than that: BRC is the rider-facing front of an interlocking network. Burr is the hinge, with one hat at BRC and another at UPLA. UPLA moves money and messaging. A fossil-fuel-funded Texas foundation supplies the lawyers. And it all feeds the same legislative vehicle, Mike Lee. The riders are the sympathetic public face. The agenda is land transfer and extraction.

Follow the history

This did not start with a dirt bike. The idea of privatizing public land traces back through the Heritage Foundation, which has pushed selling off the federal estate for decades, going back to a Reagan-era program launched in 1982 to sell off federal land and put the proceeds toward the national debt.¹⁸ Mike Lee is deeply tied to Heritage. He has called it a guiding light.¹⁸

And the historic roads argument that groups like BRC and the State of Utah use to pry routes back open? That rests on a law called R.S. 2477. That statute was Section 8 of the Mining Act of 1866. It was written to grant rights-of-way so miners could build roads to their claims. The heritage access framing that gets sold to riders is, at its root, an 1866 mining-access tool wearing a recreation costume.

Even Lee's own career fits the pattern. Before the Senate, he was a lawyer who represented a radioactive-waste disposal company in a fight over storing foreign nuclear waste in Utah.²¹ The resource-industry alignment is not new. It is foundational.

The part nobody in the community is saying

Here is the hard truth, rider to rider.

Extraction and recreation do not share ground well. When a mine, a well field, or a logging operation goes active, the public gets pushed out for safety and liability. The roads that get built and kept under an extraction regime are not scenic single track. They are graded haul roads, with industrial traffic, dust, and torn-up viewsheds. So even if route mileage ticks up on paper, the actual quality of the country you ride gets hollowed out.

That is the deal being dressed up as ride your OHV in more places. You might get a little access on the front end. On the back end, the land itself changes hands, and the network that handed you the access is the same one working to sell the ground out from under you.

What an actual win looks like

This is not a call to roll over for trail closures. The closures are real and the frustration is earned. But a win that comes from an executive order and an agency rulemaking is a loan against the next election. It can be reversed as fast as it was signed, and everything done by rulemaking can be sued. Compare that to the conservation side, which spent nearly two decades building a court judgment in the Mojave. A judgment is durable. A press release is not.

The off-road community has real political weight when it is not being steered. Spend it on durable, transparent access built on solid legal ground and honest coalitions. Demand to know who funds the groups speaking in your name. And ask the one question that cuts through all of it: if this is really about my access, why is the leadership cheering the sale of the land I ride?