Click the link to read the article on the Rolling Stone website (Thor Benson). Here’s an excerpt:

May 24, 2025

When President Donald Trump took office earlier this year, climate advocates were confident that while the federal government would certainly no longer be tackling the issue of climate change, states wouldhelp pick up some of the slack. There was a sense of hope in that — at least some of this vital work would continue. This prospect has recently been put into question, because the Trump administration is now trying to prevent states from doing much of anything to limit the impacts of climate change. 

The Department of Justice is currently suing the states of New York and Vermont to stop them from enforcing laws passed last year that would make fossil fuel companies liable for some of the costs of dealing with climate change. It is also suing Hawaii and Michigan over their climate-related lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. Finally, the Trump administration is working to end California’s stringent motor vehicle emissions standards and its cap-and-trade program. (Republicans in the Senate recently moved to end Califonria’s vehicle emission standards.)…The first set of lawsuits pertain to climate “superfund” laws. These are laws based on legislation passed in the 1980s that forced chemical and petroleum companies to pay for the cleanup of hazardous waste. In this scenario, the idea is to force fossil fuel companies to pay for the costs of the damaging effects of climate change. New York and Vermont passed climate superfund laws last year. Numerous states — from Maine to Tennessee — have expressed interest in passing laws like these in recent years…

“They’re going to try to impose some liability — some fees — on these companies as a way of forcing them to internalize the cost of past activities,” Rachel Rothschild, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan and an expert on superfunds, tells Rolling Stone. “The companies that would be deemed responsible parties under the bills are those companies that have produced, extracted or sold fossil fuel products above a certain threshold during the time period that the bills are going to impose this retroactive liability.”

[…]

Rothschild says it’s “pretty unprecedented” for the federal government to file lawsuits to block this kind of environmental legislation and that states have historically had the authority to address environmental issues that affect public health. These laws are only just starting to be implemented, so it’s also quite early to be filing lawsuits against them.

“This seems to be part of a larger effort to not only do nothing when it comes to climate change but to actively dismantle the climate science and climate accountability enterprise that is being built in response to the costs of climate change that are manifesting in everyone’s daily lives,” says Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth College. “These costs from climate change — we are just beginning to confront them, and they are astounding.”

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Times Recorder website (Michael Chameides):

May 23, 2025

Right now, Congress is working on a giant, fast-track bill that would make historic cuts to basic needs programs to finance another round of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations.

As the Communications and Policy Director for the Rural Democracy Initiative, I’ve been hearing from rural leaders across the country about the devastating impacts this bill would have.

The good news is it’s not too late. But there’s little time to spare.

This dangerous, unpopular bill would increase costs for rural working families by thousands of dollars per year, leaving millions hungry and without health care — all to provide tax breaks and handouts to the wealthy and special interests.

Here are just six of the worst provisions.

1. It guts rural healthcare.

The bill would drastically cut Medicaid and impose new barriers to care. It would take healthcare away from 13.8 million Americans and increase the cost for millions more. In some states, 50 percent of rural children get healthcare from Medicaid. Millions more rely on access to clinics and hospitals that would likely close because of these cuts.

2. It takes food off the tables of rural people.

The plan includes approximately $290-$319 billion in cuts to SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps) even as the cost of groceries continues to escalate. More than 15 percent of families in small towns and rural areas rely on this support to feed their families.

3. It shifts costs to states and local governments.

State and local governments in rural areas depend more on federal funding from programs like SNAP and Medicaid than other states. Slashing federal funding to states would create new burdens for rural states that are already struggling to provide critical public services like health care, transportation, and emergency response services to local communities.

4. It takes away local control.

Landowners have fought to stop the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines by passing bans and moratoria, as well as enacting county setbacks and safety requirements to protect their communities.

But this bill would overrule state and local laws and ordinances, override local voices, and deprive residents of a fair opportunity to evaluate the adverse impacts of pipelines. It also sets up a “pay to play” system under which companies can simply pay for pipeline, mining, and drilling permits — and avoid public comment and legal challenges.

5. It ends clean energy and infrastructure funding.

The bill would phase out existing tax credits for wind, solar, batteries, geothermal, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. It would also take away $262 million in funding for energy efficiency and conservation grants as well as transportation infrastructure.

Ending these tax credits will increase household energy costs, which are already higher in many rural communities. These changes would also reduce new clean energy projects — and jeopardize billions in rural investments in clean energy manufacturing.

6. It gives handouts to agribusiness and mega farms.

Leaders in Congress are using the budget reconciliation process to give big farms a $50 billion windfall. Add the heightened pressures and instability caused by the Trump administration’s erratic trade policy and more family farmers would lose their farms — while Big Ag consolidates more of the market.

In short, this bill would make it harder for rural people to meet their basic needs — all so the wealthy and corporations can avoid paying their fair share of taxes like the rest of us do.

Lawmakers have already heard from the giant corporations who helped write the bill. Now, they need to hear from the rest of us. It’s up to us to alert our communities and tell our lawmakers: Don’t sell rural America out to big corporations and the wealthy.

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Christine Peterson):

May 12, 2025

The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Nevada harbors four endangered species, including the Amargosa pupfish, a tough little fish that has been around since the Pleistocene. The Wyoming toad, which makes its home in southeast Wyoming’s Mortenson Lake National Wildlife Refuge, is one of North America’s most endangered amphibians. And the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge protects one of the world’s largest onshore denning sites for polar bears.

All these bumpy, feathery, furry and increasingly rare species are part of the astonishing biodiversity in the United States that helps keep our planet alive and healthy. Now, every bit of that biodiversity — the fish and wildlife and the land and water that they all need to survive — face what conservation advocates call an existential crisis owing to draconian budget cuts proposed in the name of improving government efficiency. 

President Donald Trump’s recently released federal budget asks Congress to slash more than $900 million from the National Park System, $564 million from the U.S. Geological Survey’s science and research programs and almost $200 million from the Bureau of Land Management, along with $170 million in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conservation grants. And while the president’s budget is far from final — Congress ultimately controls the power of the purse — advocates say the past 100 days of Trump’s presidency have shown that the current Republican-led Congress is either unable or unwilling to stand up for public lands and wildlife protections. In fact, a House committee voted shortly before midnight Tuesday to begin selling off hundreds of thousands of acres of public land in Utah and Nevada. 

If Trump’s current proposals become reality, advocates warn that the West as we know it will be permanently changed, home to neglected and shrinking public land with fewer national parks, diminished fish and wildlife, and increasingly out-of-control wildfires.

“This is short-term thinking at its absolute worst,” said Walt Gasson, a fourth-generation Wyoming hunter and outdoorsman. “We are standing by letting people make decisions for us that don’t reflect our own legacy, what we want to leave for our grandkids.”

“No more hiking, no more biking, no more grazing”

The proposed cuts to the National Park Service are some of the most alarming so far, and a shocking omen for anyone that goes outdoors.

Slashing $900 million from the agency budget is the equivalent of closing 350 national park sites, said Kristen Brengel, with the National Parks Conservation Association. And, in fact, Trump’s budget calls for “transferring smaller, lesser visited parks to state and tribal governments.”

The White House cannot unilaterally sell off parks, but it can cut staffing, and that is something that has Brengel seriously worried. This year alone, the Park Service has already lost at least 2,700 employees through buyouts and deferred resignations, and she expects more layoffs soon. 

“They will make it impossible to open the parks to the public,” she said. 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed an executive order in early April saying that parks and historic sites would remain fully open, but Brengel noted that this contradicts the White House’s priorities, which include shuttering those sites and transferring control of them to the states. And while Burgum promised to fully staff parks for the coming summer, many remain critically short, some still lacking superintendents and maintenance chiefs.

The White House’s proposed cuts will hit more than the parks, though: They will impact all federally owned public lands, including wildlife refuges, said Christian Hunt of Defenders of Wildlife. A leaked Department of Interior strategic plan called for national monuments to be “correctly sized” and “heritage lands and sites returned to states.”

Meanwhile, the House Natural Resources Committee voted late Tuesday night to sell public land in Nevada and Utah, at the same time requiring massive increases in timber production and coal, oil and gas extraction while deeply cutting the royalty rates companies pay to lease public lands. Estimates vary but the total acreage includes several hundred thousand acres across the two states.

“In the dead of night, 26 members of Congress, with no debate or explanation, voted to sell off public land that belongs to all Americans,” wrote Aaron Weiss with the Center for Western Priorities. “Once these lands are gone, they’re gone forever — that means no more hiking, no more biking, no more grazing, no more habitat for wildlife.”

All the changes to public lands and public-land agencies come on top of deep cuts to scientific research. The president’s proposed budget would also likely cancel out all cooperative fish and wildlife units and focus instead on “achieving dominance” in energy and critical minerals. And some worry those cuts will come even before Congress considers the president’s recommendations; sources tell High Country News that 1,000 employees in the USGS Ecosystem Services will be laid off soon.

The scientists whose jobs are on the chopping block identify and map big game migrations and figure out the best locations for constructing the wildlife over- and underpasses that save countless human and animal lives. They monitor grizzly bear numbers and perform annual migratory bird counts to set hunting limits, said Ed Arnett, CEO of The Wildlife Society. They are critical to maintaining healthy fish and wildlife populations.

Part of a plan

To Land Tawney, all this is part of a plan to “dismantle, defund and divest” federal public lands. It’s why the president’s budget calls for consolidating all wildland firefighting operations under the Interior Department, he said, which is currently being managed by DOGE operative Tyler Hassen. 

“Chaotic is one word for this,” said Tawney, co-founder of American Hunters and Anglers, “but crisis is another.”

Regardless of political party, the general public does not, as a rule, support transferring national parks, historic sites or wildlife refuges to states or reducing permit oversight on oil, gas and mining development. But if public lands are mismanaged badly enough for long enough, Tawney said, selling them off may become inevitable.  And selling places like national wildlife refuges will mean no more homes for fragile — and not so fragile — fish and wildlife populations, including the Wyoming toad and Nevada pupfish.

While Tawney said this is one of the darker periods in U.S. history, he hopes that all the federal staff firings, cuts to scientific research and other efforts to devalue and sell public lands will finally galvanize anyone who cares about the outdoors and conservation. 

“I think we’re starting to coalesce around pushing back on these ill-fated ideas,” he said. “And collectively, not just the hunting and fishing community, but the entire outdoors community.”

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Elizabeth Stewart-Severy):

May 1, 2025

Months after the U.S. Forest Service cut thousands of positions nationwide, including 16 workers on the White River National Forest, Colorado’s congressional delegation is concerned that many of those lost played a critical role in preventing and fighting wildfires. 

Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction representing Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, joined all of Colorado’s Democratic representatives in Congress in sending a letter dated April 29 to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asking her to reinstate Forest Service workers who are qualified to respond to wildfires. The three other Republicans representing Colorado congressional districts did not sign the letter.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says wildland firefighting positions were exempt from hiring freezes and layoffs. Nonetheless, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, R-Colo., and the other signatories estimate that since January, the Forest Service has lost 3,000 staffers who hold the agency’s Incident Qualification Card, commonly called a red card.

“The layoff of red-card holding Forest Service employees has substantially weakened our nation’s firefighting workforce,” the letter reads. “Red-card-carrying Forest Service staff have the skills, training and qualifications to support wildfire response (and, indeed, fight wildfires), but hold other full-time jobs at the agency. Red-card holders are the backbone of federal firefighting efforts, proving critical support and added capacity when a wildfire breaks out.”

In addition to the layoffs that the Trump administration announced Feb. 14, there have been two opportunities for Forest Service employees to voluntarily leave the agency through the Deferred Resignation Program, in which participants resign and retain pay and benefits through Sept. 30. It’s not clear how many employees the White River National Forest has lost through this program, through other voluntary separation and through layoffs. Forest Service officials did not respond to a request for comment about this week’s letter or how many red-card carrying staff have been lost, and Aspen Journalism is awaiting reply on an inquiry through the Freedom of Information Act that was sent in early April concerning recent staffing, budgetary and communications changes.  

Local nonprofits, retired Forest Service employees — including former White River National Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams — and the general public have expressed a growing concern about how a deeply reduced workforce will be able to manage the busy summer season on the White River National Forest, which was already facing deep budget cuts.

Hurd has been meeting with county commissioners across his sprawling congressional district — which includes much of the Western Slope, as well as Pueblo and the San Luis Valley — and said he has heard concerns about public lands management. 

“We need more boots on the ground,” Hurd said in a phone interview Wednesday. “We need more individuals that are managing our forests, managing our public lands, reducing the fire load in our national forests, protecting watershed health, because, remember, forest health also means watershed health.” 

Hurd said he has spoken with those in leadership roles at the White River National Forest and understands that recent cuts were to those working in the field. 

“That’s something that we need to make sure we address as quickly as possible, particularly given the potential fire risk that we may have coming this summer,” he said.

The letter that Hurd signed is direct in its plea to Rollins and the USDA.

“The Forest Service is now entering peak fire season in a compromised position, placing an even greater fire danger on communities across Colorado,” it reads. “The loss of red-card holders threatens public safety, undercuts local economies and undermines years of local wildfire prevention efforts. We urge you to restore the Forest Service red-card holders without delay.”

Local organizations faced with picking up the slack, cleaning toilets

Amid the Trump administration’s layoffs, push to encourage resignations and talk of large-scale reorganization of the Forest Service, local organizations are deeply concerned about protecting the national forest and are working to avoid damage to the landscape. 

“We know for a fact that there will be highly reduced Forest Service staff on [Independence Pass],” said Karin Teague, executive director for the Independence Pass Foundation. 

Teague said the presence of Forest Service staffers in the field is critical — well before a wildfire incident occurs. 

“If this summer we end up having drought conditions and wildfire restrictions are put in place, it’s critical to have boots on the ground, making sure that people are obeying fire restrictions, that they’re putting out campfires completely,” Teague said. 

Teague and her summer field-ecology intern will increase their presence on the landscape this summer, she said, checking on campfires, educating the public and picking up garbage. 

“We’re determined to make sure the landscape and the health of every living thing up there doesn’t suffer as a result of these cuts to budget and staff,” Teague said. “It’s a big hole to fill, and it’s not something we can do endlessly.” 

Given the White River’s bare-bones budget, the Independence Pass Foundation will now foot a $18,000 to 20,000 bill for a contract to clean and stock toilets at the summit of Independence Pass, the Grottos day-use area and the Upper Lost Man trailhead. Such maintenance previously was overseen and funded by the Forest Service. Teague added that she is working with Aspen Chamber Resort Association and Pitkin County to help fund and support the contract.

“At the summit, you do not want to have restrooms closed,” Teague said. “Human waste and toilet paper on the tundra takes years to degrade, and there’s a reason restrooms were installed up there a couple decades ago. They’re a critical necessity.”

But the public will see a reduction in service; those toilets have been cleaned and stocked every day of the busy summer season. This year, the Independence Pass Foundation has stepped up to secure a contract with American Land and Leisure to clean and stock the bathrooms three days a week. Teague said volunteers will work to fill in the remaining four days a week. 

Hurd said he is in favor of working to identify areas across the government, including the federal land management agencies, that can work more efficiently. But he emphasized that those cuts should not affect people working on the ground to protect resources. 

“We’re doing everything we can to make sure that our public-lands agencies have the resources they need in the places that they need them and that when we’re making cuts, we’re making them in places that aren’t going to result in harm to our public forest, to our national forest and our public lands,” Hurd said. 

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Chris D’Angelo):

April 29, 2025

This story is part of a Grist package examining how President Trump’s first 100 days in office have reshaped climate and environmental policy in the U.S.

America’s federal public lands are truly unique, part of our birthright as citizens. No other country in the world has such a system. 

More than 640 million acres, including national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges, as well as lands open to drilling, mining, logging, and a variety of other uses, are managed by the federal government — but owned collectively by all American citizens. Together, these parcels make up more than a quarter of all land in the nation. 

Congressman John Garamendi, a Democrat representing California, has called them “one of the greatest benefits of being an American.” 

“Even if you don’t own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures,” he wrote in 2011.

Despite broad, bipartisan public support for protecting public lands, these shared landscapes have come under relentless attack during the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term. The administration and its allies in Congress are working feverishly to tilt the scale away from natural resource protection and toward extraction, threatening a pillar of the nation’s identity and tradition of democratic governance. 

“There’s no larger concentration of unappropriated wealth on this globe than exists in this country on our public lands,” said Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, a conservation nonprofit. “The fact that there are interests that would like to monetize that, they’d like to liquidate it and turn it into cash money, is no surprise.”

Landscape protections and bedrock conservation laws are on the chopping block, as Trump and his team look to boost and fast-track drilling, mining, and logging across the federal estate. The administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are eyeing selling off federal lands, both for housing development and to help offset Trump’s tax and spending cuts. And the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, is wreaking havoc within federal land management agencies, pushing out thousands of civil servants. That purge will leave America’s natural heritage more vulnerable to the myriad threats these lands already face, including growing visitor numbers, climate change, wildfires, and invasive species.

The Republican campaign to undermine land management agencies and wrest control of public lands from the federal government is nothing new, dating back to the Sagebrush Rebellion movement of the 1970s and ’80s, when support for privatizing or transferring federal lands to state control exploded across the West. But the speed and scope of the current attack, along with its disregard for the public’s support for safeguarding public lands, makes it more worrisome than previous iterations, several public land advocates and legal experts told Grist. 

This is “probably the most significant moment since the Reagan administration in terms of privatization,” said Steven Davis, a political science professor at Edgewood College and the author of the 2018 book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer. President Ronald Reagan was a self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel. 

Deubel said the conservation community knew Trump’s return would trigger another drawn out fight for the future of public lands, but nothing could have prepared him for this level of chaos, particularly the effort to rid agencies of thousands of staffers.

The country is “in a much more pro-public lands position than we’ve been before,” Deubel said. “But I think we’re at greater risk than we’ve ever been before — not because the time is right in the eyes of the American people, but because we have an administration who could give two shits about what the American people want. That’s what’s got me scared.” 

The Interior Department and the White House did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.

In an article posted to the White House website on Earth Day, the Trump administration touted several “key actions” it has taken on the environment, including “protecting public lands” by opening more acres to energy development, “protecting wildlife” by pausing wind energy projects, and safeguarding forests by expanding logging. The accomplishments list received widespread condemnation from environmental, climate, and public land advocacy groups. 

That same day, a leaked draft strategic plan revealed the Interior Department’s four-year vision for opening new federal lands to drilling and other extractive development, reducing the amount of federal land it manages by selling some for housing development and transferring other acres to state control, rolling back the boundaries of protected national monuments, and weakening bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOGE is in the process of cutting thousands of scientists and other staff from the various agencies that manage and protect public lands, including the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. Nearly every Republican senator went on the record this month in support of selling off federal lands to reduce the federal deficit, voting down a measure that would have blocked such sales. And Utah has promised to continue its legal fight aimed at stripping more than 18 million acres of BLM lands within the state’s border from the federal government. Utah’s lawsuit, which the Supreme Court declined to hear in January, had the support of numerous Republican-led states, including North Dakota while current Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was still governor. 

To advance its agenda, the Trump administration is citing a series of “emergencies” that close observers say are at best exaggerated, and at worst manufactured.  [ed. emphasis mine]

A purported “energy emergency,” which Trump declared in an executive order just hours after being inaugurated, has been the impetus for the administration attempting to throw long-standing federal permitting processes, public comment periods, and environmental safeguards to the wind. The action aims to boost fossil fuel extraction across federal lands and waters — despite domestic oil and gas production being at record highs — while simultaneously working to thwart renewable energy projects. Trump relied on that same “emergency” earlier this month when he ordered federal agencies to prop up America’s dwindling, polluting coal industry, which the president and his cabinet have insisted is “beautiful” and “clean.” In reality, coal is among the most polluting forms of energy.

“This whole idea of an emergency is ridiculous,” said Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “And now this push to reinvigorate the coal industry seems absolutely crazy to me. Why would you try to reinvigorate a moribund industry that has been declining for the last decade or more? Makes no sense, it’s not going to happen.” 

Coal consumption in the U.S. has declined more than 50 percent since peaking in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, largely due to market forces, including the availability of cheaper natural gas and America’s growing renewable energy sector. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff war threatens to undermine his own push to expand mining and fossil fuel drilling.

The threat of extreme wildfire — an actual crisis driven by a complex set of factors, including climate change, its role in intensifying droughts and pest outbreaks, and decades of fire suppression — is being cited to justify slashing environmental reviews to ramp up logging on public lands. Following up on a Trump executive order to increase domestic timber production, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed a memo declaring a forest health “emergency” that would open nearly 60 percent of national forest lands, more than 110 million acres, to aggressive logging. 

Then there’s America’s “housing affordability crisis,” which the Trump administration, dozens of Republicans, and even a handful of Democrats are pointing to in a growing push to open federal lands to housing development, either by selling land to private interests or transferring control to states. The Trump administration recently established a task force to identify what it calls “underutilized lands.” In an op-ed announcing that effort, Burgum and Scott Turner, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote that “much of” the 500 million acres Interior oversees is “suitable for residential use.” Some of the most high-profile members of the anti-public lands movement, including William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during Trump’s first term, are championing the idea.

Without guardrails, critics argue the sale of public lands to build housing will lead to sprawl in remote, sensitive landscapes and do little, if anything, to address home affordability, as the issue is driven by several factors, including migration trends, stagnant wages, and higher construction costs. Notably, Trump’s tariff policies are expected to raise the average price of a new home by nearly $11,000. 

Chris Hill, CEO of the Conservation Lands Foundation, a Colorado-based nonprofit working to protect BLM-managed lands, said the lack of affordable housing is a serious issue, but “we shouldn’t be fooled that the idea to sell off public lands is a solution.” 

“The vast majority of public lands are just not suitable for any sort of housing development due to their remote locations, lack of access, and necessary infrastructure,” she said.

David Hayes, who served as deputy Interior secretary during the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and as a senior climate adviser to President Joe Biden, told Grist that Trump’s broad use of executive power sets the current privatization push apart from previous efforts. 

“Not only do you have the rhetoric and the intentionality around managing public lands in an aggressive way, but you have to couple that with what you’re seeing,” he said. “This administration is going farther than any other ever has to push the limits of executive power.” 

Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a Colorado-based conservation group, said Trump and his team are doing everything they can to circumvent normal environmental rules and safeguards in order to advance their agenda, with no regard for the law or public opinion. 

“Everything is an imagined crisis,” Weiss said. 

Oil, gas, and coal jobs. Mining jobs. Timber jobs. Farming and ranching. Gas-powered cars and kitchen appliances. Even the water pressure in your shower. Ask the White House and the Republican Party and they’ll tell you Biden waged a war against all of it, and that voters gave Trump a mandate to reverse course.

During Trump’s first term in office, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke repeatedly boasted that the administration’s conservation legacy would rival that of his personal hero and America’s conservationist president, Theodore Roosevelt — only to have the late president’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, and the conservation community bemoan his record at the helm of the massive federal agency. 

Like Zinke, Burgum invoked Roosevelt in pitching himself for the job.

“In our time, President Trump’s energy dominance can be America’s big stick that will be leveraged to achieve historic prosperity and world peace,” Burgum said during his confirmation hearing in January, referencing a 1900 letter in which the 26th president said to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The Senate confirmed him to the post in January on a bipartisan 79-18 vote. Some public land advocates initially viewed Burgum, now the chief steward of the federal lands, waters, and wildlife we all own, as a palatable nominee in a sea of problematic potential picks. A billionaire software entrepreneur and former North Dakota governor, Burgum has talked at length about his fondness for Roosevelt’s conservation legacy and the outdoors.

Whatever honeymoon there was didn’t last long. One hundred days in, Burgum and the rest of Trump’s team have taken not a stick, but a wrecking ball to America’s public lands, waters, and wildlife. Earlier this month, the new CEO of REI said the outdoor retailer made “a mistake” in endorsing Burgum for the job and that the administration’s actions on public lands “are completely at odds with the longstanding values of REI.”

At an April 9 all-hands meeting of Interior employees, Burgum showed off pictures of himself touring oil and gas facilities, celebrated “clean coal,” and condemned burdensome government regulation. Burgum has repeatedly described federal lands as “America’s balance sheet” — “assets” that he estimates could be worth $100 trillion but that he argues Americans are getting a “low return” on.

“On the world’s largest balance sheet last year, the revenue that we pulled in was about $18 billion,” he said at the staffwide meeting, referring to money the government brings from lease fees and royalties from grazing, drilling, and logging on federal lands, as well as national park entrance fees. “Eighteen billion might seem like a big number. It’s not a big number if we’re managing $100 trillion in assets.”

In focusing solely on revenues generated from energy and other resource extraction, Burgum disregards that public lands are the foundation of a $1 trillion outdoor recreation economy, nevermind the numerous climate, environmental, cultural, and public health benefits.

Davis, the author of In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer, dismissed Burgum’s “balance sheet” argument as “shriveled” and “wrong.”

“You have to willfully be ignorant and ignore everything of value about those lands except their marketable commodity value to come up with that conclusion,” he said. When you add all their myriad values together, public lands “are the biggest bargain you can possibly imagine.” 

Davis likes to compare public lands to libraries, schools, or the Department of Defense. 

“There are certain things we as a society decide are important and we pay for it,” he said. “We call that public goods.”

The last time conservatives ventured down the public land privatization path, it didn’t go well. 

Shortly after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, then-Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican representing Utah, introduced legislation to sell off 3.3 million acres of public land in 10 Western states that he said had “been deemed to serve no purpose for taxpayers.”

Public backlash was fierce. Chaffetz pulled the bill just two weeks later, citing concerns from his constituents. The episode, while brief, largely forced the anti-federal land movement back into the shadows. The first Trump administration continued to weaken safeguards for 35 million acres of federal lands — more than any other administration in history — and offered up millions more for oil and gas development, but stopped short of trying sell off or transfer large areas of the public domain.

Yet as the last few months have shown, the anti-public lands movement is alive and well. 

Public land advocates are hopeful that the current push will flounder. They expect courts to strike down many of Trump’s environmental rollbacks, as they did during his first term. In recent weeks, crowds have rallied at numerous national parks and state capitol buildings to support keeping public lands in public hands. Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who voted to confirm Burgum to his post and serves as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has taken to social media to warn about the growing Republican effort to undermine, transfer, and sell off public lands.

“I continue to be encouraged that people are going to be loud. They already are,” said Deubel, the executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. “We’re mobilizing. We’ve got business and industries. We’ve got Republicans, we’ve got Democrats. We’ve got hunters and we’ve got non-hunters. We’ve got everybody speaking out about this.” 

In a time of extreme polarization on seemingly every issue, public lands enjoy broad bipartisan support. The 15th annual “Conservation in the West” poll found that 72 percent of voters in eight Western states support public lands conservation over increased energy development — the highest level of support in the poll’s history; 65 percent oppose giving states control over federal public lands, up from 56 percent in 2017; and 89 percent oppose shrinking or removing protections for national monuments, up from 80 percent in 2017. Even in Utah, where leaders have spent millions of taxpayer dollars promoting the state’s anti-federal lands lawsuit, support for protecting public lands remains high. 

“Even in all these made up crises, the American public doesn’t want this,” Hill said. “The American people want and love their public lands.” 

At his recent staffwide meeting, Burgum said Roosevelt’s legacy should guide Interior staff in the mission to manage and protect federal public lands. Those two things, management and protection, “must be held in balance,” Burgum stressed. 

Yet in social media posts and friendly interviews with conservative media, Burgum has left little doubt about where his priorities lie, repeatedly rolling out what Breitbart dubbed the “four babies” of Trump’s energy dominance agenda: “Drill, Baby, Drill! Map, Baby, Map! Mine, Baby, Mine! Build, Baby, Build!” 

“Protect, baby, protect,” “conserve, baby, conserve,” and “steward, baby, steward” have yet to make it into Burgum’s lexicon. 

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

April 25, 2025

Already, the two institutes — the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University — are preparing for potential layoffs should money held up in new federal approval processes not materialize in the coming weeks…Both institutes for decades have partnered with the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides the majority of the budget for both facilities. The federal agency’s weather prediction and air and ocean monitoring impact nearly every industry and provide critical severe weather tracking, including through the National Weather Service. Its work is advanced by research from a network of 16 cooperative institutes, like those in Fort Collins and Boulder.

A memo by the White House Office of Management and Budget for the 2026 fiscal year — which begins Oct. 1 — proposes reducing funding for NOAA by 27%, effectively eliminating the agency’s research arm and ending support for the cooperative institutes. The budget reductions are part of a wide-ranging effort by the Trump administration to slash the size of government. Project 2025 — a conservative think tank’s outline for Trump’s second presidency — called for the dismantling of NOAA and for its functions to be privatized. The policy document identified the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, (it) is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” The White House plan prompted three of Colorado’s Democratic congressional leaders — Rep. Joe Neguse and Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet — on Wednesday to send a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to urge him not to cut cooperative institutes’ funding.

“CIs are home to experienced researchers and long-standing data collection programs with major impacts on human societies, (and) moreover they are instrumental in training future generations of workers who continue to contribute to societal needs,” the letter states. “It is our fear that if sweeping cuts are made, the damage will be irreversible. Even short-term interruptions in their research could threaten the safety and economies of the communities that CIs serve across the nation.”

Congress would have to approve the White House’s plan for the next fiscal year, but cooperative institute leaders also worry about more immediate funding problems. The memo directs NOAA to align its spending through fiscal year 2025 with the priorities in the document. The administration could strangle funding to the cooperative institutes even before the 2026 budget is set, said Waleed Abdalati, the director of CIRES at CU Boulder. Already, institutes are struggling to get money previously approved for research projects.

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Christine Peterson):

April 16. 2025

Anna Jones-Crabtree and her husband spend sunup to sundown — plus hours of time before and after — nurturing 20 crops through tight margins on their dryland organic farm in Montana. Federal grants have long helped ease those tight margins, enabling farmers like Jones-Crabtree to survive and even thrive despite droughts and fires, market swings and crop failures. It’s the fruit of a philosophy that stewarding large tracts of land benefits not just a country with 340 million hungry bellies and a global food economy but also the clean air and water that people depend on as well as the land wildlife needs to survive. 

So she was taken aback when the U.S. government froze half of a $100,000 grant the farm had received to hire people for regenerative agriculture work. She had workers and a crop plan ready, but now it looked like the rest of that money would never be paid out. 

Other Department of Agriculture money still seemed to be coming through, but she was counting on that $50,000, just like thousands of other farmers and ranchers across the West have been counting on the billions promised through various programs from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But now the Trump administration is trying to end many of these grants using a tool supposedly designed for efficiency that has also caused unpleasant side effects and cost thousands of American jobs.          

“We’re in a tight spot. Combine that with the markets right now,” she said, “and this is unprecedented. It’s a perfect storm.”

The damage done to farmers and ranchers by grants frozen or ended by the Department of Government Efficiency is compounded by the loss of local staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Farm Services Administration (FSA) offices that have traditionally provided on-the-ground support for projects. In fact, the USDA announced Monday that it plans to cancel its grants for the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, though it may approve some of them if they meet the administration’s priorities.

More than 5,700 probationary employees at the USDA were fired in February, according to Mary Pletcher Rice, an Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary that oversees human resources at the agency. And while Rice testified that they were reinstated following a court order in March, many of the workers say that they’re still on administrative leave or have taken early retirement or buyouts, while others are anticipating further dramatic reductions in force. One FSA office in Montana where rancher Bill Milton lives, went from five staff to one. Other offices around the rural West shuttered completely. The changes are creating a “disturbing amount of uncertainty,” Milton said. The office helps Montana landowners identify grants and file critical paperwork so money funnels into on-the-ground projects. Without enough employees around, deadlines are missed, and farmers are left out to dry. 

Milton runs a 15,000-acre ranch in rural Musselshell County. He also works with community-based landowner groups seeking solutions to common problems — helping young ranchers access land as well as building sustainable ranches and solving watershed issues. Some groups in Montana have had grants of up to $4 million frozen. 

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so people are putting pressure on their congressmen to release signed grants,” he said. “But everyone has staff. And as soon as grants get frozen, they have cash-flow issues.”

He and other Western producers acknowledge that there are certainly ways to make the government more efficient. But there is nothing particularly efficient about withholding money needed for repairing fences, hiring agricultural workers or building drought resilience in farms across the Western U.S.

“You’re cutting things on the wrong end here,” said Traci Bruckner, chief policy officer for the Western Landowners Alliance. Federally supported local partnerships are, she said, “how you do conservation right — from the ground up.”

And the need is as great now as it’s ever been, said Robert Bonnie, former undersecretary of Agriculture for farm production and conservation under President Joe Biden. When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, it committed nearly $20 billion to agriculture and forestry. While the branding dubbed it “climate smart agriculture,” most of the programs involved things that farmers, ranchers, and foresters had been doing for decades through the Farm Bill. 

“It’s soil health, improving grazing management, improved forest management to reduce nitrogen,” Bonnie said. “It’s reducing chances of catastrophic wildfires. And there’s a huge demand for it.”

Applications poured in from farmers, ranchers and working groups — so many, in fact, that within the first three years the federal government had committed all of the IRA money. But billions have yet to be paid. States like Utah are still owed $210 million between now and 2031, according to the University of Illinois’s Policy Design Lab. Washington is supposed to receive about $304 million, while Montana was set to see even more come through in the form of programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives and Conservation Stewardship programs.  

In addition to local grants to improve fencing or build pivots, those dollars were also headed to programs like the USDA Migratory Big Game Initiative, which has supported private-land restoration and paid for easements to keep such land intact for wildlife, including elk, deer and pronghorn. 

Federally supported local programs may have seemed like a given, but landowners haven’t always trusted the federal government to follow through on its promises, said Maggie Hanna, a Colorado Springs, Colorado, rancher and director of the Central Grasslands Roadmap Initiative, a 700-million-acre collaborative working on grasslands conservation. And that’s why she’s even more concerned. 

“To have a producer say, ‘I would like you, the federal government, to come to the table to be my partner’ is a big deal, and we’ve spent 40 years building that trust,” Hanna said. “And whether or not dollars come out of that scenario now, that trust feels deeply and dramatically eroded.”

She’s a farmer, though, and an eternal optimist. And so she wonders if perhaps pulling the rug out from under producers could ultimately help farmers and ranchers coalesce more and work together, teaching each other how to build fences or use rotational grazing. She doesn’t want to sound “Pollyanna-ish,” she said, but the possibility serves as a light for her in a West darkened by uncertainty.

Meanwhile, calves are being born and seeds being planted even as producers from New Mexico to Washington struggle with the fallout from the economic losses and uncertainty caused by Trump’s new tariffs.           

“There’s a lot of fear and a lot of stress. Ranching and farming are difficult even when farming is going well,” Milton said. “But the most important point I’m making to people and each other is don’t just wait and see what the hell will happen. Let’s let those who are in rural communities keep doing good, collaborative work. The last thing you want to do is shut that down.”

Click the link to read the article on The Kiowa County Press website (Roz Brown). Here’s an excerpt:

Working without fanfare, federal scientists at 22 U.S. sites maintain the nation’s agricultural plant species collected since 1898, including crops native to New Mexico. But the Trump administration’s DOGE agency has fired them. The move creates uncertainly for hundreds of crop species that undergird the country’s food system. The U.S. National  Plant Germplasm System safeguards the genetic diversity of agriculturally important  plants. Iago Hale, associate professor of specialty crop improvement at the University of New Hampshire, said the potential loss of these “seed bunkers” should alarm every American.

“If you subsist totally on chicken nuggets and KFC, that’s fine – understand that that comes back to plants grown in the field. The breading on your fried chicken, the French fries that you’re eating – these are all products of crops, and this is how it works,” Iago Hale said.

Hale said the NPGS is central to the nation’s preparedness, because the food system is only as safe as our ability to respond to the next plant disease. Unless dormant seeds are continually cared for and periodically replanted, Hale noted the lines will die, along with their evolutionary history. Hale said potatoes, the fourth-largest crop, require even more care than wheat or corn.

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Elizabeth Stewart-Severy):

April 13, 2025

Since his early retirement just over three weeks ago, former White River National Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams has been soaking up his favorite activities on public lands. 

“The public lands are my life,” Fitzwilliams said. “Not just because I worked there. That’s where I get my sense of wellbeing and quality of life.”

Fitzwilliams, who led the 2.3 million acre White River National Forest for 15 years, left his position in late March as part of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program. He said when he left, the White River was down 27 or 28 positions since Jan. 1, 2025, and just over 50 fewer positions in the past 12 months. The cuts account for nearly a third of the forest’s workforce, which by his count stood at 155 positions about a year ago. 

“It’s pretty bleak right now,” Fitzwilliams said. 

The Forest Service announced last fall that it would not be hiring any non-fire, seasonal workers for summer 2025 and it saw an additional round of cuts involving thousands of positions nationwide on Feb. 14, led by the Department of Government Efficiency. Even more drastic cuts are expected as the Trump administration moves to consolidate operations. 

“Pretty much across the country, there will not be any of our normal seasonal workforce that cleans the bathrooms, that clears the trails, that maintains our recreational facilities, that enforces regulations. Across the country, we won’t have those people this year,” Fitzwilliams said. 

While the current administration’s cuts have made exceptions for federal firefighters, Fitzwilliams is concerned that firefighting efforts will be hampered by the reduced workforce. 

Those Forest Service employees who work out in the field “are also the people that often are the first to spot or respond to a fire,” Fitzwilliams said.  

The organizational structure and support for fighting fires on the White River National Forest has been cut, too; drivers and those who buy supplies and food for firefighters are among the lost positions, Fitzwilliams said. 

Local White River National Forest officials declined to comment and requested any questions be sent in writing. Aspen Journalism received a response from an unnamed spokesperson at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Wildland firefighting positions continue to be exempt from the hiring freeze a (sic) operational readiness is not impacted,” the statement read. “The U.S. Forest Service, along with our other federal, state, tribal and local partners continue to prepare for and respond to wildfire incidents as needed.”

Fighting and preventing major wildfires is often top of mind for those living in the drought-prone, arid West, but it’s far from the only job with which the Forest Service has been tasked. The agency is responsible for managing forests for multiple uses, including wilderness, wildlife, recreation, logging, grazing and clean water. 

“Our public lands, when we live amongst them, we do tend to take them for granted,” Fitzwilliams said. “But they cannot be anymore.” 

‘Part of the strength of America’ at risk

The U.S. Forest Service oversees 193 million acres of land, including the 2.3 million acres of the White River National Forest, with its 11 ski resorts, eight wilderness areas and five ranger districts. And Fitzwilliams thinks the value of public lands far exceeds what can be tracked on paper. 

“I believe public lands in America are part of the strength of America,” he said. “It’s a uniquely American ideal.” 

Fitzwilliams noted that this ideal is not one enshrined in the Constitution; it relies on public engagement. 

“Public lands provide so much to so many and it’s not easy to manage them for all the different uses. National forest management is hard,” Fitzwilliams said. “You have to manage for wilderness and logging and grazing and mining and recreation and all these things, and clean water and wildlife — it’s hard, and so people get frustrated. It may not align perfectly with everyone’s values. 

“But it’s a system of public lands in the public trust that, thank god, we have the ability to argue over them. I’m worried that if they’re dismantled, what appears to be organizationally dismantled, we could lose this incredible part of America.” 

While there are indications that the Trump administration may sell off public lands, Fitzwilliams said he’s more concerned at this point that neglect and a lack of maintenance and staffing will effectively dissolve federal land management organizations. 

“I just think it’s a devastating thing to think of a future that we don’t have this system,” he said. 

The Forest Service was facing budget shortfalls prior to the current cuts. The budget for the White River National Forest for this fiscal year is “abysmal,” Fitzwilliams said.

There are 2,800 miles of roads across the forest. “Our road maintenance budget this year, when I left three weeks ago, was a whopping zero. Zero.” 

There is no funding to support the work that it takes to rebuild culverts when they are blown out by spring thaws, for example. Instead, Fitzwilliams said there’s a three-person crew with one piece of machinery that can try to address emergencies. 

The White River National Forest attracts about 18 million visitors every year; Fitzwilliams said the forest regularly collects more money than it spends through the appropriated budget. Nevertheless, the recreation budget is bare. 

“Our recreation budget — the most profitable, most efficient, most visited forest in the entire country — I think the recreation budget was $150,000,” Fitzwilliams said. “That’s not enough money to pump the toilets this year.”

The Department of Agriculture’s statement to Aspen Journalism — received after we sent questions to local forest officials — acknowledged that “recreation services and public access are vital to local economies.”

“The Forest Service remains committed to ensuring public health and safety while balancing access to recreation areas during this transitional time. … It is our intent to maintain access to recreation opportunities to the greatest degree possible,” the statement said.

Such a response reflects what Fitwilliams described as an agency directive that requires all interactions with the media to be cleared by top officials in Washington D.C. 

“This is the biggest gag order anyone has ever seen,” Fitzwilliams said. “In 35 years, I’ve never seen anything like it.” 

Aspen Journalism also filed a request for information about budget and staff cuts through the Freedom of Information Act in early April and has not received a response. 

There are places, Fitzwilliams said, where the Forest Service could certainly improve efficiency and cut costs. He said he shares concerns about the federal debt and would welcome the opportunity to work on efficiency and cost savings.

“It should be a systematic, collaborative approach, by focusing on mission-critical work first,” Fitzwilliams said.  

Instead, in the mass cuts on Valentine’s Day, the White River National Forest fired 16 people, 15 of whom were permanent part-time workers whose job was in the field, out on the 2,500 miles of trails in the forest. They earned about $19,000 per season, Fitzwilliams said, and six of the positions were paid for by other agencies or governments, like Pitkin or Eagle counties. The rest were funded through fees collected by the White River National Forest. 

“The United States taxpayer saved zero dollars in the initial firings,” Fitzwilliams said. 

Finding ways to reduce spending and become more efficient would involve detailed analysis and hard work, which Fitzwiliams said he would welcome. 

“I don’t think the hard work is sending out a note on Valentine’s Day saying a bunch of people are fired, with no analysis whatsoever of who these people were. None. There was none. It was low hanging fruit and they took it,” he said.  

Fitzwilliams had been planning to retire in about a year, but decided to take the buyout offered to federal employees under the deferred resignation program, and receive full pay and benefits through Sept. 30. He sent a letter to White River employees and partners announcing his resignation on Feb. 25. 

“Quite frankly, I didn’t have the energy to be part of what is looking more and more like the dismantling of the agency,” Fitzwilliams said. “That last month or two at work was — I’ve never been that stressed out ever. I was feeling hopelessness, having to fire people for no reason and trying to figure out how we would get the work done, serve the public and meet the agreements with our partners. It was stressful.” 

Brian Glaspell, who previously was director of strategic planning for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region, is the acting supervisor of the White River National Forest. 

Forest health depends on partnership, public involvement

The White River National Forest is the largest national forest in Colorado, spanning parts of nine counties and bordering communities including Aspen, Glenwood Springs, Vail, Breckenridge and Leadville. Much of the identity and economy of these communities is tied to the forest. 

“Aspen isn’t Aspen without the forest around it,” Fitzwilliams said. 

These communities rely on the forest in other ways, too, including for a healthy water supply and air quality. 

“Every single community on the West Slope gets its drinking water off of national forest,” he said. “We ought to have people taking care of that.” 

In his time with the White River National Forest, Fitzwilliams built partnerships with local governments, nonprofits and other agencies that helped to share stewardship of the forest as recreation numbers boomed in the past decade. For example, Pitkin County has provided funding for forest protection officers at North Star Nature Preserve and works in partnership with the agency on several other properties that share boundaries with the White River National Forest. 

“These partnerships were the epitome of efficiency,” said Gary Tennenbaum, director of Pitkin County Open Space and Trails.

The Forest Service worked with Pitkin County, the city of Aspen and the Independence Pass Foundation to bring more rangers to heavily trafficked areas like Independence Pass, Wildwood, Richmond Ridge, Pearl Pass and the Castle Creek area. 

The county’s public works and open space and trails departments pay for two, full-time seasonal Forest Service employees; for now, those positions remain intact. A third position, paid for by a partnership between Pitkin County, the city of Aspen and the Independence Pass Foundation, has been cut by the Forest Service because the employee was in their probationary period. 

Fitzwilliams is proud of his legacy of cross-agency work. 

“It’s the part of the job I’m going to miss the most. We roll up our sleeves and figure out how to solve problems with only one objective: how do we serve the public?” he said. “It’s a symbiotic, shared stewardship. We’re doing this work together. We’re leveraging in a very innovative, creative, efficient way.”

But he’s concerned that the Forest Service now has less to bring to the table in terms of staffing and funding. 

“I don’t know how long we think that local governments can support this, and the scary part that keeps me up at night is then what happens afterwards,” Fitzwilliams said. 

In many respects, the White River National Forest is fortunate and unique in the level of support it receives from surrounding communities. According to a 2019 economic analysis of national forests, the White River contributed more than 22,000 jobs, bringing in $960 million to local communities and workers. 

Local organizations, like the Independence Pass Foundation and Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, provide labor, funding and support that enhances public lands management of the White River National Forest as well. 

“We’re fortunate around here, we have those organizations. That’s not the case everywhere,” Fitzwilliams said. “There is no one to step up and fill the gaps. That’s worrisome.” 

The health of the White River National Forest in the upcoming summer season will depend deeply on the partnerships that Fitzwilliams and his colleagues have built over the past decade. 

“This summer, we’re going to need the public to care more than ever about their public lands,” Tennenbaum said. “People need to have an ethic this summer that is very respectful of the land. You come across a campsite, don’t just walk by it. Make sure the campfire is out. Think about how you deal when you have to go to the bathroom. There’s going to be some impacts; we have to recognize that and not make it worse.”

The White River National Forest is not alone in facing a summer season with large numbers of crowds and little ability to manage those crowds to prevent ecological damage. Fitzwilliams notes that public lands are deeply valuable to many Americans, and he retains hope in the public’s ability to speak up for a national treasure. 

“I think the American public, not excluding anyone, they’re going to stand up for their public lands,” Fitzwilliams said. “Unfortunately we’re going to see some hurt in the meantime.”

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

April 4, 2025

Last August, I wrote an incredulous and somewhat tongue-in-cheek story about then-candidate Donald Trump’s plan, as outlined a year and a half earlier on his Agenda 47 website, to build 10 “Freedom Cities” on “empty” public lands in the West.

I didn’t take it seriously. Maybe I should have. Trump hasn’t said much about Freedom Cities since being elected, but other people have taken the idea, spiffed it up a bit, and run with it. One enigmatic group, for example, wants to convert the Presidio Trust in San Francisco into a Freedom City. And the American Enterprise Institute has incorporated Freedom Cities into its audacious Homestead 2.0 plan to “make housing affordable again.”

Indeed, the cities and similar efforts to hand over federal land to housing developers may be the very tool Western right-wing activists have been looking for to finally transfer public land out of the American public’s hands.

Efforts to privatize the public domain have flared up for over a century. In the early part of the 20th century, Sen. Albert Bacon Fall, of New Mexico, urged his colleagues to turn over forest reserves to states and private interests. In the 1940s, Western lawmakers and the livestock lobby attempted to transfer all Bureau of Land Management lands to private ownership. And in the late 1970s, the Sagebrush Rebellion’s legal arm, the League for the Advancement of States Equal Rights, endeavored to convey federal lands to the respective states, at which point they could be sold off to the highest bidder.

These movements were echoed in the 1990s, the 2000s, and in the 2010s. But each conflagration was ultimately doused. Proponents realized that mining, grazing, and drilling federal lands was much cheaper than doing so on state or private lands, and that they had no support outside of a handful of Western counties.

Over the last few years, the embers have been rekindled in the form of lawsuits, state-level legislation, and far-out campaign proposals. While I certainly have taken note of and written about these bids, I also haven’t taken them all that seriously: They, too, would collapse as it became clear that their flimsy legal grounding couldn’t stand up to public opposition.

More recently, however, I’ve begun to have my doubts.

No, I don’t think Utah will ever win its land grab lawsuit, nor will the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’s bid to seize control of all federal land within its borders — even national parks — succeed, even in the state legislature. But the growing number of proposals from both Democrats and Republicans to use federal land for housing and for siting data centers and associated power generating facilities — while also using proceeds of land sales to offset tax cuts for the wealthy — seem set to come together and make the Sagebrush Rebellion fantasy a reality.

The thing that got me thinking about all of this was a video of a recent AEI conference, in which the right-leaning*, free-market think tank introduced its Homesteading 2.0 plan. In a nutshell, the plan — which is broken up into the Home Sweet Home and Freedom Cities phases — looks like this:

• The Bureau of Land Management would sell off 850 square miles, or about 544,000 acres, of developable public land in or near existing metro areas. About 250 of those square miles would fall under the Home Sweet Home phase, with the remaining 600 square miles devoted to 20 Freedom Cities around the West. They say this would generate $100 billion for the U.S. Treasury, which would mean the land would sell for an average of about $183,000 per acre.
• Under the Home Sweet Home phase, a total of 1.5 million new homes would be built on that newly privatized land within existing metro areas on the current urban fringe.
• Another 1.5 million homes would be built in Freedom Cities, which would lie outside — but not far from — existing metro areas’ peripheries.

After getting this far, I was ready to shut off the video and go back to watching reels of mountain biking wipeouts. There’s no way that such a grandiose plan could garner the necessary support to actually occur, even if it had been stripped of Trump’s nuttiest embellishments. No matter how these folks spin it, 544,000 acres is a lot of public land to transfer, especially given the fact that high profile Republicans such as Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Ryan Zinke have come out strongly against large-scale public land transfers.

But under our current bizarro political regime, anything is possible, especially the zany and grandiose. I wouldn’t be surprised if the AEI folks threw in the Freedom Cities just to spice up their Home Sweet Home plan and to grab Trump’s attention. Because if you get Trump’s support, you automatically gain the backing of 95% of the Republicans in Congress. Get Elon Musk on board and it’s a slam dunk, especially if it raises $100 billion to offset tax cuts to the wealthy. (Zinke and Daines will back down from their stances instantly if bullied by Trump to do so).

AEI senior fellow Ed Pinto said the initiative would gain access to the land via the existing authority of the Interior Secretary to dispose of public lands, plus the congressional reconciliation bill, and “emergency” presidential powers. “We’re talking basically undesignated BLM areas,” Pinto said, “some of it may be designated as conservation areas, some of it may be ranch land …” (So much for the “undesignated” part).

One thing that struck me was the similarity between these right wing policy folks’ arguments and those made by YIMBY progressive housing advocates. Both blame the housing affordability crisis on a lack of supply, both say the solution is to build more housing, and both agree that the best way to do that is to reduce bureaucratic red tape and to up-zone land. That’s when state and local governments encourage density and multiple use by getting rid of or reducing minimum lot sizes and abolishing sprawl-friendly single-family-only zoning laws. “Zoning gets in the way of the highest and best use of land,” said Pinto.

This could help get Democrats and progressives on board with the plan, even if it means transferring public lands. After all, while almost anyone on the left eagerly pushes back against Big Oil or Big Beef land grabs, they may be far less enthusiastic about fighting Big Housing.

While progressive housing advocates are more likely to combine up-zoning with government subsidies and support, AEI is adamant about letting the market do its thing. “We’re gonna add supply, not with subsidies,” said AEI senior fellow Ed Pinto in the video. “This land is going to be sold at market rate … We’re making it more affordable the old fashioned way: build smaller houses on smaller lots and the price goes down.” Pinto added that he is not necessarily on board with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s similar plan to use public lands for affordable housing, because Burgum’s very vague plan is not laissez faire enough.

AEI is shooting for 13 houses per-acre, which is about twice as dense as Las Vegas currently. Yet it’s not clear how the plan would ensure that developers built the small homes AEI is looking for. Also a big question mark is who the hell is going to pay for the infrastructure for these developments, especially in Freedom Cities, which are mostly way out beyond the existing utilities and roads.

Pinto indicated that the Freedom Cities wouldn’t be as much of a reach as they might sound. He pointed to giant master-planned communities as models, including Columbia, Maryland; Reston, Virginia; Villages, Florida; and Sun City/Georgetown, Texas. But his main example was Teravalis, a planned new city on nearly 60 square miles of land in Buckeye, about an hour’s drive outside of Phoenix, where Howard Hughes Holdings hopes to build 100,000 homes and over 50 million square feet of commercial development.

That brings up an important point that the AEI folks barely touched upon before brushing it off: water, and the increasing lack thereof. Teravalis has received its land-use approvals for the whole project. But the state has issued the required 100-year assured water supply certification for just 8,500 of the development’s homes. In 2023, Arizona halted new certifications for groundwater-reliant areas on Phoenix’s fringe, throwing the future of Teravalis’s remaining 91,500 planned homes into doubt. A new Freedom City in the same region would run up against similar limits. And the 1.27 million new homes these guys are planning for Southern Nevada? Umm … hello! They don’t have any more water, folks.

But that seems to be of no concern to the AEI folks or, for that matter, various Nevada leaders who are pushing similar, if less ambitious, plans.

U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat, recently introduced legislation that would make 25,000 acres of BLM land in Clark County, i.e. the Las Vegas area, available for housing over the next 50 years, while also setting aside other public land as wilderness, following the model of similar legislation Congress passed in 1998. It mirrors Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s bill introduced last year. Nevada Republican Rep. Mark Amodei forwarded a similar bill for the northern part of the state. And last year Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican introduced his Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter — or HOUSES Act — that would allow state and local governments to nominate tracts of “underutilized” (meaning not actively being drilled or grazed to death) public land for purchase.

These bills and Burgum’s plan lack details. The AEI plan, on the other hand, is more than just an abstract concept. The think tank has actually mapped out specific BLM parcels that would be targeted for development. It’s worth checking out the map to see for yourself, but some of the sites that stand out include:

• Three potential Freedom City sites north of Grand Junction, stretching from Clifton to the Utah border;
• Another one that would cover Mormon Mesa near Mesquite, Nevada, not far from the iconic land art, Double Negative;
• And yet another at Fredonia, Arizona.

This whole Homesteading 2.0 thing, and especially the Freedom Cities part, is a long-shot, maybe even a pipe dream. But these days, anything’s possible.

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Georgina Gustin):

April 4, 2025

The Department of Agriculture issued an “Emergency Situation Determination” that environmental groups say will speed the cutting of old-growth trees.

The Trump administration announced Friday that it plans to remove protections on tens of millions of acres of public forest by declaring a wildfire-related emergency, a move that critics believe will lead to the destruction of massive swaths of older trees that are actually more resilient to fire.

In a memo released internally Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins issued an “Emergency Situation Determination” covering more than 110 million acres of land in the National Forest System. The memo comes on the heels of an executive order issued by President Donald Trump to expand timber production in the country by 25 percent. 

The agency says the declaration will authorize emergency operations to “reduce wildfire risk and save American lives and communities.”

Environmental groups say the move is the administration’s next step toward achieving its goal of increasing timber production under the guise of wildfire protection.  

“Nobody should be fooled into thinking that this secretarial order or Trump’s executive order are anything more than a handout to the industry to basically log-baby-log on our public lands,” said Randi Spivak, the public lands policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Nobody should be fooled that this has anything to do with wildfires.”

The most destructive and notable fires in recent years—in Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023, and in Los Angeles earlier this year—were in urban areas, far from U.S. Forest Service land covered by the new order.  

“Those weren’t forest fires,” said Anna Medema, who works on forest and public land issues for the Sierra Club. “No amount of forest management would have changed those tragedies.”

The move comes amid massive staffing cuts at the Forest Service, including of many employees certified to fight wildfires, and funding freezes that have halted projects aimed at reducing wildfire risk.

“There are a lot of shovel-ready projects ready to go, but they don’t have the staff now to do them,” Medema said. “They’re using fear and the moment, saying we need to get into the forests and log, but they’re removing the resources to fight wildfires.”

The declaration covers roughly 60 percent of the lands in the national forest system, much of it home to older trees, which are more resilient to wildfires because of their thicker bark and extensive root systems. These trees are targeted by industrial logging because of their size.

“Science shows that harvesting mature and old-growth trees can actually make wildfires worse,” Medema said.

Trump’s executive order, issued last month, demands that agency leaders “streamline” the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act to expedite logging operations. Environmental groups believe the administration will likely issue additional emergency orders under the ESA that would allow logging companies to bypass more rigorous review processes. The 2001 “roadless rule” that prohibits the construction of roads on Forest Service land—a rule designed to limit access—is also likely in the administration’s crosshairs.

“I don’t think this is the end of it,” Spivak said. “Trump is saying, in a nutshell: Any regulations or protections that get in the way of timber production, get them out of the way.”

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

Click the link to read the article on The Revelator website

March 19, 2025

Politicians have mocked, belittled, and cut federally funded research for decades, but funding basic science has a long history of lifesaving discoveries.

Just because you don’t understand why or how federal funds are being spent doesn’t mean they’re waste or fraud — especially if you’re too lazy or ideologically focused to ask questions about the nature of the spending in the first place.

I learned those lessons more than a decade ago when I covered a great program called the Golden Goose Awards, which recognizes federally funded research that often seemed trivial at the time it was funded but later yielded lifesaving science or commercially important technologies.

At the time federally funded researchers often found their projects mocked, trivialized, belittled, or under attack — in ways that almost seem quaint today as the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE team take a chainsaw and blowtorch to the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NOAA, USGS, and other federal agencies.

How many of those now-unfunded research projects could have protected us from climate change, pollution and toxic chemicals, or the extinction crisis?

We may never know the answer to that question, but a look at two of the most recent Golden Goose Award winners offers a clue:

• A project about the red-cockaded woodpecker that revealed new ways to protect all birds.
• An observation that “bright pink penguin poop appeared on satellite images” yielded a 40-year effort to track penguin populations (and all wildlife) from space.

You can find a lot more in past years’ award recipients, including a study of frog skin that has saved 50 million human lives and another frog study that revealed the nature of the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus.

For more on the hidden value of federally funded scientific research — and ideas about how to protect it in the future — let’s look back at my November 2013 article on the Golden Goose Awards, originally published in IEEE-USA’s Today’s Engineer. The original is no longer online, so the publisher has approved its republication below.

Federally Funded Research: The Key to Unexpected (and Valuable) Discoveries

One of the most important discoveries in modern genetics and biotechnology got its start more than four decades ago with a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the humble bacteria that live in high-temperature geysers in Yellowstone National Park.

Back in 1969 microbiologist Thomas Brock and his undergraduate research assistant Hudson Freeze journeyed to Yellowstone and discovered a new bacteria species, which they named Thermus aquaticus bacteria, in the waters of the Lower Geyser Basin. In the years that followed their discovery unlocked new fields of study for other researchers, inspiring new technologies for studying DNA, genetic tests to diagnose diseases and conditions, and sequencing the human genome.

That’s the beauty and importance of federally funded research, says Freeze, who today serves as the director of the genetic disease program at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “You can’t predict where the research is going to go next.” [ed. emphasis mine]

Taking a Chance on the Unexpected

The early work of Brock and Freeze has not been forgotten. This year they are among the honorees of the second annual Golden Goose Award, created to recognize scientists and engineers whose federally funded research led to “significant human and economic benefits.” The award, now in its second year, highlights seemingly obscure federally funded studies that led to later breakthroughs which had a major impact on society. The other recipients of this year’s award include John Eng, whose study of Gila monster venom led to an important drug for diabetes; and David Gale, Lloyd Shipley and Alvin Roth, whose separate research into subjects as varied as marriage stability and urban school choice programs led to the creation of the national kidney exchange program.

“The value of federally funded research has been proven time and time again,” says Barry Toiv, vice president for public affairs at the Association of American Universities, one of the organizations sponsoring the Golden Goose Award. “Economists suggest that 50% of growth over the last several decades has been a result of innovation, much of which is in turn a result of federally funded research at American universities.”

Toiv says this research is important even though “it’s impossible to know where so much of it is going to lead. It’s basic research, mostly, and it may not have some end-result in mind when it takes place.”

Federally funded research is the “only place that you can take that kind of chance,” says Freeze. “Private industry can’t do it because they have to show that they’re working on something that will eventually yield a profit.” He notes that the lifesaving research being done at his own organization, a nonprofit, would probably not be conducted at all in the for-profit world.

Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, echoes this observation. “There’s not a lot of room for fundamental science in an environment where people are driven by the next quarterly report.” He says corporations have a hard time justifying investments that “may take decades to pay off or pay off in a completely different way than anticipated and not necessarily in a way that would enrich the company which did the work.”

ORNL receives its funding through the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, as well as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Although the lab does tend to work in areas that Mason characterizes as “not too far away from some kind of end-use application,” the fact that they do not build or sell anything means they are not restricted to work that has an immediate commercial application. “We can push things to a point of proof of principle and then, hopefully, hand it off to the private sector or the Department of Defense or whoever to really deploy it.”

Research for All

Beyond funding individual projects, federal dollars also help pay for collective resources that become available to researchers from around the country. ORNL, for example, hosts the famous Titan supercomputer, the Spallation Neutron Source, and the High Flux Isotope Reactor, among other tools.

“It’s a big investment,” Mason says. “These are shared resources. They serve a wide range of communities.”

These types of systems exist outside the scope of most if not all corporate budgets, says IEEE Fellow Pramod Khargonekar, assistant director for the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Directorate. “Modern scientific and engineering research involves very sophisticated infrastructure, whether that infrastructure is physical laboratories, instruments or computational resources. It’s very difficult to imagine that any entity other than the federal government would have the resources to create and then support and sustain this kind of fundamental, long-term basic research. I think it’s just too expensive for any single entity.”

Beyond that, Mason points out that the majority of the research conducted at government facilities is open-literature research.

“It’s not proprietary, so again, how would you ever justify a return to shareholders if the results are just going to be published in the open literature?”

Since most of this research is basic science, it is also hard to protect it as intellectual property, a priority for corporate research.

Outside of the research itself, the federal government helps support the development of young scientists.

“We’re not just federally funding research,” Toiv says, “we’re also funding training of scientists and engineers, and this has been extraordinarily successful for the country.”

Khargonekar himself benefited from that support back in 1985 when, as a young researcher, he received the NSF’s Presidential Investigator Award.

“I must say it was one of the best things that have happened to me in professional life,” he tells me. “I still remember receiving the certificate with President Reagan’s signature on it. You know, I was born in India and I came to U.S. to do my graduate work. But to receive an award from the President of the United States left a deep impression on me and was very, very helpful in my early research.”

He used the funding from the award to attract “some really outstanding graduate students” and together they wrote a number of papers he says have had a very strong impact on the field of control theory. “That NSF Presidential Investigator Award was certainly very critical to our success and I think at the foundation of my professional career,” he says.

Despite Successes, Threats Abound

Despite the proven track record of federally funded research, budgets continue to shrink. The federal sequester of 2011 and the shutdown of 2013 both hurt federally funded science, and some politicians see the need to cut things even more.

“Research funding is going down,” Toiv says. “It’s not just flat. It’s just declining.” Many research labs have had to shutter projects, lay off employees and scale back their operating hours as a result of these cuts.

Meanwhile a few politicians even go as far as to mock federally funded science projects, something we first saw decades ago when then-Senator William Proxmire began issuing his monthly Golden Fleece Awards. (The Golden Goose Award is named in part as a response to Proxmire’s awards.)

“This is damaging to the public’s view of science,” Toiv says. “When policymakers ridicule individual examples of research, when they look for things that sound funny, when they target and when they try to de-fund them or even try to de-fund entire disciplines, they are dismissing the possibilities of discovery. They are, in the long run, damaging the country, because they are limiting the possibilities of innovation that benefits the economy, that leads to a new industry and that leads to a new idea that ends up saving lives.”

The public isn’t the only group to feel the effect of this dismissal. Researchers feel it as well.

“If the creativity of researchers is stifled, if they are worried or if federal agencies are worried that they can’t fund research, it could damage the entire innovation enterprise that has made this country,” Toiv says.

While Sanford-Burnham has ramped up its efforts to attract additional funding from philanthropists and to license some of its discoveries, that may not be the most sustainable path. Freeze says funding uncertainty has already created a brain drain in his organization, as faculty members have left to take positions overseas. Similar brain drains are happening around the country, as other nations attract people with promises of more stable funding. Several European countries, China and Korea are pouring their resources into research and basing their systems on that in the United States.

“Other countries are absolutely trying to imitate this,” Toiv says, “because the magnitude of the success of the scientific enterprise in this country is unquestionable.” He points at countries such as China, which is developing new research universities at a record pace. “They’re not going to match our research universities in the short run, but in the long they are.”

Let’s Talk

Although Mason acknowledges that other countries are overtaking us, he says the United States remains the “gold standard” for federally funded research. Khargonekar used the same phrase when describing the NSF grant review process, which he calls “one of the very best review processes anywhere in the world.” That helps to support the high quality of the research being done in this country. “We do the best job we can for the taxpayers and for the public so that their investments help society as best as is possible.”

But do the public and legislators get that message? Freeze suggests that researchers in general “haven’t done the greatest job at the grassroots level of educating people about science and where science funding comes from.”

Khargonekar takes it further: “We, the scientific community and the engineering community, need to continuously make the case to the public and the policymakers as to why investment in research is critically important for national progress, our well-being and our society to remain economically competitive, health of our citizens, and the security of the nation.”

And Mason recommends that emphasizing the value of science in general may help to alleviate fears about the economy.

“A component of solving the deficit problem has to be growth in the economy,” he says. “You’ve got to grow the revenues. You’ve got to grow the economy, and innovation technology research is a critical part of that.”

Toiv suggests that politicians may need to be better educated about the value of scientific research.

“What policymakers sometimes don’t realize is that the work that researchers do may end up leading to some extraordinary innovation, but it’s impossible to know at the time. It is discovery upon discovery, twists and turns. Researchers are looking for one thing and they find something else. There’s serendipity often involved.”

How do we turn things around? Freeze suggests that a well-prepared team of engineers going out and talking to local groups could help do the trick. “Just try and think what a thousand scientists could do by going out there and preaching the value of science. It would be revolutionary.”

It may also help to embrace and promote why we conduct science in the first place.

“It speaks to us as human beings who are curious about our place in the world and want to know how the world works,” Khargonekar says. “Since the dawn of human civilization that fundamental drive to know and explore the frontier is part of what makes for a great society.”