10/30/2026
MWF has long championed responsible oil and gas activity in Montana. We ask policymakers to compare an eye-popping $56 billion quarter for the five biggest oil majors against the fact that Montana still has orphaned wells — leaking methane and fouling wildlife habitat — which taxpayers, not operators, are paying to plug. MWF has insisted for 25 years that bonds, paid for by oil and gas companies, should cover every well and every facility, from start to finish. If the industry can afford $20 billion in stock buybacks, it can afford to clean up after itself.
We are proud of our work with partners to defend the bipartisan sage grouse and elk winter range policies that protect Montana’s habitat and wildlife. Those protections worked in part through leasing preference screening, which steered lease sales toward high-potential ground near existing infrastructure and away from migration corridors and crucial habitat. Last year, Congress gutted that screening. And it’s worth noting that this quarter’s windfall profits came largely from refining gains, not from new domestic drilling — the claim that mandatory lease sales keep prices down doesn’t survive this earnings call.
Congress changed the rules that let ranchers, hunters, county commissioners, and even Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks weigh in before public land goes under the gavel. Congress now requires four lease sales a year in Montana, requires the U.S. Bureau of Land Management - Montana/Dakotas to offer at least half of whatever industry nominates and eliminates the modest fee companies once paid to nominate a parcel at all.
That’s why MWF endorses the Local Input Act (H.R. 9924). This Congress took away the agency’s ability to act on what it hears from all of us. The bill restores it: disclose the parcel and its conflicts, take comment, and let the Secretary say no. Our endorsement sits alongside Taxpayers for Common Sense, Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship and Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, which is not a coalition built on opposing energy development. It’s built on the idea that the people who live on, work on, and hunt these landscapes deserve a say before the gavel falls. The Copper Kings taught Montana what happens when our resources are plundered without community input. We’d be wise not to let that happen again.
Multibillion dollar oil earnings reports land at an awkward time for GOP.
