WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump’s push to expand oil and gas drilling on federal lands across the American West is reaching new heights, even as government officials, conservation groups and even some members of his own party move to stop him.

The Interior Department last year set an all-time record for oil and gas lease sales on federal lands, generating more than $1.1 billion, almost triple the previous record from 2008.

While that is drawing applause from oil and gas executives, environmental groups warn that leasing so much such land so fast has put at risk pristine wilderness and wildlife habitats. More than 1.5 million acres of land were leased for drilling last year alone, and buried within the growing list are lands within Wyoming’s Red Desert Corridor, one of the largest game corridors in the country, and others close to Native American ruins at Hovenweep National Monument in southeastern Utah, despite warnings from the National Parks Service.

“They try to lease as much as they can as fast as they can. Whether the industry is interested is not a determinate factor,” said Bobby McEnaney, senior deputy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The problem is with this approach, you end up hitting pieces of land that are too sensitive to drill.”

In September, the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that administers public lands, offered up to 300,000 acres of oil and gas leases in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains, drawing protest from locals and environmental groups worried the alpine terrain was going to be inundated with trucks and drilling rigs. The auction, however, did not generate a single bid, even at a minimum buy-in of $2 per acre.

America first

That led to accusations that the Department of the Interior is putting land up for auction without studying its holdings to determine whether development represents the best use of a public resource. In a letter to the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., questioned the practice of “offering Nevada’s public lands that have little to no potential for drilling while generating little interest from industry.”

The Bureau of Land Management did not respond to an interview request for this story. But in a press release earlier this month, the bureau described itself as a “key contributor to the Trump Administration's America-First Energy Plan.”

“With a bold, new approach to energy development, and a President who recognizes that conventional wisdom is meant to be challenged, we are starting to see what a great America looks like,” acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, Trump's nominee to lead the agency, said in a statement.

The approach largely has drawn applause from the U.S. oil and gas sector, which had criticized the Obama administration’s approach to leasing on federal lands as overly cautious.

America’s fastest growing oil field, the Permian Basin, is split between private lands in Texas and federal lands in New Mexico. Until recently, oil companies largely avoided the New Mexico side, because of the lengthy waits for federal drilling permits compared with two weeks for a permit from the Texas Railroad Commission, said Christopher Guith, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute.

The average wait times for a permit from the Bureau of Land Management is now four months, down from 10 months at one point during the Obama administration, according to the Western Energy Alliance, a trade group.

“This administration has been committed to really driving down the time frames to get the permits, to make it more predictable, and frankly making more areas available for lease,” Guith said. “When you compare it to where it was with the previous administration, it’s 180 degrees.”

But some worry sped-up timelines are leading to mistakes. In a controversy around Native American ruins in southern Utah last year, a National Parks Service superintendent urged Interior to back off the lease sale because officials had failed to “adequately address several concerns related to resource protection.”

See you in court

“We are concerned about the proliferation of pads and roads associated with potential future exploration and production activities enabled by the proposed lease sale,” wrote Jeannine McElveen, superintendent of Hovenweep and Natural Bridges National Monuments. “ Vibrations from heavy vehicle traffic have been shown to affect historic structures.”

To keep up the record pace of leasing, the Bureau of Land Management has had to contend with a near constant stream of litigation from environmental groups and Native American tribes. Last year, the administration sustained a blow when a federal judge in Idaho blocked the lease sale of millions of acres of land across lands occupied by a shrinking population of sage grouse, after environmental filed suit claiming the Bureau of Land Management had failed to follow federal laws regarding public comment.

But in April, another federal judge in New Mexico tossed a lawsuit from Native American and environmental groups over Chaco Canyon, home to the more than thousand-year old ruins of what was a major center of the Pueblo tribe and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The judge ruled the Bureau of Land Management had taken steps to protect the site from future oil and gas drilling, a decision the plaintiffs appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Salt Lake City.

Federal parks and wilderness are big business in states like Utah and Wyoming, drawing millions of tourists every year. The push to open up drilling in the areas around those parks has turned criticism on Republicans, prompting protest from the likes of Utah Governor Gary Herbert, a Republican who fought to stop drilling around Zion National Park last year.

Last week, the Senate passed a conservation bill protecting more than 2 million acres of lands and rivers across the United States, the largest of its kind in a decade. The legislation was in the works for years, and Trump’s drilling campaign got little attention in the lead-up to the vote.

Public pressure

But Alex Taurel, conservation program director at the League of Conservation Voters, wondered whether Republicans were feeling pressure from constituents to offer a “counterbalance.”

“What Trump is doing is really out of step where the public is,” he said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the bill’s sponsor and chair of the Senate Energy and Natrual Resources Committee, declined to comment.