The Trump Administration this week proposed reducing by over 90 percent the bonds oil and gas companies put up to cover cleanup costs when drilling on federal land.  

In 2024, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) raised the minimum bond that companies have to put up for each oil and gas lease on federal land from $10,000 to $150,000. The BLM also proposed lowering the statewide bond, which covers all a company’s wells in a state, from $500,000 to $25,000.

The 2024 rule change followed a 2019 analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that lower bond amounts “have not provided sufficient financial assurance to prevent orphaned oil and gas wells,” meaning wells that have not been sufficiently plugged by their owners, leaving taxpayers on the hook to pay for the wells’ remediation.

The rollback could allow oil and gas companies to pass on as much as $753 billion in plugging costs nationwide onto taxpayers, according to a November 2025 report by Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship. The move “enables industry bad actors to scam American taxpayers out of billions,” the group’s president, David Jenkins, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release.

The BLM is accepting comments on its proposal to lower the bond amounts until Aug. 24.