On Tuesday, President Obama sent a memo to the Secretaries of Defense, Interior, and Agriculture, and the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that sets a “net benefit goal” for natural resource use.

According to the memo, federal actions, including permitting, must ensure no net loss of land, water, wildlife and other ecological resources.  The President directed the agencies to use landscape, or watershed scale planning in order to fully understand the impacts of federal action.  According to the memo, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will have one year to finalize their mitigation policies, including directing the Fish and Wildlife Service to create additional policy for compensatory mitigation under the Endangered Species Act.  Perhaps most troubling, the President wrote that agencies have the discretion to recognize resources as "of such irreplaceable character that minimization and compensation measures, while potentially practicable, may not be adequate or appropriate…" and "…agencies should design policies to promote avoidance of these resources."  No standards were included in the memo that would dictate how the agencies should utilize this directive.  It is unclear at this time if the resource agencies will need to use the public rulemaking process to adjust current policies on mitigation to fit under this new directive.