Five federal departments that pertain to public lands in one way or another gutted their environmental review rules on the same day last July, and the rules shrinking your comment period never went out for public comment themselves.

All six published as interim final rules, effective the day they hit the Federal Register. Energy's carries a section heading reading "Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking Is Not Required." Agriculture's erased every agency-specific environmental regulation across seven sub-agencies, the Forest Service's included, and dropped the requirement to ask the public about an environmental assessment.

What came after runs down a list. Interior went final February 24, throwing out more than 80 percent of its environmental review regulations and moving the rest into a departmental handbook it can rewrite whenever it likes with nobody outside the building consulted. Draft environmental impact statements became optional. BLM's oil and gas leasing rule cuts public participation from 90 days to 10 and eliminates two comment periods outright. Its grazing overhaul across 155 million acres skipped an environmental assessment entirely and narrows who's permitted to object.

The Forest Service rule filed February 6 cuts comment on a project from 30 days to 10 and the objection window from 45 to 10, kills extensions, deletes the provision letting objectors and the agency sit down in a room together, and hands review of your objection to the official who made the decision you're objecting to. It also ends the requirement to run legal notice in the newspaper of record, the back pages where people have always found out somebody wants to log the drainage above the house, and moves it to a federal webpage. A project drawing no comments gets no objection process at all.

Chaco Canyon got seven days, online only, set inside Holy Week, and drew more than 100,000 comments anyway. A second window in July ran fourteen days and drew more than 200,000. The protection being revoked took two and a half years to build, with 150 days of public comment and 24 Tribal Nations invited to consult. An emergency determination now covers 112,646,000 acres of national forest where the objection process doesn't apply to anything, out of 193 million in the whole system.

BLM leasing closes August 24 and Bear Lodge closes August 28, both live on PLAN right now. File them, then send this to somebody who still thinks the public gets a say.