Their Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior has exclusive jurisdiction over more than 270 million acres of public land, of which 90 million acres are in Alaska. This is National land that has not been sold; not been withdrawn to form a park, forest, refuge, a reservoir, or defence installation; not been granted to a state, railroad, or other entity; or not been made part of the Indian reservation system. These areas are sometimes known as the leftover lands; officially they are called the National Resource Lands.

Although the bureau was formed in 1946, it did not receive a basic mission statement and policy guidelines until 1976, with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. This act which repealed a hodgepodge of earlier statutes, directed the bureau to follow multiple use, sustained yield goals. The agency was to designate “areas of critical environmental concern” and to study its lands for 15 years to determine which should belong to the National Wilderness Preservation System. By the early 1990s Congress had extended wilderness protection to 470,000 acres of bureau land in 26 areas.

In addition to exercising exclusive jurisdiction over a large portion of federally owned land, the bureau controls the leasing programme and the administration of claims for energy and mineral resources on all federal lands. Under the multiple use principle, the bureau permits much the same mixture of land uses as the Forest service, but it supervises activities on its land even less closely. Except for the agency’s Alaskan holdings, most of its lands are in the arid West and are grazed by livestock.

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