16. Department of the Interior · Notable
Abandon the leasing withdrawal in Colorado's Thompson Divide
Printed page 523 16. Department of the Interior
“Abandon withdrawals of lands from leasing in the Thompson Divide of the White River National Forest, Colorado; the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Cultural Historic National Park in New Mexico (restoring the compromise forged in the Arizona Wilderness Act); and the Boundary Waters area in northern Minnesota if those withdrawals have not been completed.”
What has happened
- Not started
No revocation of the Thompson Divide withdrawal was found. Greps of every Federal Register rule, proposed rule and notice in the window for "Thompson Divide" return nothing; the fourteen Public Land Orders published in the window are all military withdrawals, extensions, or the Alaska Dalton Corridor revocation (PLO 7966); no joint resolution of disapproval covering the Thompson Divide order appears among the 104 public laws of the 119th Congress; and Interior's press releases for 2025 and 2026 do not mention it. SO 3418 §4(c) does direct "actions to review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands, consistent with existing law, including 54 U.S.C. 320301 and 43 U.S.C. 1714", which is the authority under which such a revocation would come — and the review has now produced action in Alaska, Minnesota **and New Mexico**, but still not Colorado. That is the sharpened form of the negative (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06): on 2026-07-15 the BLM opened comment on a draft environmental assessment for revoking the Chaco withdrawal (#1472), citing EO 14154 and SO 3418 by name, so the review is demonstrably live and demonstrably reaching individual withdrawals one at a time. Nothing comparable exists for the Thompson Divide. BLM's own site search, read through `search.usa.gov?affiliate=blm.govdrupal` and nonsense-controlled, returns one Thompson Divide press release and it is the Forest Service and BLM comment notice that **created** the withdrawal, not one revisiting it; the remaining hits are Resource Advisory Council minutes from 2022-2024 and unrelated PDFs. Federal Register full text for "Thompson Divide" since 2025-01-20 returns 0 documents, and the only Public Land Orders published since 2026-06-01 are a Utah extension (No. 7970) and a Louisiana revocation (No. 7969). Note the division of labor, which is why this may never surface on a BLM host at all: PLO 7939 withdrew National Forest System land in the White River National Forest, so the Forest Service is the surface managing agency and the Department of Agriculture would carry the application to revoke.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Public Land Order 7939 withdrew about 221,000 acres in the Thompson Divide from mineral entry and leasing for twenty years in April 2024 — a completed withdrawal, so the Quote’s condition (“if those withdrawals have not been completed”) had already failed when the administration took office. Nothing in the window undoes it.
- How we searched (2026-09-06). BLM’s National NEPA Register could not be searched: its search returns the identical page for “Chaco”, for “Thompson Divide” and for a nonsense control query, and its results load only for signed-in users. BLM’s own site search, which runs on search.usa.gov (https://search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=blm.govdrupal&query=…), can be read. That search found the Chaco environmental assessment for #1472, and it returns nothing here.
- Related: #1472 (Chaco, now attempted, from the same search) and #1473 (Boundary Waters, done) share this Quote. All three are leveled separately: the Quote lists three withdrawals and the record reaches them one at a time.
- Action
- withdraw
- Object
- Thompson Divide leasing withdrawal, White River National Forest, Colorado
- ID
- 1471