what are the threats to public lands?
Slashing funding and staffing at our national parks and public lands
America’s parks are in crisis. The Trump administration, led by Elon Musk’s DOGE and assisted by Congress, has slashed funding for the agencies that manage national parks and public lands. These cuts include mass firings of park rangers, certified wildland firefighters, scientists, and other civil servants who care for our outdoor spaces while living and working in communities across the West.
Faced with massive backlash from members of Congress and the public, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum promised that the most popular national parks won’t see any reductions in staffing or visitor services. While visitors to these parks may not see impacts on the surface this summer, this is because parks have shifted staffing and resources to visitor services to maintain the appearance of full funding and staffing, while behind-the-scenes work to protect the parks and their resources is left undone.
At smaller national park units that had fewer staff to begin with, the absence of rangers and other employees will be more noticeable. On other national public lands, including forests, recreation areas, and national monuments, Americans will lose access to the outdoors as there are no longer enough staff to maintain campgrounds, trails, and other facilities.
An analysis by the National Parks Conservation Association found that since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 24 percent of National Park Service permanent staff have left or been fired. Of 8,000 seasonal positions the administration promised to fill, only 4,500 had been filled as of July 3, well into the summer travel season.
In addition to the impacts on national parks and public lands, these funding cuts and firings impact surrounding communities. National parks, national monuments, and other public lands drive economic spending from visitors and locals alike. In 2023, the most recent data available, visitors to national park sites spent an estimated $26.4 billion in gateway communities, supporting 415,000 jobs.
Maintaining the facade of a good visitor experience at the largest national parks is not enough. The National Park Service and other land management agencies must be fully funded and staffed so that they can fulfill the entirety of their missions, which include stewarding our public lands and natural resources so that they will be intact for future generations.
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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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Thousands of probationary employees fired as Trump administration directs agencies to carry out widespread layoffs
The Trump administration broadened its effort to terminate thousands of probationary workers on Thursday, instructing agencies on a call to move forward with the layoffs.
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STATEMENT: White House proposes disposing of national park sites, national forests, and giving DOGE control over fighting wildfires
The White House released a wish list of sweeping cuts across the federal government in a memo outlining “major discretionary funding changes” in its 2026 budget request to Congress.
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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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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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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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STATEMENT: White House proposal to eviscerate America’s parks and public lands
The Trump administration released new details of its proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget in a late Friday trash dump on the White House website. The new 1,200-page document lays out massive cuts to programs and staffing across America’s public lands and national parks.
Reckless forest management at the riskiest time
As the impacts of climate change intensify, catastrophic wildfires have become a significant and growing threat across the West. “Fire season” used to be a few months out of the year; now, fire season is year-round. Yet President Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have recklessly slashed funding, failed to hire enough firefighters, fired qualified firefighting support staff, and implemented policies that prioritize logging for profit over community protection, forest health, wildlife habitat, and recreation.
As part of a government-wide firing spree led by Elon Musk’s DOGE and assisted by Congress, the Trump administration has fired or offered early resignation to other staff whose primary roles were not as firefighters, but who held “red cards” indicating their qualifications to participate in firefighting if needed. When the Trump administration realized belatedly just how badly it needed these red-carded staff and their institutional knowledge and expertise, it tried to get them to come back for the summer peak fire season, with limited success. Meanwhile, as of July 17, more than 4,500 firefighting were vacant despite promises that they would be filled. The result has been chaos at the worst possible time as major wildfires erupt across the West.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also introduced policies intended to prioritize timber production on national forests and other public lands. In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order demanding increases in both the amount and pace of timber production on national public lands. Congress followed up by including increased timber production requirements in the budget bill passed in July.
Thoughtfully-planned and sustainable timber production has long played a role in many local economies in the West. However, reckless pursuit of arbitrary and unsustainable production targets is short-sighted and will cause lasting harm to communities, wildlife, and our national public lands. Forest management should be based on the latest science on forest health and wildfire, and should balance the many uses our national forests offer today’s communities and future generations.
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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.
Prioritizing destructive development: Oil, gas, and mining on national public lands
America’s parks are in crisis. The Trump administration, led by Elon Musk’s DOGE and assisted by Congress, has slashed funding for the agencies that manage national parks and public lands. These cuts include mass firings of park rangers, certified wildland firefighters, scientists, and other civil servants who care for our outdoor spaces while living and working in communities across the West.
Faced with massive backlash from members of Congress and the public, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum promised that the most popular national parks won’t see any reductions in staffing or visitor services. While visitors to these parks may not see impacts on the surface this summer, this is because parks have shifted staffing and resources to visitor services to maintain the appearance of full funding and staffing, while behind-the-scenes work to protect the parks and their resources is left undone.
At smaller national park units that had fewer staff to begin with, the absence of rangers and other employees will be more noticeable. On other national public lands, including forests, recreation areas, and national monuments, Americans will lose access to the outdoors as there are no longer enough staff to maintain campgrounds, trails, and other facilities.
An analysis by the National Parks Conservation Association found that since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 24 percent of National Park Service permanent staff have left or been fired. Of 8,000 seasonal positions the administration promised to fill, only 4,500 had been filled as of July 3, well into the summer travel season.
In addition to the impacts on national parks and public lands, these funding cuts and firings impact surrounding communities. National parks, national monuments, and other public lands drive economic spending from visitors and locals alike. In 2023, the most recent data available, visitors to national park sites spent an estimated $26.4 billion in gateway communities, supporting 415,000 jobs.
Maintaining the facade of a good visitor experience at the largest national parks is not enough. The National Park Service and other land management agencies must be fully funded and staffed so that they can fulfill the entirety of their missions, which include stewarding our public lands and natural resources so that they will be intact for future generations.
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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.
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. Proposals to remove protections from national monuments across the Western United States to allow drilling, mining, and other development are deeply unpopular. Yet this is exactly what the Trump administration wants to do.
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. But 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 is picking up where it left off in its effort to shrink or eliminate national monuments. In February, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum kicked off another review of national monuments for possible “revision.” A number of national monuments are reportedly being considered as targets for reduction to allow for more energy development or to settle political scores. And in June, lawyers for President Trump's administration released a memo claiming the president has the authority to abolish national monuments, including two in California created by his predecessor at the request of Native American Tribes.
This memo is an attack on the very concept of national monuments and undercuts the very principles of the Antiquities Act. Passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act grants presidents the authority to designate national monuments. Since then, all but three presidents have used this authority to protect important and irreplaceable sites and resources for current and future generations to enjoy and learn from. In several cases, Congress later followed up to designate a national monument as a national park; examples include Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Bryce, and Zion national parks, which all started as national monuments.
Presidential authority to protect national monuments is especially important in the face of persistent congressional gridlock. The Antiquities Act was designed to enable presidents to protect cultural, scientific, and other important sites from harm, rather than leave sites vulnerable to irreparable damage while a bill languishes in Congress.
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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 any way they can. Anti-public lands extremists have been pushing this idea for decades, despite its deep unpopularity with voters.
In the most recent push to sell off national public lands in the West, U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah is trying 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 this year’s budget negotiations across millions of acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land in the Western United States.
Thanks to an onslaught of 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. But Lee has said he isn’t giving up.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has launched its own effort to sell off national public lands. In February, President Donald Trump ordered the development of a plan to create a sovereign wealth fund. The United States famously does not have a budget surplus that could provide the money for such a fund and would have few options other than selling public lands to establish a fund.
The Trump administration also launched a joint initiative between the Interior and the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) departments to identify national public lands that could be sold or transferred for the purpose of housing development. So far, the initiative has not released any progress reports on its efforts, leaving the public in the dark about the departments’ plans.
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and onX recently released a mapping tool showing the Bureau of Land Management lands that could be transferred or sold if land sell-off proponents get their way.
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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.
