Wyoming v. United States Department of Interior

In 2015, the United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (bureau) (defendant) issued comprehensive regulations that applied to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on federal and Indian lands. Fracking was a process for extracting oil and gas by injecting fracking fluid underground to provide better access to the oil and gas. The bureau asserted its authority to regulate fracking under several federal statutes, including the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (land-management act), the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, and several others. By contrast, the Safe Drinking Water Act (drinking-water act) granted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to regulate underground injections. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had previously found that the EPA had the power to regulate all underground injections, including fracking. However, after the enactment of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (energy-policy act), the EPA no longer had the authority to regulate fracking under the drinking-water act because the United States Congress had explicitly excluded fracking from the definition of underground injections in the energy-policy act. After the bureau published its final rule with regulations governing fracking, the State of Wyoming, several other western states, and several energy-industry associations (plaintiffs) challenged the bureau’s final rule in the district court and filed a motion for a preliminary injunction.