Our federal government has historically allowed oil and gas companies to lease America’s public lands across the West for exploration and drilling. One reason for doing this has been to spur economic activity; the other is to generate revenue to the U.S. Treasury on behalf of the landowners…you, me, and the rest of the taxpaying public. In recent years this oil and gas leasing program, which is run by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has fallen short on both counts. The process is supposed to work like this: Leases are offered at auction for lands that have been nominated by interested parties. The idea being that these interested parties, ostensibly oil and gas companies, will bid against each other for these leases and drive up the price. That only works if the parcels being offered up for lease have a strong potential to produce lots of oil. However, too often that is not the case. One problem is that BLM allows our public lands to be nominated for leasing anonymously, and pretty much accepts any nomination without scrutiny. This has allowed oil companies and other speculators to nominate huge swaths of land for leasing, often in an attempt to hide which parcels they are actually interested in from potential competition. That brings us to another big problem, price. When the competitive bidding process is thwarted, BLM offers leases on the nominated land for a paltry minimum bid of $2 per acre—which is essentially a big government handout. In addition to shortchanging the American taxpayer to the tune of $12.4 billion between 2012, these practices are also shortchanging the...
