what are the threats to public lands?
Slashing funding and staffing at our national parks and public lands
In the second year of the second Trump administration, America's parks are still in crisis. Since January 2025, the National Park Service has lost nearly 25 percent of its permanent workforce to layoffs, buyouts, and early retirements, and the U.S. Forest Service has lost about 16 percent of its permanent staff, close to 6,000 employees.
The 43-day government shutdown from October to November 2025, the longest in U.S. history, deepened the strain, furloughing thousands of park employees. More than 450 former National Park Service employees, including two former directors, warned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that between the shutdown and staffing cuts, parks were becoming unsafe.
Visitor management decisions, such as canceling the timed-entry reservation systems at Yosemite and Arches for 2026, are harming the visitor experience and creating safety concerns, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.
Congress has pushed back on some of the attempted cuts from the Trump administration. The fiscal year 2026 Interior appropriations bill, signed in January 2026, kept National Park Service operations funding flat, rejecting the administration's proposed 31 percent cut. But the administration's fiscal year 2027 budget proposal seeks to cut nearly 3,000 more National Park Service positions, an 18 percent reduction, along with a 27 percent cut to the Bureau of Land Management.
National parks remain a major economic engine despite the turmoil. Visitors to national park sites spent an estimated $29 billion in nearby communities in 2024, supporting $56.3 billion in total economic activity nationwide.
Voters across the West are concerned about cuts to public lands agencies. In early 2026, 86 percent said funding cuts to public land agencies are a serious problem, according to the Colorado College Conservation in the West Poll.
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Staffing Crisis at National Parks Reaches Breaking Point, New Data Shows 24% Decline in Permanent Workforce
Utilizing internal data from the Department of the Interior workforce database, the National Parks Conservation Association’s (NPCA) new analysis reveals a sharp decline in staffing levels across the National Park System since January 2025.
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Fired US Forest Service and National Park Service workers say cuts will be felt on fire lines
A union official said many employees held dual jobs, including fighting fires.
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Inside the FY26 National Park Service budget
In January, park advocates across the country celebrated the passage of the fiscal year 2026 funding bill that includes the National Park Service budget. But what does this hard-won funding mean for our national parks and the people who care for them?
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We Will Not Just Watch Our Government Get Dismantled
Firings, employee buyout schemes, shutting down an entire agency. The Trump administration is gutting federal funding and attacking the public servants who are critical to making our government function.
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Doug Burgum's FY2027 budget blueprint for public lands is a recipe for disaster
The White House has released its proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget for the Interior department. Predictably, it proposes further shifting the agency’s mission toward “energy dominance” and giving extractive industry free rein over the nation’s public lands. At a time when gas prices are rising, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is intent on picking “winners and losers,” and American consumers are paying the price.
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Federal Workers’ ‘Emotional Roller Coaster’: Fired, Rehired, Fired Again
Former government employees are finding that perhaps the only thing harder than getting laid off from the federal government is staying that way.
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How Congress and Trump are working together to drill, log, and mine virtually all public lands
The big budget bill offers up hundreds of millions of acres of public land for drilling, logging, and mining and strips funding from the National Park Service and BLM
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What to Expect When Visiting Parks in Summer 2026
It’s the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, and one of America’s most beloved institutions — our National Park Service — is at a crossroads: access to parks now and at all costs or enjoyment of them forever based on conservation.
Reckless forest management at the riskiest time
In 2026, Western states are facing an unprecedented fire season. As of July 7, more than 37,500 wildfires had burned nearly 3.4 million acres nationwide, 146 percent of the 10-year average. Three federal firefighters were killed in late June 2026 battling Colorado's Snyder Fire, raising questions about the administration's push to return to a full suppression strategy that commits crews to fights they might otherwise avoid.
At the same time, the Forest Service is short-staffed, having lost close to 6,000 permanent employees, or 16 percent of its workforce, to layoffs, buyouts, and early retirements since January 2025, even as Trump's administration claims seasonal firefighter hiring is ahead of recent years' pace.
The administration has also moved to consolidate the federal government's wildland firefighting workforce. Without congressional approval, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum created the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, folding firefighting personnel from across the Interior department into a single new agency. Former officials say the reshuffling has sown confusion among crews about their chain of command. Separately, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in March 2026 that it would relocate Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of a broader reorganization, which will likely result in many employees choosing to leave their jobs rather than relocate.
This is all taking a toll on federal firefighters, who are reporting low morale and burnout just as the fire season heats up. Meanwhile, the agency's wildfire prevention work dropped 35 percent last year because of staffing cuts. "I'm so frustrated I could cry," one federal firefighter fighting Utah's Cottonwood Fire told the Washington Post, adding that firefighters are "treated like we're dispensable" by the current administration.
The administration has also prioritized logging over other forest management. A March 2025 executive order directed agencies to expand timber production, and a related U.S. Department of Agriculture memo declared an emergency across more than 112 million acres of national forest, fast-tracking timber sales by shortening environmental review.
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'I'm so frustrated I could cry': Federal firefighters describe burnout, staff cuts
A collision of risky conditions have made things harder as summer begins. But before these elements aligned, the pressure on federal capacity had been building for years.
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Falling behind: Forest Service fuel treatment gap puts communities at risk
A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that the U.S. Forest Service treated roughly 35 percent fewer acres for hazardous fuels in 2025 than in 2024, a sharp decline that leaves communities across the West and Southeast more exposed to the risk of catastrophic wildfire. CWP’s analysis covers the full calendar year 2025, updating earlier findings from Grassroots Wildland Firefighters that tracked the decline through September.
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‘Help is not on the way’
As fire season ramps up, thousands of Forest Service firefighting positions are vacant.
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Wildfires and Climate Change
Earth's warming climate is amplifying wildland fire activity, particularly in northern and temperate forests. When fires ignite the landscape, NASA’s satellites and instruments can detect and track them. This information helps communities and land managers around the world prepare for and respond to fires, and also provides a rich data source to help scientists better understand this growing risk.
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The Forest Service Claims It’s Fully Staffed for a Worsening Fire Season. Data Shows Thousands of Unfilled Jobs.
DOGE cuts and voluntary resignations have severely hampered the agency as the nation enters the peak of fire season, with more than 1 million acres burning across 10 Western states.
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NIFC Maps
Wildfire information maps available for public access from the National Interagency Fire Center.
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The Big Beautiful Bill codified a 25% increase in logging on federal lands
The new Big Beautiful Bill is set to increase logging on federal lands by about 25% over the next few years.
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The Forest Service Claims It’s Fully Staffed for a Worsening Fire Season. Data Shows Thousands of Unfilled Jobs.
DOGE cuts and voluntary resignations have severely hampered the agency as the nation enters the peak of fire season, with more than 1 million acres burning across 10 Western states.
Prioritizing destructive development: Oil, gas, and mining on national public lands
The Trump administration is moving aggressively to open public lands to oil, gas, coal, and mineral development. On his first day in office, President Trump declared a national energy emergency, directing agencies to use emergency powers to fast-track permitting. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed with orders cutting standard environmental review timelines to as little as 28 days for a full environmental impact statement and 14 days for a lighter-weight review.
The Bureau of Land Management approved more than 6,100 drilling permits in fiscal year 2025, the most in 15 years, and reopened about 82 percent of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to leasing. A June 2026 lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drew bids on only five of 58 available tracts, raising just $3.7 million and underscoring the lack of industry interest even as the administration pushes to open the refuge to drilling.
The administration is also prioritizing coal, cutting the federal coal royalty rate from 12.5 percent to seven percent and opening more than 13 million acres to coal leasing, though a Montana coal sale in late 2025 drew a single bid of under a penny per ton.
Trump and Burgum have also proposed removing a 10-mile drilling buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, despite 71 percent of New Mexicans opposing the move, and reopened Nevada's Ruby Mountains to oil, gas, and geothermal leasing after canceling a Biden-era mineral withdrawal.
In May 2026, the BLM finalized the repeal of the Public Lands Rule, a Biden-era regulation that put conservation on equal footing with drilling, grazing, and other uses, despite 98 percent of public comments opposing the repeal.
The public is widely opposed to this prioritization of oil and gas over conservation. In the 2026 Conservation in the West Poll, 74 percent of voters said they oppose selling public lands for oil, gas, and mining development, and 73 percent said they would rather see more renewable energy development than more drilling, mining, and coal production.
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How Congress and Trump are working together to drill, log, and mine virtually all public lands
The big budget bill offers up hundreds of millions of acres of public land for drilling, logging, and mining and strips funding from the National Park Service and BLM
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Trump Drilling Dashboard
This dashboard provides an at-a-glance look at federal onshore oil and gas activity in 2025, demonstrating the stark difference in stewardship of our national public lands resulting from the irresponsible leasing policies now in place, compared to the responsible policies that previously governed the onshore program thanks to the Biden-era reforms.
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Don’t Drill Here
How bipartisan pushback has helped prevent oil and gas leasing on some of the West’s most prized public lands
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Western Oil and Gas Spills Report 2024
Each year, the Center for Western Priorities analyzes data collected by Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming for wells on private, federal, and state land. All three states require oil and gas companies, or well operators, to file a report each time oil or drilling materials are spilled.
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Backyard Problems
Extractive industries keep leaving toxic messes across the West. Will history continue to repeat itself?
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Doug Burgum says public lands are America’s “balance sheet” — he’s right, but for the wrong reasons
Trump’s Interior secretary ignores the real value of American lands
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Party Like It’s 1899
100 days in, the Trump administration is trying to take us 100 years back.
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Trump admin jettisons public lands rule, eases grazing regulations
The Interior Department killed a signature policy initiative of the Biden administration, while advancing a new plan for grazing policies.
Rolling back protections for national monuments
National monument designations protect some of the West's most unique and valuable cultural and scientific sites from drilling, mining, and logging. Polling consistently shows that Westerners support these protections and want to see more national monuments designated to protect unique and at-risk public lands. Removing those protections in favor of drilling, mining, and development remains deeply unpopular.
During the first Trump administration, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke ordered a review of all national monuments in an effort to lay the groundwork to shrink or eliminate them. Legal experts agree that while presidents have the authority to create national monuments, they do not have the authority to undo them. President Donald Trump still attempted to shrink Bears Ears National Monument so that private mining companies could stake claims within its boundaries. President Joe Biden later restored the original monument boundaries.
The second Trump administration moved quickly to revive that effort. On his first day as interior secretary, Doug Burgum signed an order in February 2025 directing agencies to review national monuments for possible "revision," and in May 2025 the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel released a memo claiming the president can abolish national monuments outright, a position that breaks with decades of legal precedent.
In July 2026, Trump cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by roughly 90 percent each, stripping protection from nearly 3 million acres in what conservation groups called the largest rollback of national monument protections in the nation's history.
The reductions are expected to draw immediate legal challenges from tribes and conservation groups, who argue the president has no authority to dismantle monuments that Congress and prior presidents established. As in the first Trump administration, the fate of these protections will likely be decided in court.
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How President Trump and Utah leaders lied and misled on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase
Lies about the correct size of a monument, the history of the Antiquities Act, and hunting and fishing access were all used to justify the downsizing
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America to Trump: Hands off our national monuments
Voters want national monuments protected in perpetuity, as promised
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The Antiquities Act and America’s national monuments: Frequently Asked Questions
The Center for Western Priorities, which tracks Antiquities Act developments as part of its work advocating for America’s public lands, has answers to the most frequently asked questions about the Act and America’s national monuments.
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Languishing Lands
How executive action can rescue popular conservation proposals that are stalled in Congress
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Trump officials consider shrinking 6 national monuments in the West
Interior Department officials are considering scaling back the boundaries of national monuments in the West to encourage energy development on public lands.
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The Trump Administration is Targeting National Monuments
When the first Trump administration tried to revoke national monument protections, Earthjustice stepped in alongside Tribes and other conservation groups with a vigorous defense. We’re ready to challenge the second Trump administration and defend our public lands again.
Selling off our national public lands
The Trump administration and its allies in Congress have made it clear that they want to sell off our national public lands to private industry and developers. Anti-public lands extremists have been pushing this idea for decades, despite its deep unpopularity with voters.
In 2025, U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah tried to blame national public lands for the housing affordability crisis in the West. Lee's proposed HOUSES Act would facilitate the sale of national public lands while doing nothing to actually address housing affordability. Lee also pushed to have land sell-off included during that year's budget negotiations across millions of acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land in the Western United States. Thanks to widespread bipartisan opposition from members of Congress and voters across the West, Lee eventually dropped this effort, and public land sell-off was not included in the reconciliation bill that passed in July 2025. Emails later obtained by the Wilderness Society showed Interior department staff had helped draft talking points supporting Lee's sell-off push, even as Secretary Burgum publicly claimed it was not part of the administration's agenda.
But the attempts to sell off public lands did not end there. In December 2025, Lee introduced an amendment to a Senate appropriations bill that would have removed language protecting current National Park Service boundaries, opening the door to selling off park land. After widespread public backlash, Lee withdrew the amendment, saying he "categorically" opposes selling national parks. Then, Lee's stated concern for housing affordability rang hollow in June 2026, when he was one of just five senators to vote against the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a sweeping housing package that did not include any public land sell-off provisions.
The Trump administration has also launched its own effort to sell off national public lands. Interior and the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a joint initiative in 2025 to identify national public lands that could be sold or transferred for housing development. Over a year later, the agencies still have not released a public list of parcels or a progress report on the initiative's plans.
Trump's BLM is now overseen by former congressman and land sell-off proponent Stevan Pearce. As a New Mexico congressman, Pearce co-sponsored the 2016 HEARD Act, which would have allowed the sale of hundreds of thousands of acres of BLM land, and in 2012 he proposed liquidating public lands to pay down the federal deficit. He has also urged local governments to seize control of federal land and vowed to reverse the trend of public land ownership.
Opposition to these sell-off attempts has crossed party lines. Seventy-six percent of Western voters oppose selling public lands for housing, and 74 percent oppose selling them for oil, gas, and mining development, according to the 2026 Conservation in the West Poll. Wyoming's legislature passed a resolution in March 2026 opposing large-scale public land sales, and Idaho and Colorado lawmakers have advanced similar measures. In Congress, senators including Michael Bennet, Jeff Merkley, Ron Wyden, and Martin Heinrich introduced legislation in April 2026 that would make it harder to include public land sales in future budget reconciliation bills.
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Following backlash, Mike Lee backtracks on national parks proposal
If passed, the Utah Republicans’ proposal would have rescinded legislation that protects and maintains the boundaries of national parks as federal lands. Yet Senator Mike Lee told Outside, “selling national parks was never on the table.”
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Trump’s Interior Dept. Crafted Talking Points For Mike Lee’s Public Land Sell-Off Scheme
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said a federal land sell-off “wasn’t part of the president’s agenda" even though his staff shared research with the Utah senator.
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The devil is in the details when it comes to building affordable housing on public lands
Without proper guardrails to ensure affordability and contain sprawl, turning public land over to developers will do nothing to bring down housing costs
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Extremism on Public Lands
Our public lands belong to all Americans, but access to these lands is under attack
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Selling public land won’t solve the housing crisis. Here’s what would.
A proposal to liquidate millions of acres of public land was struck out of Congress’s massive tax and immigration bill after unifying the left and right against it. Even Republicans admitted the provision wouldn’t deliver on the promise of more affordable housing.
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Will the U.S. Housing Crisis Be Exploited for a Massive Public Lands Sell-Off?
Some politicians are using the nation’s housing affordability problems as a pretense to sell off public lands—an extreme agenda that puts America’s treasured lands and waters at risk without substantively addressing housing needs.
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Utah Senator Mike Lee Says Selling Off Public Lands Will Solve the West’s Housing Crisis. Past Sales Show Otherwise.
A measure to sell public land to build affordable housing was cut from Trump’s policy megabill, but key officials and interests say they’ll continue pursuing the idea.
Corruption and misuse of public lands funding
Instead of investing in national parks, the Trump administration has redirected park fees toward pet projects in Washington, D.C. In 2026, at least $90 million in entrance and recreation fees collected at parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite was diverted to fund parts of the America 250 celebration and repairs to National Mall landmarks, including the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, even as parks face a $24 billion deferred maintenance backlog.
This misuse of national park fees is tied to Freedom 250, the White House's effort to celebrate the country's 250th anniversary. A House Natural Resources Committee report accused the effort of pay-to-play fundraising and steering contracts to political allies, charging that the White House had cheated the American people out of their 250th birthday.
Conflicts of interest have also plagued the Interior department. Karen Budd-Falen, the agency's third-highest-ranking official, is a longtime ranching attorney who signed ethics documents in 2018 barring her from working on grazing matters, citing her family's own ranching operations. Despite that recusal, government records show Budd-Falen has been involved in grazing policy since returning to Interior, and a conflict-of-interest waiver for her later surfaced without explanation.
Budd-Falen has also faced scrutiny over a $3.5 million contract her husband signed with the developer of the Thacker Pass lithium mine while she held a top Interior post during the first Trump administration, and over her role in delaying the release of an endangered Mexican gray wolf pack onto a ranch owned by former legal clients. Budd-Falen is now shaping a rewrite of BLM's grazing regulations that would loosen rangeland health standards and sharply limit public input.
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Trump officials divert National Park Service fees to fund July 4 celebration
Entry fees are going toward a $1.6 million fireworks display and D.C. beautification, while donations will fund a $5 million helipad at the White House.
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STATEMENT: Interior department becomes conduit for influence peddling and history erasure
The Trump administration has hijacked the official, bipartisan organization set up to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary and created a financial black box that has received at least $10 million in taxpayer funds while also soliciting millions more from donors whose identities may never be released.
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Statement on Karen Budd-Falen’s potential ethical conflicts at the Interior department
Congressional letter raises major questions about corruption and lack of ethics oversight
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The First Major Overhaul of Public Lands Grazing Regulations in a Generation Looks to Cut Out Public Involvement
For the first time since 1995, the Bureau of Land Management is rewriting its grazing regulations. The new rule, which governs ranching across 155 million acres of public lands in the West, would heavily favor the livestock industry.
