President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on Friday, officially rescinding a pair of 1970s-era directives that restricted the use of off-road vehicles on federal lands.
The order eliminates Executive Order 11644, issued by President Richard Nixon in 1972, and Executive Order 11989, issued by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Both historical orders required federal agencies to create strict criteria to minimize the environmental impact, wildlife disruption, and noise conflicts caused by off-road vehicles on public property.
In the text of the new order, Trump stated that his administration has “eliminated a record number of unnecessary regulations to further our Nation’s prosperity and reduce regulatory burdens on industries critical to our national and economic security while keeping sufficient environmental protections in place.”
The administration argued that the 50-year-old rules relied on “vague, subjective criteria” that ultimately created “barriers to energy and timber production and utility maintenance, permit delays, and de facto bans on hiking and other forms of recreation that require accessing remote areas.”
Under the new directive, federal land management will instead rely on a network of existing statutory laws passed by Congress. These include the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Trump determined that these modern statutory frameworks provide enough oversight to manage federal land “without retaining the additional specific designation criteria” of the previous executive orders.
The White House stated that the policy shift is intended to give the public more freedom to use public property, writing that the rollback “would facilitate the replacement of current regulations with a system for off-road vehicle use designation that provides more access, recreational opportunities, and greater multiple use benefits to the public.”
As a direct result of the signing, the heads of several federal departments—including the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, and the Tennessee Valley Authority—have been ordered to immediately begin the formal rulemaking process to rewrite or rescind any current agency regulations that were originally set up to enforce the 1970s restrictions.
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