Public lands are front-and-center in the news lately, and just about everyone has something to say about it.
On a seemingly innocuous post on Instagram, Steven Rinella added a stinging condemnation of the current attitude around public lands:
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Rinella is a fantastic ambassador for public lands, and I appreciate how he uses his platform to bring these issues to light.
Public Lands Workers Fired
But it’s not just Rinella making a fuss about accessing national forests, parks, monuments, or worrying about those locations potentially being sold off to the highest bidder. Public lands are in the crosshairs right now as part of President Trump’s efforts to cut government spending and increase domestic energy production. As recently as last month, around 4,400 workers were laid off from the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish & Wildlife Service, and National Park Service. An attempt to rehire those workers via legislation in the U.S. Senate failed.
Losing those workers before spring, when visitation usually creeps up at National Parks, won’t help these places weather tourist season. But deeper than that, those cuts of federal workers sent a shockwave through the industry that’s best reflected in headlines like “Trump’s Mass Federal Layoffs Raise Concerns About the Future of Public Lands,” “‘Wild West’: Oregon’s public lands face uncertain future amid federal job cuts,” and “As a judge orders reinstatement of federal workers, Westerners worry about instability on public land.”
On Friday, March 14, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration needed to reinstate most of those 4,400 workers, many of whom were probationary employees. And according to Ella Lee at The Hill, the Trump administration is following orders.
The decision is likely to be appealed, however, and that doesn’t mean things are back to normal in these land management agencies, either. As Lee wrote, many of these reinstated workers will be placed on paid administrative leave, pending resolution of other lawsuits.
She goes on to say that “the change could cause chaos for fully reinstated employees, in particular, who must be onboarded and trained again but could lose their positions once more if an appellate ruling reverses (this) decision.”
Drilling, Development On The Table
While staffing at land management agencies is a legitimate concern, other problems are also grabbing headlines, like this one from The Denver Post: “New western Colorado congressman proposes reopening of thousands of acres of federal land to drilling.”
Freshman representative Jeff Hurd has introduced the Productive Public Lands Act, which the Post reports would “undo decisions made in 2024 and 2025 under the Biden administration on how to manage vast swaths of Bureau of Land Management land across Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, and Montana.” If passed, the bill would impact 2.3 million acres in Colorado alone.
Selling Public Lands
Among the most shocking headlines, however, are the ones that I suspect got Rinella’s attention in the first place. Time Magazine ran an op/ed from Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert, in which he says, “The Trump administration (is) trying to make it easier to lease or sell 640 million acres of public lands.”
The Center for American Progress, a D.C.-based think tank, ran a story a month ago claiming that “The Trump administration seems to be signaling that selling out and selling off the nation’s public lands to the highest bidder might provide the necessary funding” for a sovereign wealth fund, which Trump has attempted to establish through executive order.
It appears that the threat to public lands is very real, but I think the folks running things in D.C. have underestimated the bipartisan support for national public land. As Wilderness.org reports, Democratic representative Gabe Vasquez, of New Mexico, and Republican representative Ryan Zinke, of Montana, just introduced bipartisan legislation that would “ban the sale or transfer of most public lands by the Department of the Interior and U.S. Forest Service, and require congressional oversight of any public lands disposal.”
In addition to that legislation, it’s likely any sale of public land would be appealed to the Supreme Court. That same court just recently rejected a lawsuit from Utah, where the governor and attorney general tried to claim ownership of 18.5 million acres of public land. The Supreme Court didn’t make any formal comment on the lawsuit, but U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s office made one point that I think should give public lands advocates hope:
“Congress retains exclusive right to control and dispose of public lands through the Property Clause of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution.”
The Supreme Court agrees with that statement, otherwise they would have allowed the lawsuit to proceed. And since Congress can’t even pass a budget right now, I think the likelihood of selling off these lands remains low. It’s worth staying vigilant, however, and doing your part to ensure public lands stay in public hands.