The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management will publish in the Federal Register a final rule eliminating part of existing regulations that allow two congressional committees to direct the Interior secretary to make an emergency withdrawal of lands from mining and mineral leasing activity. The change eliminates the redundancy in existing regulations and removes constitutional issues raised by the committee-directed withdrawal provision. The final rule, however, will retain a procedure whereby the secretary alone can initiate an emergency withdrawal immediately upon determining that an emergency exists and that extraordinary measures need to be taken to protect natural resources or resource values that otherwise would be lost. The rule does not affect the conventional process for segregating and protecting public lands, the BLM said.

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