What The Trump Administration Could Mean for Public Land

Changing politics can have big implications for the places we get outside. Here’s what the new makeup of the federal government could mean for the country’s iconic landscapes.

ByNick Mott

Updated:

Mar 31, 2025

Table of contents

Land Protections

Public Lands Management

Endangered Species

Oil and Gas Drilling and Mining

Logging

Environmental Permitting

What You Can Do

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A new administration takes office this January, which could mean monumental changes for public land nationwide. From cutting back national monuments to a renewed charge on oil and gas drilling on federal land, Donald Trump’s track record and campaign rhetoric give us a healthy guess of what we can expect for the four years ahead. Below, we’ll break down what to watch out for as the new administration begins and pose key questions we’ll track as time goes by. We will create the same article for every future incoming administration regardless of party affiliation.

Update, April 2025: In January, just before President Trump took office, we took a stab at guessing at what his administration might mean for public land. We knew the impact might be substantial, but the pace of change in just the first few months of the administration has been staggering—and beyond anything we expected. The impacts on public land began fast, with the appointment of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to the Secretary of the Interior. Burgum has long had ties to the oil and gas industry and has professed that he sees public land as part of the country’s “balance sheet.” While we have about $36 trillion in debt, Burgum argues that the oil, gas, trees, and more on public land are part of the country’s “assets”—with as much as $100 trillion in value. (Recreation and wildlife are notably absent from his public rhetoric, although a coalition of outdoor companies did support his nomination.) Burgum also announced an agency effort to develop public land to address the country’s affordable housing crisis. At the same time, President Trump issued a series of executive orders to increase the country’s oil drilling, mining, and logging on public land. He had one particularly noteworthy other idea, too: he mandated that the country create a so-called “sovereign wealth fund,” or a government-owned pool of investable dollars. Government watchdogs think selling off the “assets” in our public land might be the only feasible source of the trillions of dollars required for such a fund.

The other major and pressing impacts on public land have been on the work of management agencies. Grants, contracts, and scientific research have been stopped altogether. Budgets are poised to be slashed. Thousands of workers were terminated from the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, simply for having “probationary” status (meaning they were relatively new at their current position). For many workers, that move was reversed in court—at least temporarily. But the government also has so-called “Reductions in Force” mandated for all federal agencies, a formal bureaucratic process to downsize the number of employees. Insider leaks suggest these reductions could be even larger than the first round of firings. Other efforts are also under way to weaken the country’s environmental review process and endangered species protections. At the same time, the administration is considering shrinking national monuments, and many expect an announcement on that front in the months to come. For even many government employees, the shifts in public land management have been fast, hard to follow, utterly confusing, and demoralizing. A few months into the Trump Administration, the changes have just begun. We’ll continue to follow what happens next.

Land Protections

During his last four years in office, President Trump made some massive changes to our federal land system across the country. Below, we break down that track record and what it means looking ahead.

According to federal law, the president has the power to establish national monuments. However, a president can’t unilaterally revoke that designation. That said, presidents can shrink national monuments—and that’s exactly what President Trump did his last time in office. In 2017, according to a study published in Science, his administration made the largest reduction in national monuments in history. He shrank Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by 85 and 51 percent, respectively, removing more than two million acres from national monument status combined. The administration’s primary motivation for removing those protections was to expand energy production on federal lands. In 2021, the Biden Administration restored full protections for both national monuments, citing the regions’ significance to flora and fauna and deep-rooted historic and cultural connections to tribes.

For a sample of what else might be ahead, it’s worth digging into the weeds just a bit. The controversial “Project 2025” put out by far-right think tank The Heritage Foundation was publicly disavowed by Trump during his campaign, so there is no clarity on how many of its policies will actually be implemented. However, Project 2025’s ties to the past and future Trump Administration are strong and there is significant overlap with his campaign agenda and speeches. Thus, it’s one possible data point among others.

Project 2025 digs into a wishlist for public land management in a chapter authored by William Perry Pendley, former head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Trump’s first administration. That chapter goes beyond Trump’s reductions at Bear Ears and Escalante. It calls for eliminating the Antiquities Act, which grants the president authority to designate national monuments. This would mean the removal of one of the country’s most powerful tools to protect federal land.

Hiker standing by canyon wearing Danner Trail 2650 hiking shoes

In a 2021 executive order, President Biden put forth a monumental call: To help tackle the climate crisis, America ought to conserve at least 30 percent of its lands and waters by 2030. As Biden took office, about 12 percent of U.S. land was protected. He managed to increase protections by about 1 percent during his time in office. That’s no small feat, but it’s only a tiny dent in the administration’s goal.

Although extremely popular with the public, according to polling, President Trump is likely to reverse course on this ambitious goal. Project 2025 explicitly calls for vacating President Biden’s order. It also goes further, urging the administration to reinstate Trump’s own rule, which mandated state and local approval for any new federal property added to our public land system through the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The LWCF enables the government to purchase new public land and is one of the country’s most effective tools for conserving large spaces. Critics worry that requiring local approval could prioritize extractive industries like oil and mining, putting small-scale economic interest above the good of ecosystems.

However, the news wasn’t all bad for public land under Donald Trump. In March 2019, he signed into law the largest public lands package in a decade. Those bills protected 2 million acres in the West and created five new national monuments. The former president also signed the Great American Outdoors Act into law, which made a dent in addressing the maintenance backlog on our public lands and permanently authorized and funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Still, the Center for American Progress estimates that the Trump Administration tried to remove protections for about 35 million acres of public lands during his first four years in office, about 1,000 times more acreage than it protected. Looking ahead, we’ll be tracking:

Where and how much will the administration strip protections for public lands, particularly national monuments?
How will the Antiquities Act fare under the Trump Administration, especially with a Supreme Court that is partial to gutting it?
What’s the fate of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante?
Will the Trump Administration add protections to land anywhere in the nation?

Hiking on trail with Zpacks Carbon trekking poles

Public Lands Management

Our public lands are predominantly managed by agencies within the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), which falls under the Department of Agriculture. Combined, the DOI and USFS had a budget of about $28 billion in 2024 and employed about 100,000 people nationwide. Taken together, the agencies who manage our public land—including the USFS, BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service—have a backlog of unfinished work running into the tens of billions of dollars, and it’s quickly growing. The USFS is so strapped for cash they announced they wouldn’t be hiring any non-fire seasonal employees in the coming fiscal year. That will leave work as basic and important as trail and bathroom maintenance unmet. (You can read more about How We Fund Our Public Lands here.)

At the same time, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading the new (unofficial) “Department of Government Efficiency” and have vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. No one’s certain if this is truly possible or where all that money will come from. But the cuts could certainly impact the already struggling agencies that manage our public land. While public land agencies have large budgets, the sum pales in comparison to other federal agencies. Even significant cuts at the DOI wouldn’t go far toward reaching the Trump Administration’s goals. However, it isn’t unlikely that the all-hands-on-deck quest for “efficiency” and a smaller government will make its way to the institutions that manage our public lands. As the effort gets underway, we’ll be watching:

Will the call for more efficiency and less government spending impact the agencies managing our public land? If so, what will the cost be for the places we love?
How will we fund our public lands in the future?

Entering Public Lands sign with lake in background

Endangered Species

Saving critters from going extinct seems like a relatively uncontroversial idea, but the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of the most politically polarizing pieces of legislation out there. Pendley’s section of Project 2025 (mentioned above) lays out a laundry list of items he wants Trump to accomplish when it comes to the ESA. That list includes removing protections for grizzly bears and wolves, giving states more of a say in sage grouse management, and abolishing the U.S. Geological Survey’s scientific research work—the federal government’s premier biology service, which studies everything from grizzlies to climate change. During his last administration, Trump also enacted rules that weakened the ESA. Those included measures that allowed the consideration of economics—rather than just biology—when establishing species’ protections and lightened protections for “threatened” (rather than “endangered”) species. Biden reversed most of Trump’s rules, but it’s likely Trump will bring them back.

At the same time as the regulatory fate of the ESA is up in the air, a lot is happening on the ground. The federal government is poised to reintroduce a small population of grizzly bears in the North Cascades, a decision about whether to remove protections for Yellowstone and Glacier-area grizzlies is expected in January, there are various calls to add protections for gray wolves or to strip them away, and many of Trump’s trademark initiatives threaten species from the Sonoran pronghorn to the polar bear. With more than 1,600 species in the U.S. protected as endangered or threatened, the stakes are higher than ever. As we dive deeper into what some scientists call a sixth mass extinction, we’ll be watching:

Will wolves and grizzlies make it off the endangered and threatened list?
Will legislation that weakens the ESA make it through Congress?
Will populations of charismatic but controversial animals like grizzlies and wolves decline?
What will ESA “reforms” look like?
Will the broader government funding cuts impact how we conserve endangered species?

bighorn sheep standing on rock looking at camera

Oil and Gas Drilling and Mining

During his campaign, Trump unabashedly promised to “Drill, baby, drill.” With billions of barrels of oil buried underneath federal land, this could impact areas throughout the West. During Biden’s presidency, the administration aimed to slow drilling on federal land. His administration’s efforts to do so entailed a moratorium that was overturned in court, a ban on coal extraction in Montana and Wyoming’s lucrative Powder River Basin, and regulations that made it more expensive to drill. However, during his time in office, drilling on public lands occasionally surpassed even Trump’s most oil-happy years. Still, Trump is poised to forge a path that’s full steam (or, I guess, oil) ahead. He appointed a favorite of the oil industry—former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum—to head the Department of the Interior, and Project 2025 stresses an “energy dominance” approach to public land. Some key areas to pay attention to are:

What’s the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? The area on Alaska’s far northern coast is home to polar bears and some of the wildest landscapes in the U.S. It could also produce more than 10 billion barrels of crude oil. Biden tried to stop drilling there. Trump’s likely to try to get it going again.
Could a copper-sulfide mine impact the Boundary Waters? Trump tried to push the controversial mine ahead in his first administration. Biden issued a mineral ban on federal lands in the area. We’ll see what’s next.
Will there be more extraction in Colorado’s Thompson Divide and in the buffer around Chaco Culture National Historic Park? Project 2025 specifically calls out these areas.
How much and where will a push for more oil, gas, and minerals result in extraction on public land?

Logging

Timber harvesting on public lands has radically changed over the last few decades. After reaching highs in the 1980s, the number of trees cut on public land declined precipitously, especially in the Pacific Northwest. This was due to Endangered Species Act protections for the northern spotted owl, mechanization in the industry, and broader economic changes. However, Trump and Project 2025 are both pushing to up the pace and scale of logging projects. Proponents claim that logging can reduce wildfire risk and invigorate small, rural communities. But scientists say only careful removal of small-diameter trees with little economic value and close proximity to communities bolsters fire readiness, especially when coupled with prescribed burns to further thin out fuel and simulate historic wildfires. A couple of key issues to focus on include:

What will happen in Alaska’s 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest? Trump exempted the area from the federal “Roadless Rule” to promote logging there, and Biden restored protections. Project 2025 calls for a renewed push for timber extraction.
President Biden took steps to protect old-growth forests, in particular. Large, old, fire-resilient trees can sequester carbon and work as a climate solution. Will President Trump reverse course and aim to ramp up harvesting of ancient trees?

Environmental Permitting

Passed in 1970 under President Richard Nixon, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is one of our bedrock environmental laws. The act forces the government to analyze the environmental impacts of its projects and allows ample public input on how those projects should proceed. However, critics allege that activist organizations have divorced the act from its original purpose. By suing over every major project, they argue, environmental groups create costly, often years-long delays in vital federal projects. Of course, proponents of NEPA say the lawsuits are the result of very real problems: namely, continually putting economics over ecosystems. In an era of massive wildfires and climate change, getting speedy work done promotes resilience to the catastrophes we’re experiencing. At the same time, NEPA continues to serve a vital role in protecting ecosystems and habitats.

During his last administration, President Trump “streamlined” NEPA to speed up the permitting process and consequently exempt some projects from analysis entirely. Will he reinstate these rules, as called for in Project 2025?
Trump rolled back more than 100 rules related to clean air and water. How far will the administration go this time around?

Foggy mountains and trees on steep slope

What You Can Do

To us, the key question ahead is: How will the new administration balance economic development and ecosystems? Based on campaign rhetoric and the administration's track record, it’s highly likely that delicate balance will skew towards the economy over the well-being of species, open space, and habitat. The above is just the beginning of the Trump Administration’s possible impact on public lands. For example, a Utah lawsuit that could affect millions of acres of federal public land across the West is pending before a possibly sympathetic Supreme Court. So, what can you do to make sure public land stays public and protected?

First and foremost, connect with organizations where you live. If you live in an area with lots of public land, one or more organizations are likely dedicated to protecting it. Get involved, write letters, and get your voice heard. Your legislators can also be a key resource. If protections are on the chopping block where you live, call your representatives and make your perspective clear. National organizations like Protect Our Winters, The Wilderness Society, and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers can be great resources for helping you to articulate your opinions and understand what’s pending at the federal level. There’s no question that the federal government will be charting a vastly different course toward public land in the years ahead. Fortunately, our political system is built to give you a voice.

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