On Monday, January 20, the presidency of Joe Biden came to an end. During his four years in office, Biden, 82, focused on issues that impact outdoor recreation, such as the preservation of public lands and conservation.
The centerpiece of Biden’s conservation policy was the , a commitment to conserve and restore at least 30 percent of federal public lands and waters in the U.S. by 2030. There are still five years left to go, but during his tenure Biden did protect more lands and waters than any president before him. Biden’s track record on public lands was far from unblemished, though. He also opened public lands for the extraction of natural resources, approved a massive oil extraction project, and oversaw a boom in domestic oil production.
We examined some of Biden’s actions that impacted public lands and the environment to try and determine how he compares to previous presidents. Here’s what we found.
Establishing and Expanding National Monuments and Other Protected Designations
Biden used his power granted by the Antiquities Act to create or expand , which is actually fewer than some of his democratic predecessors. Barack Obama 34 monuments; Bill Clinton did 22. Republican presidents historically have not established as many—Donald Trump and George W. Bush created one and six, respectively. During his first term, Trump became the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to shrink a national monument, drastically reducing the size of Bears Ears. Biden restored the monument to its original size in 2021.
Designating national monuments isn’t the only method for presidents to protect public land. Biden also created six new national wildlife refuges, three national marine sanctuaries, and one national estuarine research reserve. He closed roughly 625 million acres of ocean to offshore drilling off of the Atlantic coast, part of the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast off of California, Washington, and Oregon, parts of Alaska’s Bering Sea, and the Arctic. Biden also prevented roads from being built through the Tongass National Forest, a huge swath of undeveloped land in Alaska.
In total, Biden protected 674 million acres of lands and waters, the most of any president in U.S. history. But the drawing and redrawing of the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument from one presidential administration to the next illustrates the sometimes tenuous nature of land conserved by executive action. Namely, that it is vulnerable to being overturned by subsequent administrations.
Opened Public Land to Drilling and Approving Oil Projects
During his 2020 campaign, Biden swore not to open any new public lands for drilling. And at first, he was true to his word, issuing an executive order that paused all new oil and gas leases. But in 2021, a federal judge struck down his ban on drilling, and public outcry ratcheted up amid rising gas prices. In 2022, Biden on his campaign promise and opened Bureau of Land Management land in Colorado, Nevada, North Dakota, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah to drilling.
Afterward, Biden’s administration approved additional oil and gas permits at a rate comparable to Trump during his first term. Biden also approved the massive, long-disputed Willow Project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which will involve drilling up to 199 new oil and gas wells over 30 years.
Many of the leases approved by Biden were sold by former presidents—ConocoPhillips bought the Willow project lease . Industry experts Biden with investing in alternative energy sources that will lower demand for oil and gas in the long run, and the Inflation Reduction Act raised the cost of drilling on public lands going forward. But there’s no getting around the fact that U.S. domestic crude oil production grew to , ever, during his time in office.
“Every day that you are allowing [the industry] to remain in the room, that you are indulging their fantasies about continued production, that you are allowing them to kind of peddle their false solutions and prolong their existence, you’re shooting yourself in the foot,” Collin Rees, U.S. program manager for Oil Change International, in 2024.
Partnering with Indigenous Communities
Biden made history in 2021, when he appointed Deb Haaland Secretary of the Interior. Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, is the first Indigenous person ever to lead the department that houses the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Biden administration included Indigenous communities in planning and decision making around public lands, reaching 400 co-management and co-stewardship agreements with tribal nations.
Biden broke new ground as a president when he became the first to apologize to Indigenous Americans for the federal Indian Boarding Schools, a program designed to eradicate Indigenous cultures through the forced assimilation of their children. One of the new monuments established by the former president was the Carlisle Indian Boarding school, which commemorates that period of history.
The EXPLORE Act
President Biden signed the EXPLORE Act into law in January 2025, after it passed Congress with bipartisan support. The legislation contains more than a dozen outdoor recreation-related initiatives rolled up into one piece of legislation, including protecting the use of fixed climbing bolts in wilderness areas and streamlining the permitting process for guiding companies working on public land.
The Act doesn’t appropriate new funding, but it does provide directives to the various land management agencies to take on certain projects, like improving campsite infrastructure, building more restrooms on public land, and installing broadband in the national parks. Many of the EXPLORE Act’s provisions focus on increasing access to federal public land, extending an Obama-era initiative offering free national park passes for all fourth graders, making more infrastructure for people with disabilities, and expanding programs to get veterans outside.
Enshrining these priorities into law increases the odds that they’re enacted under following administrations, but agencies like the National Park Service, Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management have struggled for years to meet existing mandates with insufficient budgets. The National Parks Service, for example, in 2023 that they have an estimated $23.3 billion backlog in necessary upkeep of existing infrastructure.
Policies to Fight Climate Change
Biden was lauded by environmental advocates for securing the in climate adaptation and resiliency projects with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021.
He also rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, an international commitment to reduce emissions that Obama signed in 2016 and Trump withdrew from when he took office in 2017. Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement again on January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term.
The Biden administration formed a program called Climate Corps in 2023. The corps was highly publicized by the outgoing administration as rebooting a popular New Deal-era jobs program, the Civilian Conservation Corps. But critics argued that the program was little more than a new label placed on existing federally-supported climate and conservation service jobs. The Climate Corps, which the administration initially said would create 300,000 new jobs, didn’t secure any funding from Congress. When it finally , it amounted to little more than a website listing states’ existing climate and conservation positions that were already paid for through programs like Americorps.
Congressional Republicans vehemently opposed the Corps (Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell “pure socialist wish-fullment” and “make-work programs for young liberal activists.”) With Biden out of office, the “Climate Corps” heading has and the is inactive. But many of the actual jobs that had preexisted the Corps, and were briefly pulled under its umbrella, will remain.
There were some service-oriented jobs programs that created new opportunities for young people to work and gain skills in conservation and environmental stewardship during the Biden administration, mostly operating at the state level. The Maryland Climate Corps, for example, launched in 2023, and a dozen other states established or expanded corps of their own.
What Will Biden’s Public Lands Legacy Be?
The full extent of Biden’s impact on the outdoors may take years to fully understand. Some of his policies are likely to be undone by the Trump administration, which has to shrink national monuments and environmental regulations. His failure to follow through on campaign promises, like the Climate Corps and a ban on new drilling leases, may feel like missed opportunities.
However, the Biden administration did set a new standard for empowering tribal nations to be partners in managing the federal lands that are their ancestral homelands. And the priorities for land management agencies passed in the EXPLORE Act, which address pressing issues for outdoor recreation, are codified into law and more likely to endure from one administration to the next.