After national parks hearing, MAGA forces continue public land assault, greens say

As Congress conducted a high-profile hearing in Grand Teton National Park 10 days ago to support parks funding, President Donald Trump’s administration and supporters were busy elsewhere eliminating public land protections across the West.

The Grand Teton hearing conducted by the House Committee on Natural Resources on Sept. 5 heard widespread support for resolving a backlog of maintenance at national parks, along with calls to restore DOGE staffing cuts.

But the committee meeting at the spectacular Jenny Lake Plaza came amidst a flurry of attacks against rules protecting wildlife, its habitat and preservation funds, conservationists said.

Those attacks include Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ move to rescind the Forest Service roadless rule that protects 59 million roadless acres considered vital to wildlife. Also, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order restricting use of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which was created in 1964 to buy and preserve recreation lands.

Meantime, the U.S. House on Sept. 3 put on the chopping block a Bureau of Land Management plan in Montana that restricted coal leasing. If agreed to by the Senate, the bill would open the door to “legal and regulatory chaos” across the West, the Center for Western Priorities warned.

And on Thursday, the BLM opened comment on the plan to roll back its Public Lands Rule that gave conservation an equal footing with industrial uses of property owned by all Americans.

All that happened in 15 days — about one week on either side of the congressional Teton hearing. But while witnesses were supporting parks in the open air of the Teton Mountains, Trump allies were undercutting conservation with less visible methods, one public lands advocate said.

The rule changes, secretarial orders and legislation are complex and sometimes opaque, said Amy Lindholm, an Appalachian Mountain Club director and spokesperson for the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition.

“It’s not easy to understand what’s going on here,” she said, using Burgum’s order curtailing the LWCF as an example. “It flies under the radar [but] could be as serious as selling off pieces of federal public land.”

The MAGA messages

The administration and its supporters characterized the changes as necessary to help reduce the federal deficit, rectify allegedly unlawful policies and increase energy production, among other things.

“I am so baffled and mortified that for four years our government intentionally tried to impose energy poverty on the American people, all to please the vocal but minority climate lobby,” U.S. Rep Harriet Hageman said on the House floor when voting Sept. 3 for Joint House Resolution 104.

That bill states that the BLM’s Montana management plan restricting coal leasing in the Powder River Basin “shall have no force or effect.”

Hageman’s vote was one of three in the 211-208 tally that helped Republicans use the Congressional Review Act to move the bill through the House.

On another front, Agriculture Secretary Rollins’ roadless-rule rollback will allow loggers “to access our abundant timer [sic] resources,” U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis wrote to a constituent on Sept. 2. The roadless rule “has done nothing to advance our national interest or strengthen our communities,” Lummis wrote.

The rollback “will give state and local leaders, not distant federal agencies, the authority to manage forests responsibly, improve forest health, and implement real wildfire prevention strategies,” Lummis’ letter reads. “I will push back on any policies that endangers [sic] Wyoming families, communities or businesses.”  

In ordering revisions to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, Interior Secretary Burgum wrote that changes will ensure funds “are managed efficiently and aligned with the goals of the Trump administration.” The account was used to buy and protect the 640-acre Kelly Parcel in Grand Teton National Park. While touting the revisions, Burgum said the Trump administration has “prioritized access to Federal lands and outdoor recreation.”

At the BLM, meanwhile, conservation should not be on equal footing with mining, drilling and grazing, according to a notice seeking public comment on the expurgation of the Public Lands Rule. Also known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, the measure is “unnecessary and violates existing statutory requirements,” the notice reads.

Conservation doesn’t rise to a “principal or major use” of BLM land, the Western Energy Alliance said in a statement supporting rollback of the Public Lands Rule. Those principal uses are “mineral exploration and production, livestock grazing, rights‐of‐way, fish and wildlife development, recreation, and timber,” the statement said.

Greens see an assault

Conservationists and others are challenging those MAGA positions. Using the Congressional Review Act to undo the BLM’s Montana plan for the Powder River Basin coal — a move Hageman voted for — risks unleashing “legal and regulatory chaos across the West,” the Center for Western Priorities said.

“If courts interpret this action broadly, every management plan written since 1996 could be challenged in court — potentially invalidating oil and gas leases, grazing permits, and threatening public access to trails and campgrounds,” the Center’s Deputy Director Aaron Weiss said in a statement.

Without BLM resource management plans, operations would revert to “outdated frameworks … written before today’s recreation economy took off,” he said. “Outfitters, guides and businesses that depend on reliable access for rafting, off-roading, and other outdoor activities could face years of uncertainty, permit delays, and costly litigation.”

On the roadless front, Lummis’ contention that roads can help prevent wildfires contradicts a 2007 study that found “current road systems increase risk of human-caused fire.” Authored by the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, the 40-page paper found that “[a]reas that are very close to roads have many times more wildfire occurrences than areas distant from roads.”

Roadless areas are critical to outfitter Meredith Taylor, who has worked successfully in them for decades, she told WyoFile. Industrializing them could endanger her family, community and business, she suggested. 

“Unnecessary road development would ruin the value of these public lands for people and wildlife who appreciate them as they are,” Taylor said. The Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation and others urged the public to comment before Sept. 19.

Conservation should be equal

Conservationists also decried the pending revocation of the BLM’s Public Lands Rule/Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. “The administration is saying that public lands should be managed primarily for the good of powerful drilling, mining and development interests,” Alison Flint, senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.

“They’re saying that public lands’ role in providing Americans the freedom to enjoy the outdoors, and conserve beloved places … is a second-class consideration,” Flint said. The rule “has solid grounding in a nearly 50-year-old directive from Congress,” she said.

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Defenders of Wildlife said the existing rule “requires science-based decision-making and consideration of conservation.” The rule is “foolishly being yanked away in service of the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ agenda,” Vera Smith, national forests and public lands director at Defenders, said in a statement.

Addressing changes to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which receives $900 million a year from oil and gas leasing, LWCF Coalition spokesperson Lindholm warned of dangers in Burgum’s order.

“There’s a provision encouraging states to use their state grant dollars [from the federal fund] to buy surplus federal land,” she said. “We don’t want states to use the funds to buy back federal land that’s already been protected, to pay for continued access to places they already have access to,” she said.

Given Burgum’s advocacy for developing federal land for housing, the changes create “a dangerous potential pathway for the selloff of federal lands,” she said.

The agency already has a process for the sale of property that works, Lindholm said. Burgum’s order will reexamine that process “with the intent of increasing the discretion of the secretary.”

Without Burgum’s stated selloff advocacy, “it’s not something we would have necessarily red-flagged,” she said.

Soul of Wyoming

Healthy landscapes and wildlife are the soul of northwestern Wyoming, state Rep. Liz Storer, a Democrat from Jackson, said. Her district covers Grand Teton and parts of Yellowstone national parks, the National Elk Refuge, parts of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and BLM property.

Those lands and the wildlife on them “define who we are,” she said at a Keep Parks Public rally in Jackson on Sept. 4.

Others at the forum chimed in. “These threats to public lands are very much alive,” Lauren Bogard, senior director of advocacy at the Center for Western Priorities, said after outlining DOGE cuts and threats to conservation.EcoTour Adventures founder and wildlife guide Taylor Phillips told the Teton congressional panel that scientists are scared. “In the next five to 10 years, the wildlife as we see it now will not exist unless drastic measures are taken,” Phillips testified of his talks with scientists.