The greatest conservation achievement of the first Trump Administration is in jeopardy of being undermined by the second. Earlier this week the Washington Post reported there’s a plan to divert funds from the Land and Water Conservation Fund and use them to pay for backlogged maintenance on national parks and other federal sites. This would effectively limit the federal government from purchasing more public lands next year.
The Department of the Interior had hinted at this idea in its June budget proposal, which called for around $276 million to be diverted from the LWCF into a new deferred maintenance program. Many public land policy insiders are expecting the DOI to issue an official memo on this soon, and an email sent earlier this week from the White House Office of Management and Budget included similar guidance from the administration.
The email directs the Bureau of Land Management to cut spending associated with land acquisitions, including those funded by the LWCF, according to E&E News. The implication here is that the federal government should not be investing in more public land when there is already so much overdue maintenance on our existing public lands.
However, this is the same administration that enacted sweeping budget cuts and crippling force reductions at federal agencies earlier this year.
Federal lands policy experts say those cuts are likely to add to the maintenance backlogs on our public lands. In other words, the administration hindered America’s public lands system with budget cuts, and is now attempting to justify diverting LWCF funds based on the problems it helped create.
“They want frustration,” says Randy Newberg, a public land advocate with many sources on the Hill. “This is part of a deliberate plan to pry these lands from Americans … and if you get to know some of the people on the inside, they’ll tell you they want to divest. So, they’ll defund. Whatever it takes to bring frustration to the landscape.”
Land Tawney, co-chair of the American Hunters & Anglers Action Network, says the blueprint for these plans was laid out clearly in Project 2025, and that he’s not surprised by the actions he’s seen from the Trump Administration over the last eight months.
“There is this idea of dismantling our public lands, and I think that goes back to all the DOGE cuts, the early retirements, the fork in the road,” Tawney says.
The Great American Outdoors Act…Undone?
When the Great American Outdoors Act was signed into law by President Trump in 2020, it was celebrated by sportsmen and pro-public-land politicians as “the kind of thing that Teddy Roosevelt [would have] put in place.”
The landmark law did two crucial things that hunters, anglers, and other public-land users have long pushed for. It permanently funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund, directing $900 million a year from offshore oil and gas royalties toward federal land acquisitions and conservation easements, as well as public work projects at the state level that improve recreational access to the outdoors. The chunk of LWCF funding that goes to states and local municipalities (for boat ramps, trailheads, and the like) is not under threat, as the administration’s current focus is on limiting federal land acquisitions.
“The idea behind the Land and Water Conservation Fund, when it was created in 1964, was that we’re depleting one asset — offshore oil and gas — and we should use part of that money to improve other tangible assets, like public land access,” says Newberg, who’s been lobbying in Washington D.C. for permanent LWCF funding since 1998. “And there’s hardly an American, of the 340 million of us, who has not benefited in some way, shape, or form from LWCF money.”
Both Newberg and Amy Lindholm, Director of Federal Affairs at the Appalachian Mountain Club and a national coordinator for the LWCF Coalition, refer to the Land and Water Conservation Fund as the single most important source of federal investment for conservation and recreation access.
The other key piece of the GAOA — what Lindholm calls the other side of the same coin — was the establishment of a Legacy Restoration Fund at $1.9 billion annually for five years. This funding source, which expires in September, was meant to address the backlog of deferred maintenance projects at national parks and other public-land sites — an amount that by 2019, had grown to roughly $19 billion across all four federal land management agencies.
“Both of these things are critically important, and you can’t trade off one for the other,” says Lindholm. “This [idea to divert funding] is the exact opposite of what Congress intended [when it passed the GAOA].
“At that signing ceremony,” Lindholm says, “President Trump said, ‘From an environmental standpoint and from just the beauty of our country standpoint, there hasn’t been anything like this since Teddy Roosevelt.’ And honestly, so much important land protection has been empowered by the GAOA over the past five years that his claim does have some credibility. But what’s happening now, between the OMB and the DOI, they are undermining that conservation legacy.”
Lindholm says a bill introduced by Sen. Daines and Sen. King in May, which seeks to reauthorize the LRF, would be the best solution for maintaining the momentum the GAOA started. Newberg says he’d be surprised if that bill makes it out of committee, considering anti-public lands senator Mike Lee chairs that committee. And he doesn’t expect the attacks on our public lands to go away anytime soon.
“Because, one: These lands have a lot of value, and you can pay a lot of political debts with the resources of our public lands. And two: It’s going to be hard work doing all the things related to public-land management, and Congress doesn’t have the stomach for it. They haven’t for 40 years. That’s why we find ourselves in this predicament.”
Adding to the Backlog
Dan Wenk, who retired as superintendent of Yellowstone National Park in 2018 after a 43-year career with the Park Service, knows all about the shortfalls of federal funding. He says the recent cuts to the NPS will undoubtedly add to the maintenance backlog issue over time.
“And, you know, this funding issue. It always translates to people,” Wenk tells Outdoor Life.
This includes the full-time NPS employees who direct and oversee the maintenance work, as well as the seasonal employees and contractors who repair the roads, fix the buildings, and handle the endless upkeep that a park like Yellowstone requires. Wenk, who also served as Associate Director of the NPS, saw the importance of this behind-the-scenes work during his tenure. He also saw that when push came to shove and the agency’s budget needed balancing, this maintenance was consistently put off to cover the necessities of day-to-day operations: things like law enforcement, visitor services, and the constant cleaning of public bathrooms.
Since January, when the cutting and draining began, the NPS has lost approximately 24 percent of its permanent workforce. This staffing cut has been exacerbated by additional cuts to NPS’ budget and a shortfall in seasonal hiring, which has made the agency significantly less capable of catching up on deferred maintenance.
“There’s no question that we are not nearly as well-equipped as we were even a year ago,” Wenk says. “The real problem is that [this backlog] will continue to build. And I worry that it’s the resources of the park that are going to suffer the most.”
Wenk’s concerns are also around the broader, long-term effects, since a large portion of that 24 percent were senior employees with deep wells of knowledge. These are people, he says, who viewed taking care of the parks as their life’s work.
“There’s the old saying about a death by a thousand cuts,” Wenk says. “But I worry about the death of our public lands by 10,000 scratches. This nibbling away at what makes these places so special and so important. It’s something I worry about every day.”
The Problem for Hunters and Anglers
This attempt to divert funds from the LWCF would focus on cutting new federal land acquisitions. The problem here for outdoorsmen is that a lot of these acquisitions help improve and expand the places we hunt and fish. Lindholm says that many of the projects the LWCF has funded, including conservation easements with willing landowners, have helped solve some of the thornier access issues on BLM and National Forest lands.
“All LWCF projects are aimed at increasing that recreational access, and opening up more of our public lands for people to use and enjoy,” Lindholm says. “These are also projects that are not always in public view … So, when the LWCF is doing its job right, you are free to experience these places, oftentimes without even realizing that you owe that experience to LWCF.”
The acquisition process requires the four federal land management agencies to make a list of desired LWCF projects each year. Congress then chooses which ones to fund and divvies up the money. The DOI’s 2024 list included 66 projects chosen by the BLM, NPS, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thirty of those projects were around National Wildlife Refuges and Wildlife Management Areas.
This year, however, the DOI has yet to issue a project list — another clear sign that LWCF funds are at risk of being siphoned off. And if that money is redirected toward deferred maintenance, Lindholm says there are a number of LWCF projects already approved by Congress for fiscal year 2025 that would not be able to move forward. This list includes:
- Cache River Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas – $500,000 (FY 25) + $500,000 (FY 24) : In 2024, USFWS began a phased acquisition of a 760-acre tract adjacent to the Cache River and existing Refuge lands. This tract is near a county road and would provide additional hunting and fishing access to 1,200 acres of existing Refuge lands.
- Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Florida and Georgia – $5,000,000 (FY 25): USFWS will begin a phased acquisition of 6,100 acres adjacent to the Refuge. This would create a buffer around the watershed from potential future development, and it would expand hunting, fishing, and boating access on existing Refuge lands. It would also expand protections for a proposed Traditional Cultural Property by the Muscogee Nation.
- Rocky Mountain Front Conservation Area in Montana – $1,500,000 (FY 25): In 2024, USFWS began acquiring conservation easements on 1,500 acres of native prairie used by grassland birds and waterfowl. This acreage also lies in a big-game migration corridor and provides important winter range for elk, deer, and antelope.
If the administration does indeed divert LWCF funds, the money required for these projects to reach completion would instead be used to pay for a tiny fraction of the maintenance backlog issues weighing down our public lands. Issues that the administration seems to be adding to by the day.
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