The man President Donald Trump tapped to serve as the government’s top ethics official has for years painted himself a nonpartisan watchdog — someone committed to holding government officials accountable, regardless of party.

But a review of tax documents and public records by Public Domain shows that his organization is a creature of the conservative movement, funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from right-wing dark money groups and tied to a constellation of MAGA influencers and media mouthpieces. In recent months, in a sign of loyalty to the White House, he even intervened to try to block a federal ethics probe into an influential Trump political appointee.

Michael Chamberlain, who served as a communications official in the first Trump administration, founded Protect the Public’s Trust in early 2021, shortly after President Joe Biden took office. For the next four years, Chamberlain and his organization became a thorn in the Biden administration’s side, filing a frenzy of public records requests, ethics complaints and lawsuits targeting high-ranking officials. When Trump reentered office last year, Protect the Public’s Trust suddenly pivoted — it overlooked or defended the myriad conflicts of interest within the Trump team and continued to focus its attention on the previous administration and other Democrats who no longer control the government.

Chamberlain’s evident fealty to Trump and MAGA Republicans appears to have paid off. Last month, Trump nominated Chamberlain to serve as director of the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency responsible for preventing conflicts of interest and ethical violations within the executive branch. Chamberlain does not have a law degree, as is the norm for OGE directors.

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Chamberlain did not respond to Public Domain’s requests for comment.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, sees Chamberlain as a “highly partisan” nominee.

“He started up this organization basically to go after ethical problems with Democrats,” Painter said. “I think the significant part of what he said about Biden, it was exaggerated, but there was some truth to it too: there were serious problems with ethics during the Biden administration. Trump is worse and we all know that … and [Chamberlain] said nothing critical of Trump.”

“It’s just one more highly partisan organization that says they’re focusing on ethics.”

For a sense of how Chamberlain might run this key oversight agency, consider his actions after Public Domain revealed last year that Matt Giacona, the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, had used his government position to work on the same policy issues that he had previously advocated for as a long-time offshore oil lobbyist on Capitol Hill. The story sparked a letter from Congressional Democrats urging the Interior Department’s inspector general to open an ethics investigation into Giacona’s conduct.

Chamberlain quickly intervened to defend the Trump appointee. In an October 2025 letter to the Interior Department’s inspector general, Chamberlain ran interference for Giacona’s benefit, discouraging the agency’s top watchdog from launching the ethics investigation.

“Regardless of whether the [Democratic] authors lacked sufficient understanding of the ethics rules or intentionally seek to misdirect the OIG into a baseless partisan investigation, we do hope this letter leaves the Office with the confidence that its resources are better spent elsewhere,” Chamberlain wrote. It remains unclear whether the Inspector General’s office moved forward with a probe into Giacona.

Despite presenting itself as defender of transparency, Protect the Public’s Trust initially misrepresented itself online and in public records requests. As Public Domain co-founder Chris D’Angelo reported for HuffPost in 2023, the group repeatedly described itself as a “501(c)(3) non-profit organization” without having filed the IRS form that is required of 501(c)(3) nonprofits during the first couple years of its operation. In their coverage of PPT’s public records and legal efforts, right-wing media often adopted the group’s “nonprofit” label.

The IRS granted PPT its 501(c)(3) status in May 2023 and a handful of Protect The Public’s Trust tax documents have since been made available to the public. They show that Chamberlain’s group, whose organization goes by Government Oversight and Education Inc on official tax forms, has taken more than $500,000 from Donors Trust, the vast bulk of Protect the Public Trust’s funding in 2023 and 2024 and much of it used to pay Chamberlain’s salary. Donors Trust is a dark-money donor advised fund that shields the identities of its funders, but has been linked to the conservative Koch brothers, the Devos Family and other right-wing billionaires and millionaires.

Chamberlain’s organization also has ties to a well-funded network of conservative media operatives that amplify the MAGA agenda on social media and via a constellation of right-wing news outlets. His organization’s treasurer, Chris Marston, is a well-known Republican political consultant who serves as General Counsel for the Republican Party of Virginia. Marston is also the treasurer for a group called the Institute for Citizen Focused Services, a shadowy organization with a $4 million budget that is led by Hubbel Relat and Doug Domenech. Relat and Domenech are both former Interior Department officials under Trump and allies of David Bernhardt, the powerful MAGA-aligned corporate lobbyist who served as the Interior Secretary during Trump’s first term.

The Institute for Citizen Focused Services funds right-wing media operatives, and in recent years has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees to conservative influencers and journalists, including reporter Allum Bohkari and influencer Mike Benz.

The Institute has in turn received more than a million dollars in funding from the Informing America Foundation (IAF), another shadowy organization closely tied to John Solomon, a MAGA-aligned journalist turned White House operative who recently made headlines for his involvement in shaping Trump’s national address accusing China of election interference in the United States. Solomon oversees a constellation of right-leaning media platforms that include Just The News and his own podcast, John Solomon Reports.

Just The News, which receives funding from IAF, consistently amplifies the work of Protect the Public’s Trust. Chamberlain also frequently appears on Solomon’s podcast. With their myriad overlapping ties, organizations like Protect The Public’s Trust, the Institute for Citizen Focused Services, the Informing America Foundation, Just The News and other Solomon-linked entities appear to constitute an “ecosystem of right-wing news,” as Mother Jones described it in a 2025 article.

Marston, Bernhardt, Solomon and the Institute for Citizen Focused Services did not respond to requests for comment.

In recent months, Chamberlain has used his organization to support the Trump administration’s pro-oil agenda. In May, his group sent a letter to the Commerce Department and the National Marine Fisheries Service challenging environmental protections for the Rice’s whale, a critically endangered animal whose listing under the Endangered Species Act has proven inconvenient for oil and gas producers in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Trump administration has used a variety of aggressive regulatory maneuvers to undermine protections for the species, and Chamberlain’s group in turn has challenged the scientific findings underpinning the whale’s ESA listing. Policy related to the Rice’s whale, incidentally, is one of the issues that BOEM’s Matt Giacona worked on both as a government official and offshore oil lobbyist, and which sparked ethics concerns about his conduct. After Protect The Public’s Trust intervened to challenge the Rice’s whale ESA listing, John Solomon’s Just The News wrote an article amplifying the group’s efforts.

Painter, the Bush-era ethics lawyer, said he sees Protect the Public’s Trust as part of a bigger problem and pattern of so-called nonpartisan watchdogs forming and then embracing a partisan agenda.

“I would like to see more who are willing to speak out about ethics violations from both Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of that.”

Back in May, two of our Public Domain crew — myself and Roque Planas — spent a few days bouncing around Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah. We camped in the Valley of the Gods. We hiked to an ancient ruin known as The Citadel, a defensive fortress that sits atop a remote rock peninsula along a deep canyon. We explored, cooked food under the stars, laughed and talked about the fight for the future of America’s public lands.

No one bothered us or interrupted that freedom.

Then on Monday, I watched President Donald Trump and his team tell a room full of reporters at the White House that all of the activities I had just enjoyed in Bears Ears were “virtually” impossible because the monument designation shut down recreation on the landscape.

“You can’t do anything,” Trump said before signing a pair of proclamations to again dismantle the boundaries of Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. “You can’t go hunting, you can’t go fishing, you can’t do anything, you can virtually not even walk on it.”

Those claims were totally false. But instead of correcting her boss, Interior Deputy Secretary Kate MacGregor backed him up.

“That’s exactly right, sir,” she said. “You are remedying that today.”

The Trump administration has a long history of lying and cherry picking data to advance its narrative about previous presidents purportedly abusing the Antiquities Act to designate large national monuments and lock people out.

But this was a different level of dishonesty. As they spoke, a giddy-looking Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who spent his career advocating for the disposal of federal public lands, smiled in the background.

Hunting and fishing, nevermind walking, are explicitly permitted in both Utah monuments. One needs to look no further than the presidential proclamations that established the sites or, in the case of hunting, Utah’s own hunting regulations, which note: “All of Utah’s national parks and monuments — except the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments — are closed to hunting.”

Despite MacGregor’s assertion, Trump didn’t “remedy” anything here. In fact, opening the landscapes to potential mining, drilling and other extractive development — the primary motivations for Monday’s rollbacks — could negatively impact hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation opportunities. After all, you won’t find many people flocking to a coal or uranium mine for their hunting, fishing or hiking adventures.

The Interior Department did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment Tuesday.

During a press call Tuesday morning, Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) reflected on a recent turkey hunt he went on in Bears Ears and argued Trump’s rollbacks will hurt the outdoor recreation economy in rural Utah.

“Public lands are an economic engine, and it’s a sustainable engine,” he said. “Outdoor recreation, tourism, hunting and fishing support rural communities.”

Asked about the administration’s false claims about hunting, fishing and recreational access in the monuments, Autumn Gillard, coordinator of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, called it disappointing.

“There was no consultation initiated with the tribes on this issue,” Gillard told reporters. “If Utah leadership felt that their constituents were not being able to access this national monument in the way that they thought was applicable, then a conversation of mitigation should have been held with tribal nations so that we could have worked together to help mediate this issue. Statistics and data proves in the past that Utahns were accessing this monument, are still accessing it, and are in favor of maintaining the protection and preservation of the landscape found within Grand Staircase.”

At Monday’s signing ceremony, the Trump administration and allied Utah Republicans also resurrected another bogus claim about national monuments: that early monuments were small and that the Antiquities Act has been abused to safeguard large landscapes.

“The Antiquities Act is 120 years old, but the first monument that was created was only 1,200 acres,” MacGregor said at the signing event. “So if you think about it, since then, President Clinton, President Obama and President Biden have increased the acreage in the state of Utah and locked those acres up.”

Lee later chimed in to argue that the Antiquities Act was initially intended to protect “a few hundred, maybe a thousand or two [thousand], acres at the most.”

What MacGregor, Lee and others refuse to acknowledge is that presidents of both parties have consistently used the Antiquities Act, which President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law in 1906, to protect large areas as national monuments. In 1908, Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument — the precursor to what is now Grand Canyon National Park. Similarly, in 1909, Roosevelt designated 610,000 acres as Mount Olympus National Monument. It became Olympic National Park in 1938.

Trump’s proclamations on Monday strip a combined 2.9 million acres from monument protection, with the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante each being cut approximately 90%. It is the largest rollback of public land protections in American history — significantly larger than Trump’s attack on the two monuments back in 2017.

On Monday, Trump boasted that his latest rollback “is better than the first time.”

“We’ve done something that was, I think, very desperately needed,” Trump said, adding that the monument designations were “very unfair to the people of Utah.”

In reality, more than 70% of Utah voters support keeping Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as national monuments, according to a recent survey.

Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement after Trump’s proclamation signing that while Trump may have little understanding of the issue, MacGregor knows better. MacGregor is a veteran of the first Trump administration who between stints at Interior worked as an executive at energy giant NextEra Energy.

“Giving the president documents to sign based on false information is unconscionable,” Weiss said. “If she’s going to take over running America’s public lands while Doug Burgum plays pool boy, the least she can do is be honest with the president and the American people.”

Monday’s obliteration of the two national monuments came on the heels of Trump delivering a speech at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, during which he compared himself to America’s conservation president.

In March 2025, news trickled out through Internet forums that the Utah Legislature might double the price of non-resident hunting permits. This would have made Utah one of the most expensive states for nonresidents to hunt big game, fueling hunter’s frustration as their sport evolves from a working-class birthright to a luxury for the rich.

The fee hike caught hunters by surprise. Utah’s Department of Wildlife Resources, or DWR, normally raises permit fees through a lengthy process that requires multiple public meetings around the state. This time, the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature buried the changes over 100 pages deep in an agency-funding bill. Hunting fees help pay for wildlife habitat preservation through the much-touted North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. But the hunter-backed wildlife groups that normally champion such measures said nothing, and the DWR did not issue a public statement about the changes until after Gov. Spencer Cox, R, signed the bill into law.

Behind the scenes, however, state Rep. Casey Snider, R-Paradise, was working with wildlife agency leaders to raise money to purchase tens of thousands of game-rich acres from a separate state agency. It was the culmination of a series of moves that Snider, a public-land hunting champion, had made in recent years to shield some of the state’s finest hunting lands from development or sell-off.

In order to do so, however, Snider and his allies at the agency — including former legislator and current Department of Natural Resources Director Joel Ferry — avoided publicizing their efforts. The group was eyeing parcels owned by the Utah Trust Lands Administration, or TLA, formerly known as the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, or SITLA. The agency has historically allowed public hunting access on most of its holdings, but that activity doesn’t raise significant revenue. And unlike most public lands, state trust lands have a mandate to maximize their economic potential in order to fund the public school system. When trust lands are put up for sale, state law requires the agency to take the highest bid.

The state Legislature has not historically authorized the funds for wildlife officials to make a timely bid when the Trust Lands Administration offers land for sale, certainly not enough to win a bidding war. Depending on the parcel, several entities might be interested — real estate developers, oil and gas companies, mineral extractors. But Snider and his allies hoped to head off one potential buyer in particular: The Ute Indian Tribe.

The Uintah and Ouray Reservation at one point comprised 4 million acres in northwest Utah. But the imposition of “allotment,” a federal requirement to sell tribal land to individual settlers beginning in the late 19th century, left the reservation checkerboarded. Then, in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt commandeered more than 1 million acres of that land to create what became Ashley National Forest. In turn, Utah ultimately took some of that pilfered territory and enrolled it as state trust land. Today, the trust lands agency controls half a million acres within the reservation’s boundaries, and tribal members must pay tens of thousands of dollars annually in grazing permits to use it.

But the Ute Tribe wants its ancestral lands back. It has tried to buy trust land at auction in the past and is currently suing the Department of Interior for the return of 1.5 million acres. After finding out about the quiet land deals, the Ute Tribe re-filed a long-standing lawsuit in November, accusing Utah officials of fraudulently manipulating trust-land sales with “racial animus” to prevent the tribe from winning open bids.

The Ute Tribe declined repeatedly through its lawyer, Linda Cooper, to comment on this story.

Last month, the Trust Land Administration’s board of trustees authorized a no-bid sale of the most coveted block of land, a 50,000-acre roadless portion of the Book Cliffs, to the Department of Natural Resources, DWR’s parent agency — despite the fact that the tribe has challenged the legislation authorizing the sale in court. Though the DWR wants the land to conserve it for wildlife instead of exploiting it for oil and gas, the Trust Lands Administration will retain the mineral rights. And the wildlife agency plans to buy up more parcels in the near future.

CASEY SNIDER, 40, HAS PUSHED a hunter-first agenda since joining the Utah Legislature in 2019, spearheading the campaign to establish a state constitutional right to hunt and fish the following year. He authored a law that required people to buy a state hunting or fishing license in order to recreate on Wildlife Management Areas last year, which drew sharp backlash and an eventual revision after game wardens threatened to ticket confused birders and trail runners.

In a state where the Republican Party has declared war on federal public-land ownership — a policy that critics see as a Trojan horse for privatization — Snider still sees public land as a democratic inheritance that keeps the hunting tradition alive by preserving habitat for dwindling big game populations and giving hunters a place to pursue them. “Opportunities are more and more limited,” Snider said in an interview last year. “It’s more and more crowded. I just think we should prioritize hunting and fishing whenever we can.”

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Trust lands pose a major challenge for public-land hunting defenders like Snider. For more than a century, wildlife officials have preserved hunting access to these lands, some of which are among the state’s most pristine, enjoyed by backpackers, horsepackers and backcountry anglers as well as hunters. But the land agency’s first obligation is to fund Utah’s schools. If it decides it can get a better return by leasing mineral rights to drill for oil or selling the surface rights to another owner, then that’s what its mission requires it to do.

Still, with public-land hunters a major constituency in Utah, the agency also faces pressure to preserve existing hunting access to its lands.

It felt the wrath of public-land hunters in 2018, when it tried to sell a parcel that included Tabby Mountain, a cherished public hunting area in northeastern Utah. The block generated little money for the Trust Lands Administration, so the agency agreed to auction it, with the understanding that Wildlife Resources would scoop it up as the sole interested buyer.

But Tabby Mountain, which is named for the late Ute Chief Tabby-To-Kwanah, lies squarely within the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation’s historic boundaries. When the trust lands agency put the block up for sale, the Ute Tribe outbid the wildlife agency to buy it back.

The Ute Tribe stood on the verge of reacquiring a historic hunting ground and a mountain that tribal members regard as sacred. But the outcome would have been a disaster for the wildlife officials, who had tried to disguise a frictionless inter-agency land transfer as a public auction. The Ute Tribe does not allow non-tribal members to hunt on tribal land.

A week after the auction, the land agency’s board voted to suspend the sale of Tabby Mountain. In 2022, the Ute Tribe sued Utah officials in federal court for discrimination, fraud and breaching its trust obligations to school children after a whistleblower came forward alleging that it had deliberately blocked the sale to keep Tabby Mountain from falling back into Ute hands.

“It’s bad enough that the tribe has to spend millions of dollars just to buy back its own land,” Shaun Chapoose, then-chairman of the Ute Indian Tribe Business Committee, told ICT at the time. “But what really grates is the deceit and treachery with which the state has acted in order to block the sale from going through to the tribe, as the highest bidder.”

SNIDER WAS STILL JUST A junior legislator back when the agency nearly auctioned Tabby Mountain back to the Ute Tribe, but preserving hunter access to trust land would become one of his signature issues. When the Trust Lands Administration put up another prized block of hunting land called Cinnamon Creek for sale a few years later, Snider went on a mad dash to convince the Legislature to fork over the money for Wildlife Resources to buy it.

Buoyed by a swell of sympathetic publicity and financial contributions from conservation groups and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the DWR placed a winning bid and acquired the parcel. But the experience highlighted glaring problems that pretty much guaranteed that it would find itself in that situation again. Wildlife officials lacked a standing budget to buy land, and in Utah, where the Legislature meets once a year for just 45 days, it’s almost always impossible to raise cash for a public agency quickly.

Over the next several sessions, Snider tried to change that. He established a small land-buying fund for the wildlife agency, then, in 2024, spearheaded a bill that allowed the Trust Lands Administration to sell parcels larger than 5,000 acres directly to the DWR for fair market value. The bill drew sharp criticism from the Ute Tribe Business Committee, which saw the law as an attempt to prevent it from buying back ancestral land now owned by the state.

Snider played down those concerns at the time, noting that the law, which passed that year, specifically exempted Tabby Mountain. But Snider had a long history with another large trust land block bordering Ute land.

The Book Cliffs Roadless Area is a roughly 50,000-acre stretch of rugged mountain country nestled in the state’s northeastern corner. Save for a few grazing permits, the area remains untouched by industry. It holds one of the country’s few herds of wild, unfenced buffalo, along with some of Utah’s largest elk and mule deer, and a blue-ribbon native trout fishery.

It also holds oil. In 2013, the trust lands board voted to lease the Book Cliffs Roadless Area for petroleum development. The prospect of drilling the remote wilderness drew such a backlash from hunters and anglers that then-Gov. Gary Herbert stepped in to suspend the lease. Snider, then serving as the state coordinator for Trout Unlimited, was among its most prominent opponents.

By the beginning of the 2025 legislative session, Snider had figured out a way to buy the land. The only thing he needed was the money.

SNIDER RAISED THE MONEY FOR the Book Cliffs and several other Lands Administration parcels quietly, in two ways. First, he gave Wildlife Resources the authority to double the cost of non-resident hunting permits. Raising the price of hunting tags isn’t unusual, but Snider’s approach was. Such proposals traditionally come from the wildlife agency, rather than the Legislature. The proposal is then presented for a lengthy and tediously democratic series of discussions at the agency’s Regional Advisory Committee meetings, where stakeholders have several months to weigh in on the issue. Big changes like fee hikes usually find their way into the hook-and-bullet press, which draws even more attention.

Instead, Snider inserted a clause into the agency appropriations budget that gave the agency the authority to, at its discretion, raise non-resident hunting fees up to double their current cost. The agency said nothing about the fee hikes until they had already become law, then hiked fees for out-of-staters by roughly 40% across the board. (The Department of Wildlife Resources said in an email that it had stayed quiet because it does not comment on pending legislation.)

Overnight, Utah’s non-resident permits went from being some of the most affordable in the West to some of the most expensive. The only state where a non-resident might pay prices topping Utah’s for premium mule deer ($1,079), elk ($1,950) and bighorn sheep ($3,998) permits is Wyoming, which conducts a “special draw” that gives deep-pocketed applicants a higher chance of pulling scarce tags. Wildlife Resources Director Riley Peck defended the price increases at the time in a press release, saying they fell in line with “relevant market values of neighboring states” — a comment eliding the fact that the U.S. system of distributing permits through state agencies was invented precisely to eliminate market pressure on wildlife.

It’s easy for politicians to beat up on out-of-staters who don’t vote in Utah. Snider had to tread even more lightly, however, when it came to raising the money for the Book Cliffs last year. Again he turned to the appropriations process rather than filing standalone legislation. This time he asked legislators to hand the agency a whopping one-time payment of $50 million to buy unspecified tracts of state trust land to preserve hunting access. The funds ultimately came out of the education budget.

The measure invited little discussion when Utah Fiscal Analyst Jonathan Ball presented it to the Executive Appropriations Committee at a Feb. 28 meeting last year. The only committee member to oppose it was Sen. Kathleen Riebe, a Salt Lake City Democrat, who hadn’t even heard about the land purchases until that day. She asked environmental groups she knew for more information about the proposal, only to learn that they didn’t know about it either.

“There was no process or transparency for how we got here,” Sen. Riebe said. “If it’s a good thing, why don’t we champion it more?”

In interviews last year, Snider repeatedly denied that his legislative tactics were aimed at buying trust land in the Book Cliffs or anywhere else.

“It’s not targeted for any particular acquisition,” Snider said last year. “There’s conversations, but there’s no parcel or anything ... (the Trust Lands Administration) is not the target for this. It could be anything — any target that’s critical for public-land hunting and fishing. I don’t ever want to be in that scramble again, like we were on Cinnamon (Creek).”

But records obtained through state freedom of information laws show that was clearly the intent all along.

“How much do I need ongoing to buy the book cliffs (sic) and everything else,” Snider wrote in a Jan. 30, 2025, group text that included DWR Director Peck. “I’m going to grab it,” Snider added, after noting that the hunting fee increases would generate $19.4 million.

Wildlife agency officials also gathered appraisal values for a total of 86,810 acres of trust land in three other areas, identified as North La Sal, South La Sal and Sand Ledges, ahead of last year’s legislative session, at the direction of Department of Natural Resources Director Joel Ferry, records show. (The Natural Resources Department is the parent agency of the Department of Wildlife Resources.) The records redacted the appraisal amounts.

“So, the bottom line is that we may be able to get all five properties for (redacted),” Wildlife Resources Deputy Director Mike Canning wrote in an email to Director Ferry dated Nov. 19, 2024. “If we need to prioritize, I would love to be able to acquire the Book Cliffs Roadless, Tabby Mountain, and La Sal North for somewhere around (redacted). If we’re down to just the best of the best, the Book Cliffs and Tabby would likely be around (redacted).”

Shortly after the session ended, the agency acknowledged its interest in buying the Book Cliffs Roadless Area, noting its value for wildlife habitat, recreation, hunting and camping.

“We would like to have that land under our protection so it’s not getting locked up or sold off,” Canning said last year. “This is actually the opposite of most of the criticisms we hear of Utah and management. This is about bringing more land into public protection.”

In November 2025, the Ute Tribe re-filed its Tabby Mountain lawsuit against the state of Utah. The new complaint added a few defendants, including Snider and his former colleague Ferry, accusing them of illegally colluding to keep the tribe from buying the Book Cliffs Mountains Roadless Area.

IN MAY, THE LAND AGENCY’S trustees gathered to consider the first land deal under Snider’s new law authorizing direct sales to the Department of Natural Resources.

On paper, the deal transferring the Book Cliffs Roadless Area surface rights to the agency looked great. Two separate appraisals estimated the land’s fair market value at about $30 million — far more than the paltry $125,000 that it was bringing in through a mix of grazing and hunter access fees. The Book Cliffs hold oil, but no one has yet figured out a cost-effective way to extract it. If anyone ever does, however, the agency retains the mineral rights.

The deal, however, rested on fuzzy math. The $50 million that Snider and his allies in the Legislature had set aside for the wildlife agency’s land purchases came out of the state’s “rainy day” fund for education. The Trust Land Administration’s mandate is to generate money for public schools. With the Book Cliffs sale, it pocketed $30 million of state money that would have gone to education anyways.

Still, the trustees approved the sale 5-to-1 on June 16.

The sale is likely to invite legal challenges sparked by Snider’s string of political maneuvers. The Ute Tribe is already suing Utah officials for trying to bar it from bidding on the Book Cliffs. Advocates for School Trust Lands, a national nonprofit, is concerned that Snider’s legislation allowing direct sales of trust lands to Wildlife Resources for conservation violates long-standing federal law by artificially tamping down the prices the trust land could fetch in a public auction. If developers do ever find a way to drill oil in a cost-effective manner in the Book Cliffs Roadless Area, the Trust Lands Administration and the Department of Wildlife Resources may once again find their missions — raising money for schools and protecting natural resources respectively — at odds with one another.

“Anything that opens yourself up to a lawsuit is not really prudent as a trustee,” said Tonia Day, the CEO of Advocates for School Trust Lands.

For now, however, Wildlife Resources plans to keep scooping up trust land. The Trust Lands Administration is still reviewing the sale of a handful of other blocks, including the ones the wildlife agency targeted ahead of last year’s legislative session. The wildlife agency still has about $20 million left for land purchases from last year’s appropriation.

Meanwhile, the state’s pricier non-resident hunting permits have created a stable revenue source for future acquisitions. The number of non-resident big game tag applications dropped slightly in 2025 after the price hikes, but applicants still vastly outnumber available permits. Out-of-state hunters paid roughly $7 million into the state’s land-buying fund last year, according to the DWR. Wildlife officials still have the authority to raise fees for those permits by about another 45% before hitting the ceiling legislators imposed last year.

Over the years he’s spent charting a legislative path to buy the Book Cliffs, Snider has emphasized his land conservation ethos, while generally sidestepping his long-simmering tensions with the Ute Tribe — much less acknowledging that he and his allies in the Legislature purposely blocked them from bidding on trust lands. With the deal closed, however, Snider now speaks more freely.

“These large blocks should be open to every member of the public, tribal or non-tribal,” Snider said shortly after the Book Cliffs sale, adding: “Tabby Mountain should be open to tribal members and non-tribal members. Go ask the public if they want to see lands they’ve been publicly recreating on privatized or locked up. I don’t think they do.”

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By Mark Olalde for ProPublica and Jimmy Tobias for High Country News

This story was originally published by ProPublica and High Country News, and is reprinted here with permission.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

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The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.

Public lands grazing is overseen by a nearly century-old system that heavily subsidizes some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address its harms to the environment, ProPublica and High Country News found last year.

Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management — the first overhaul since 1995 — would instead expand the practice.

The proposed rules would also ratchet back public participation in the agency’s decisions to allow grazing on federal public lands. The BLM’s proposed updates would strictly limit who has a say and when they can object, eliminating many steps where the public has been able to observe and comment on decisions to issue or renew permits.

“They’re clearly trying to reduce involvement of anyone other than ranchers,” said one BLM employee who works on rangeland management.

The BLM did not respond to questions about the proposed regulations, which were released publicly in May and, after a period for public comment, will go back to the agency in mid-July for further review.

In a June news release announcing the action, the agency said it “reflects the Trump administration’s priority to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, promote productive working lands and strengthen local economies.”

ProPublica and High Country News spoke to multiple current and former BLM employees to gauge the impact of the proposed regulations. Some, like the BLM staffer who works on rangeland management, requested not to be named because they still are employed by the agency. The employees agreed that the updated regulations offer several concrete benefits, including a requirement that the agency study the ecological impacts of all uses of public lands — from timber harvesting and recreation to mining and oil drilling. The current rules limit such reviews to the livestock industry, where they have uncovered tens of millions of acres of damage due to overgrazing.

The regulations would also allow the BLM to handle low-level violations of grazing regulations more informally, avoiding potentially unnecessary fights between ranchers and regulators; clean up sections of the code that may be at odds with recent court decisions and laws; and offer the agency and ranchers more flexibility in how they manage the range, allowing for quicker decision-making responding to a local ecosystem’s needs.

Tim Canterbury, president of the Public Lands Council, a ranching trade group, in a news release called the update “a massive step forward.”

He said the existing regulations grew from the “cattle free by ’93” movement of the early 1990s that was hostile to ranching and aimed to rid public lands of livestock. “The resulting regulations all but ensured ranchers did not have the flexibility to take full advantage of the scientific and management advances that the industry has made over the last 35 years,” Canterbury said.

Other groups working on rangeland management say the regulations go too far in the opposite direction, tipping the scales toward ranchers. They point to proposals allowing ranchers to continue business as usual if they appeal agency decisions limiting grazing, threatening Native American tribes’ ability to graze bison and enshrining highly subsidized grazing fees. (ProPublica and High Country News found that in 2024 the federal government charged ranchers $284 million below market rate for the use of public lands.)

“We can expect considerably more places where cows and sheep are going to be and more damage,” said Josh Osher, public policy director of the Western Watersheds Project, a conservation group. “I think we see big impacts on wildlife.”

“Back to the Ronald Reagan Years”

The livestock industry influenced the regulatory rewrite from both outside and inside the Interior Department.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Public Lands Council, two main trade groups, publicly celebrated their meetings with the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments in the spring. Among their agenda items was a memorandum of understanding allowing the trade groups to give guidance to the departments, including on a “Grazing Action Plan” that involved updating regulations.

The groups did not respond to requests for comment. (The Western Landowners Alliance, which represents conservation-minded ranchers and landowners, said it’s still evaluating the regulations.)

Representatives of Native American tribes and conservation groups, meanwhile, told ProPublica and High Country News that the administration offered them no opportunity to provide input on the draft regulations before they were published.

They also take issue with the process due to the involvement of Karen Budd-Falen, a high-ranking official in the Interior Department and a long-time grazing advocate whose family is in the ranching business. She served in the first Trump administration and was barred from discussing grazing policy due to potential conflicts of interest. But after rejoining the department, she received an ethics waiver allowing her to work on grazing policy.

In December, Budd-Falen participated in a discussion about public lands management with Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. During that event, Budd-Falen called grazing regulations the issue that “probably was the closest to my heart” and gave a rare view into the effort to update them.

“You want to know what put the public ranchland out of business — it was Bruce Babbitt’s regulations,” she told Lummis, referring to President Bill Clinton’s Interior secretary from 1993 to 2001. “By the first of next year, you will see fully new regulations that don’t just fix a few of the Babbitt things. We went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”

“I am so excited about these regulations,” she said.

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Native American tribes that manage bison herds say Budd-Falen’s efforts to aid ranchers could hurt their operations. Several rancher and stock grower associations in Montana, which at one time were represented by Budd-Falen, have railed against a conservation group called American Prairie that uses permits to graze bison herds to revitalize local ecosystems. The ranchers worry this will cost them subsidized leases and that the bison could spread disease to their cattle.

The Trump administration has sided with the ranchers in the dispute — first by revoking American Prairie’s permits and then by redrafting grazing regulations to mandate public lands livestock operations be “production-oriented,” potentially eliminating permits for herds used to revitalize ecosystems. Tribes fear they too could lose permits for the bison herds they manage to preserve cultural practices or restore the land.

“We’re really concerned about this,” said OJ Semans Sr., a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and executive director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, which represents more than 15 tribes. “I’m just kind of confused about how badly it was written.”

Less Public Input, More Public Lands Grazing

Ranchers have long complained that conservationists are quick to sue to prevent them from placing their herds on public lands, miring their businesses in litigation. The BLM’s updates would reduce green groups’ ability to challenge decisions.

The agency proposes changing the definition of “interested public,” meaning those who have a say in rangeland management. Under the new proposal, the public would have to prove a “cognizable” interest in the grazing in question. The agency did not respond to a request to define its use of the word. But a former BLM higher-up said that would likely set a higher bar for who gets advance notice of agency decisions and their ability to comment on them. Environmentalists assume it means only those with a business interest would be allowed to influence agency decision making.

The new regulations would also remove a mandate that the BLM include the public in “consultation, cooperation and coordination,” the agency’s process of gathering feedback when preparing to take actions such as authorizing grazing. The update would significantly narrow who must be involved, staff said.

Throughout the regulations, the agency proposed changes that would keep animals on the land.

Mark Squillace, a law professor focused on natural resources at the University of Colorado Law School, noted that if a rancher appeals an unfavorable ruling, it is automatically paused, meaning the rancher can continue the very practices that had been found to be harmful. “That effectively invites everyone to appeal to avoid the decision,” Squillace said. “That is a disaster.”

The new regulations also elevate cows’ status as firefighters, making it easier to place herds on public lands under the justification that they eat vegetation that could become fuel for wildfires.

Nada Culver, deputy director of the BLM during the Biden administration, said that some provisions would make it more difficult for agency staff to tell ranchers to take animals off the land, hindering their ability to address overgrazing. And renewing permits to continue grazing would be even easier under the new regulations, she said.

“The most text in this regulatory proposal is devoted to explaining why the public no longer gets to participate in pretty much every step of the process,” Culver said.

The Trump administration has also prioritized restocking vacant areas, which may be without cows and sheep because they are far from a water source, they need time to recover from wildfire or the agency is attempting to eradicate invasive species. Within months of President Donald Trump returning to the White House, political appointees instructed staff to build lists of every vacant plot that might be eligible for more livestock.

“By the end of next year,” Budd-Falen said in her discussion with Lummis, “every single vacant allotment will be filled by a rancher.”

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Here at Public Domain we don’t churn out hot takes, aggregate the work of others or rely on AI to generate content. We aren’t chasing clicks or trying to become influencers. We are doing old-fashioned investigative journalism — making phone calls, cultivating sources, filing FOIA requests and digging through documents. We aim to get crucial information into the public sphere and hold the powerful to account. We want to expose corruption and ensure government transparency. We are trying to make a real impact.

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By outside standards, the proposal that Texas Parks and Wildlife Department put forth for consideration last month sounded modest — hunters and trappers would have to report mountain lion kills within 24 hours. Within two months of harvest, they would have to turn in a molar to help confirm the animal’s age. Those practices are common in every other state that allows cougar hunting.

But in Texas, the only state where mountain lion hunting and trapping remains virtually unregulated, the proposal met staunch opposition from the livestock industry and a social media campaign so fierce that wildlife officials quietly struck it from the agenda ahead of last month’s Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission hearing. The agency has tabled the proposal for a year, Wildlife Conservation Director Jonah Evans told Public Domain.

The agency’s backtracking ahead of last month’s wildlife commission hearing incensed advocates, who have long pushed for better data collection and a rethink of the state’s hands-off lion-hunting regulations.

“We just don’t have good population models for mountain lions,” said Jake Walker, a spokesperson for Texas Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. “Step one is to get some kind of harvest reporting on the books so we can start building these models. It’s a no-brainer in conservation circles.”

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The proposal would not have imposed any changes to mountain lion hunting in Texas, which is unique for classifying cougars as a “non-game” species, like wild hogs or prairie dogs. Any private-land hunter can kill any lion without regard to season, bag limits or the tags generally issued to pursue big game animals. (Few public land opportunities to hunt cougars exist in Texas.)

But even modest changes to cougar hunting invite conflict in Texas, where wildlife politics have become increasingly polarized in recent years. Some 95 percent of land is privately held and landowners at times bristle at state-imposed mandates to manage wildlife.

“You can’t just jump to mandatory reporting, especially when you rely on private property owners to do a whole host of things,” Peyton Schumann, a spokesperson for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, told Public Domain. “Without us, there would be a lot of science and data that is not collected. We have to open our gates to let the researchers in here.”

In podcasts and Facebook posts, critics accused Texas Parks and Wildlife Department of colluding with lion-loving animal rights activists and plotting to undermine cougar hunting over the long term.

“Texas Parks and Wildlife has been infested with anti-hunting ideologies from the top down,” host Cable Smith said on an April 28 episode of the Lone Star Outdoor Show podcast, adding: “What we don’t want are animal rights activist ideologies proliferating our state’s wildlife management agency, but they are.”

Facing such hostility, wildlife officials feared they were losing the trust of the very people they would need to comply with the new rules, said Evans, the state wildlife conservation director.

“The core of wildlife management is relationships and partnerships and trust,” Evans said. “It’s clear to me that in this situation some element of that wasn’t as strong as it needed to be.”

A three-decade debate

The Texas-style free-for-all on mountain lions was once common across the West, where states hunted, trapped and, in some cases, systematically poisoned carnivores to keep them from attacking livestock. It was common for authorities in western states, where mountain lions are most prevalent, to offer bounties to kill cougars until the 1960s.

By then, it started to become clear that lion populations were dwindling in the face of unregulated hunting. Today, every state other than Texas with an active mountain lion hunt classifies the species as a big game animal. Mandatory harvest reporting is also standard in every state where lions are hunted or trapped.

State game agencies imposed those rules partly because mountain lion populations are hard to survey. They are stealthy and tend to avoid humans. They roam over vast home ranges. Like all large carnivores, there are relatively few of them on the landscape even when their populations are healthy.

Those small population numbers also make them vulnerable to over-hunting. Lion advocates have worried for decades that Texas may be flying blind while cougar numbers crater, as they did in states across the West half a century ago.

TPWD considered requiring the reporting of all mountain lion kills back in the 1990s, after receiving a petition from activists. Instead, the department settled on voluntary reporting, while commissioning research. Interest in the issue faded.

“People move on with their lives, attention wanes,” Evans said. “But it did become very clear that voluntary reporting did not work. It has zero correlation to what mountain lion populations are doing as a whole.”

In 2022, the department received a similar petition from an activist group called Texans for Mountain Lions. Texas Parks and Wildlife staff recommended denying the petition, but fielded a stakeholder group to revisit mountain lion regulations.

The commission has already adopted some of the petition’s suggestions, like imposing a 36-hour trap check and banning “canned” cougar hunts, in which game ranchers release captive animals the morning paid clients arrive to ensure success. (Critics maintain that canned lion hunting was uncommon before it became a class C misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $500 fine.) But mandatory kill reporting remains the most controversial issue.

Texas wildlife officials know little about mountain lion populations. The few detailed studies that biologists have carried out since the 1991 petition indicates that lions are struggling in at least some parts of their range.

“If you look at every mountain lion study in Texas, every single one puts the adult female mortality in the range where you would expect to see a declining population,” Evans said. “We see genetic concerns in south Texas. We already have data that make it look like mountain lions aren’t doing great.”

But without accurate hunter harvest data, wildlife officials don’t have a cost-effective way to know for sure.

“For a population model, we need to know the total amount of mountain lion human harvest that’s occurring in the state,” Evans said. “With a voluntary report, we don’t know if we’re getting 50 percent, 10 percent, 100 percent … Voluntary data, as far as we know, is essentially useless for this purpose.”

Killing a ‘record number of mountain lions’

Jeremy Harrison, one of the proposal’s most prominent critics, viewed it with suspicion partly because Texans for Mountain Lions had petitioned for it. Harrison organizes the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest, the self-described “highest-paying hunting contest in the country.” The event has drawn a slew of negative media portrayals, including a short documentary co-produced by Pamela Harte, one of the founders of Texans for Mountain Lions. (Texans for Mountain Lions did not respond to an interview request.)

In Harte and her lion-advocacy group, opponents like Harrison see a growing influence of animal rights activism in Texas wildlife politics that aims eventually to ban predator hunting in Texas altogether. They want more robust data, Harrison says, largely because publishing it will make hunters look bad.

“Whether the mountain lion harvest is 12 mountain lions next year or 1,200 or 12,000, it won’t matter — the headline will be, ‘Texas hunters kill record number of mountain lions,’” Harrison told Public Domain. “It will stoke an emotional response from an unknowing public.”

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Harrison also echoed the livestock industry’s concerns about Texas officials telling landowners what to do in a state that has no tradition of regulating lion hunting. Hunters like him want thriving cougar populations, but landowners will be less likely to comply with new rules if they feel they’ve been strongarmed, Harrison said. He suggested that Texas Parks and Wildlife Department should instead offer a raffle ticket for one of the state’s annual premium hunt drawings to lion hunters and trappers for each carcass reported and tooth submitted.

“I’m not against this harvest program, I’m against the mandatory part,” Harrison said. “The last thing I want to do is wipe out any species. If I thought for a second that we were wiping out mountain lions, I would be the one pushing for regulations.”

Concerns about “weaponizing data” are legitimate, said Romey Swanson, a field ecologist who has worked with Texans for Mountain Lions. But data is a double-edged sword. If more detailed reporting indicated that the population might be struggling in some part of the state, wildlife officials might one day step in to limit hunting and trapping there. But if, on the other hand, the population showed cougars on an upward trend in some other part of the state, it’s just as likely that officials could encourage hunters and trappers to kill more lions.

“We keep seeing obstruction for this data collection, but we’re not seeing viable solutions from them,” Swanson said. “Here we are still talking about lions on an issue the book could have been closed on decades ago. It’s going to keep coming up until we have something practical as our operation manual.”

Pressing pause

Whatever the data shows, it will take a long time for it to have any impacts on hunting regulations, said Evans, the state wildlife conservation director. Wildlife officials would need up to 10 years of complete harvest reports just to develop an accurate population model.

The most immediate impact of better data would be allowing local biologists to give landowners better-informed advice on how to navigate problems like livestock predation. In areas where data indicates struggling lion populations, biologists would be more likely to recommend non-lethal options to ease cougar conflicts.

“There’s zero interest in limiting [hunter] harvest,” Evans said. “Right now, the idea is get some good, quality data.”

For the moment, however, the data gap will remain while wildlife officials try to figure out their next move.

Even after the backlash, about two-thirds of those who submitted public comments supported mandatory harvest reporting, Evans said. As a hunter and seventh-generation Texan raised on a ranch, Evans felt frustrated to see his agency portrayed by critics as hostile to hunting. Still, wildlife officials had little choice but to try to build more trust.

“It’s difficult for any large bureaucracy or agency to respond to viral social media content in real time, so this was the right thing to do, to press pause,” Evans said. “If we just pushed through and everyone was adamantly against it, do you think these people are going to follow the regulation?”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article referred to Jonah Evans by his old title of Texas State Mammalogist. He now services as Texas Wildlife Conservation Program Director.

A scandal-plagued top official at the Interior Department met with former legal clients from the ranching industry before personally intervening to halt a release of endangered Mexican gray wolves last year, according to records reviewed by Public Domain.

The records provide perhaps the most concrete example of Karen Budd-Falen’s involvement in grazing-related policy before she received a controversial ethics waiver in March 2026 that gave her wide latitude to work on grazing issues. Budd-Falen, who built her legal career defending the interests of western ranchers and currently serves as the No. 3 official at the Interior Department, was barred from even discussing grazing matters when she served in a high-ranking role during the first Trump administration. But in the second Trump term, she appears to be working in an official capacity on issues linked to her past employment as a private attorney, rancher and grazing advocate.

In mid June last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was preparing to transfer the Mexican wolf Asha and her pack onto a ranch owned by the billionaire Ted Turner in southwest New Mexico, with the goal of releasing them into the wild by early July. But just days before the scheduled transfer, FWS staff received a terse email from Budd-Falen, a top deputy to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and a long-time conservative lawyer and rancher.

“After the big meeting we had, I just found out that the FWS is going to move Mexican wolves onto the Ted Turner ranch days before the Secretary goes to New Mexico for Western Governor’s Association meeting ------ and we want to issue a press release?” Budd-Falen wrote in a June 20 2025 email, which was first obtained and reported on by the Santa Fe New Mexican. “Those wolves will not stay on Ted Turner’s ranch.”

“Thanks Karen, we apologize for the short notice,” replied Paul Souza, a regional FWS director. “This will not happen next week and we don’t have a rescheduled date. We have many details to think through and dots to connect, as you suggest.”

By the afternoon of June 20, Brady McGee, FWS’s coordinator for the Mexican wolf recovery program, emailed his colleagues to apologize for the aborted wolf release plan.

“I am sorry for the short notice and for what is happening,” McGee wrote. “We are not transferring wolves to Ladder Ranch next week…”

“Again,” he added, “sorry for this mess, but it’s coming from the top 2 people in the Secretary’s office.”

In halting the original plan to release Asha and her pack onto Turner’s ranch, the FWS failed to meet a significant self-imposed deadline. “It is important this action happen in June – July,” agency officials stated in an internal document. “This maximizes the chances that wolf with a mate and dependent pups will stay localized the pups will remain too young to disperse. Also, this timing corresponds with elk calving (~June 5) to facilitate natural hunting behavior.” Ultimately, Asha, also known as F2754, and her pack were released into the wild, but not until early August 2025, missing the June-July window favored by agency staff.

Budd-Falen’s role in blocking the June plan to transfer and release the wolf pack came a few weeks after she personally attended a meeting on Mexican wolf issues with officials from the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, or NMCGA, an organization of ranchers that has long criticized the federal wolf recovery program. The meeting, which took place on June 3 in Ruidoso, New Mexico, also included FWS staff, a range of ranching interests, and a large group of county commissioners from Arizona and New Mexico. This was the “big meeting” Budd-Falen referred to in her email to FWS staff.

A Public Domain analysis of public records reveals that some of the attendees at that Ruidoso wolf meeting were former legal clients of Budd-Falen, raising fresh questions about her ethical conduct since rejoining the Trump administration. The Interior Department did not respond to Public Domain’s specific questions, but sent a lengthy statement defending Budd-Falen as a “highly qualified, principled public servant” who has “followed all ethical guidelines.”

Interior’s statement was nearly identical to one the agency sent when Public Domain reached out for a separate story in May, with one notable exception: the May statement included a line about Budd-Falen having “recused herself from all matters involving her former clients.” Asked about the dropped language, an Interior spokesperson said Public Domain “could use either version” of the statement.

In 2021, Budd-Falen filed a legal petition against the Interior Department — the agency she now helps lead — arguing that officials violated federal law when they finalized a decision to translocate what she described as “known problem” Mexican wolves onto Turner’s Ladder Ranch, the very same property at the center of last June’s shelved wolf release. In that legal fight, Budd-Falen represented Sierra County commissioners and three nearby ranches.

Travis Day, the then-chairman of the Sierra County Commission, was named as a participant in the Ruidoso wolf meeting last year, according to emails. Day, who did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment, has since left the commission to serve in the Trump administration, as USDA’s state director for rural development in New Mexico. Current Sierra County Commissioner Jim Paxon told the Sante Fe New Mexican that he protested last year’s planned wolf release on Ladder Ranch and downplayed the Trump administration’s intervention as “cursory.”

“They acknowledged our protest, ran it through their legal department, released the wolves,” Paxon told the publication. “That’s about how that went.”

Other participants at the Ruidoso wolf meeting were former Budd-Falen clients as well. In 2022, Budd-Falen represented the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association in a complaint the group filed challenging a U.S. Forest Service’s proposal to cull feral cows on national forest land. And more recently, in 2024, she represented the New Mexico Federal Lands Council, a frequent critic of federal conservation policy, in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in support of Utah’s efforts to seize control of millions of acres of federal land within its borders.

The Secretary Treasurer of the New Mexico Federal Lands Council is a prominent ranching advocate named Caren Cowan, according to the group’s website. Cowan was named as a participant in the Ruidoso wolf meeting in an email that Tom Paterson, then the NMCGA President-elect, sent on June 16 last year.

Paterson, in a statement to Public Domain, said the Ruidoso meeting was “not an NMCGA meeting. It was a meeting organized by individuals concerned about the increasingly negative impact of Mexican wolves on public safety, economic livelihoods and other species in southwestern NM and southeastern AZ.”

“Ms. Cowan attended,” he added, “but my recollection is that she attended as an interested community member. She was not there representing any organization, including the New Mexico Federal Lands Council.”

News of Budd-Falen’s presence at the Ruidoso meeting alongside numerous former legal clients comes amid a swirl of ethics scandals that have surrounded her tenure at the Interior Department.

As Public Domain has extensively reported, Budd-Falen is facing calls for investigations over potential conflicts of interests stemming from her personal financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine and her work on grazing policies that could ultimately benefit her family’s sprawling ranching operations. More recently, Public Domain detailed how Budd-Falen represented ranching groups in challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s 2022 decision allowing American Prairie Reserve, a conservation group, to continue grazing bison on federal lands in Montana. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Budd-Falen’s boss, personally intervened in that case earlier this year and the BLM revoked American Prairie’s bison grazing permits last month. That decision ultimately fulfilled the very request that Budd-Falen and others made of the agency back in 2022.

The ethics waiver that Interior granted Budd-Falen in March 2026 does not appear to retroactively cover her participation in grazing issues during the first year of her current tenure, including her role in delaying last year’s release of the Mexican wolf pack.

The Ruidoso meeting in June 2025 was an opportunity for cattle interests and numerous conservative county commissioners to advocate for their priorities at the Interior Department. They brought to the meeting a list of proposals for the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Interior Department. Among other things, they proposed that FWS engage in “no more wolf releases other than to meet genetic diversity requirements.” They also proposed that the Fish and Wildlife Service “authorize lethal and non-lethal removal of wolves that invade communities,” “issue rubber bullets to anyone who wants them to use on Mexican wolves,” and provide “GPS real-time data that the FWS gets.” They requested FWS “respond to us within 30 days on these proposed solutions,” according to records obtained by Public Domain.

On June 16, Paterson, of NMCGA, wrote to his allies to inform them that he had received FWS’s response to his organization’s proposals. “Before we concluded our meeting on Tuesday, June 3, Mrs. Budd-Falen said that the Fish and Wildlife Service would respond to our proposals within two weeks,” he wrote in an email obtained by Public Domain. “FWS has done so. Attached is a response from FWS.”

The agency seems to have delivered on many of the proposals that NMCGA and its allies put forth. According to FWS’s response to the Ruidoso meeting participants, the agency pledged “to employ effective hazing, trapping, and translocation methods to manage wolves that habituate to populated areas. Additionally, we will provide local law enforcement with necessary resources, including less-than-lethal projectiles, to ensure that human-wolf interactions are managed appropriately and immediately. We will also permit members of the public to use less-than-lethal projectiles under our current regulations.” The agency also committed to provide more Mexican wolf location data and other concessions.

In an email to Public Domain, Paterson of NMCGA praised the government’s participation in the Ruidoso meeting. “What I do know is that, for the first time in many years, the federal government listened to rural community members about the problems associated with Mexican wolves,” he wrote.

Critics of the Trump administration’s Mexican wolf policies, meanwhile, blasted Budd-Falen’s actions in this case.

“The Mexican gray wolf program deserves better than political interference and top-down anti-wolf control,” said Greta Anderson, deputy director of Western Watersheds Project, a conservation watchdog group.

Mexican wolves have been listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act since 1976. Budd-Falen has been a longtime critic of the ESA, once describing it as “a sword to tear down the American economy, drive up food, energy and housing costs and wear down and take out rural communities and counties.”

The ESA has been instrumental in recovering Mexican wolves. Last year, the population in Arizona and New Mexico numbered more than 300 individuals — the highest count since reintroduction efforts began in the late 1990s.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the population of Mexican wolves. It has been updated.

The Trump administration has waived a slew of environmental and historical preservation laws that would allow it to build a towering border wall that cuts through Big Bend national park, a vast protected wilderness in south Texas.

Congress poured a whopping $46.5 billion for border wall construction into the “Big, Beautiful” bill last year, supercharging Donald Trump’s ambition to wall off the southern border with Mexico. Some of the longest unwalled stretches lie along a roughly 500-mile (800km) section of west Texas that Customs and Border Protection calls the “Big Bend sector.”

That corridor includes large chunks of protected land in a state that is 95% privately owned, including Big Bend national park, Big Bend Ranch state park and Black Gap wildlife management area.

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The prospect of marring those landscapes in the name of border security at a time of plummeting unauthorized immigrant crossings has drawn fierce backlash from a bipartisan group of local leaders and protest from public land users. The notion of walling off Big Bend national park has sparked the most fury. The 800,000-acre expanse of Chihuahuan desert punctuated by the Chisos mountain range draws half-a-million visitors annually to hike, camp, stargaze and float the Rio Grande.

For months, CBP has sent mixed signals about its intentions for Big Bend national park, while limiting its comments about its plans to vague and infrequent statements. CBP updated an interactive map on its website in February to indicate that the agency planned to erect a steel bollard wall along the park’s river frontage, sparking an outcry from public land advocates, local business owners and elected officials.

CBP later changed the map to show that it only intended to use detection technology along the length of the park’s border. The current iteration shows that the agency plans to build new roads along the length of the park’s southern border, along with four separate four-to-six-foot-tall barriers intended to stop incoming vehicles. CBP officials have rarely discussed their plans for the wall publicly.

The park’s advocates worry that an opaque agency with a massive war chest could still wreak severe damage on the most beloved park in Texas. The waiver that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published on Tuesday in the Federal Register empowers CBP to build seemingly whatever security infrastructure it wants in the park – from 30-foot steel bollard fencing to unpaved roads.

The waiver casts aside protections outlined in major laws including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and many others. The Big Bend area is home to several endangered species, a struggling population of bighorn sheep and a large concentration of Native rock art and petroglyphs.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, criticized the move as ludicrous in a region where illegal border crossings are already rare. “Billions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted on this unnecessary project, as Big Bend’s rugged mountains make illegal crossings nearly impossible, with crossings in the area accounting for under half a percentage point of all illegal border crossings nationwide last year,” Doggett said in a statement.

Vehicle barriers and surveillance

The only infrastructure project formally proposed within the park itself so far is a 17-mile, non-contiguous “vehicle barrier system” in four separate locations, composed of steel rails and posts measuring four to six feet tall, along with 205 miles of roads up to 24 feet wide equipped with detection technology. The project also envisions the erection of utility poles, lighting and surveillance cameras. Two of the proposed vehicle barriers are located in the middle of the park’s river frontage, along with one on each end.

The vehicle barriers are enough to dramatically alter an otherwise wild landscape, according to Bob Krumenaker, former Big Bend national park superintendent.

“It’s massive impact, massive destruction,” said Krumenaker, who now heads a nonpartisan advocacy group called Keep Big Bend Wild. “You’re looking at some of the most remote parts of a remote national park.”

DHS has signed off on border wall-related waivers for other federally protected lands in the past, including Organ Pipe Cactus national monument, Buenos Aires national wildlife refuge and Coronado national memorial, all in Arizona. But Tuesday’s waivers marks the first time the agency has used that authority to install border security infrastructure in a national park, Krumenaker said.

Like many other public land advocates, Krumenaker is concerned that CBP’s infrastructure development won’t stop with the vehicle barriers. Though he viewed a 30-foot steel bollard wall as an unlikely “worst-case scenario,” the waiver’s broad authority makes it possible for the agency to add virtually any security infrastructure it wants in an area prized for its scenic beauty and wildness.

“Waiving the law undermines all credibility and makes them completely unaccountable to anyone,” Krumenaker said. “They don’t care about the impact on the environment. If they have, say, a fuel spill, they’re not subject to any laws – they’ve just waived the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.”

“Their words, whether intended to be truthful or not, mean nothing,” he added.

In a statement, a CBP spokesperson said its border security infrastructure plans in “the areas adjacent to the Big Bend National Park and State Park are still in the planning stages, while CBP focuses on other higher priority locations.”

“CBP continues to coordinate with the National Park Service, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and other federal and state agencies, throughout the planning of border barrier and technology deployments, in order to achieve Border Patrol’s operational priorities,” the statement said.

Border crossings remain low

The Big Bend sector of west Texas contains some of the longest stretches of terrain on the US-Mexico border that remains untouched by significant border wall and fencing. It is also one of the most remote, with steep cliffs and vast stretches of Chihuahuan desert on both sides of the border that make it unattractive as a crossing point.

DHS justified the waiver as an emergency measure necessary to contain illegal crossings in the area. But the area was always among the least-trafficked corridors of the southern border, and unauthorized immigrant crossings have plummeted since Trump re-took office in 2025. His administration has largely dismantled humanitarian protections that allowed some immigrants to gain entrance to the United States, while the Republican-backed Congress has heaped tens of billions of new dollars into border security and mass deportation.

Within Big Bend national park itself, Border Patrol made only 100 arrests in 2023, and 125 in 2024, according to data obtained by Krumenaker and shared with Public Domain. Those numbers likely continued to drop last year, after Trump took office and unauthorized crossings plummeted.

CBP commissioner Rodney Scott told the Washington Examiner last month that it would be “kind of silly to put like a 30-foot border wall on top of a 90-foot granite cliff”.

Big Bend national park’s scenic Santa Elena canyon cliffs, which are composed of limestone, in fact reach heights of 1,500ft.

Democrats in Congress have attempted to block DHS from using its funds from the “Big, Beautiful” bill to build barriers through Big Bend national park. But the measure, proposed by Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, failed in an appropriations committee vote on Tuesday in the face of Republican opposition, according to the Texas Tribune.

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The waiver has already prompted a legal challenge. The Friends of the Ruidosa Church, river guide Billy Miller and the Center for Biological Diversity updated an existing lawsuit on Thursday that challenges DHS border wall-related waivers of environmental laws in the Big Bend sector, arguing that they violate due process and other constitutional rights

“This is an attack on the integrity of the National Park Service itself,” said Laiken Jordahl, a national public lands advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. “They have never waived these laws on a national park itself. If they’re willing to do this in a national park, where virtually no one is crossing the border, where won’t they?”

• This story is co-published with The Guardian.

Conservation groups have filed at least three separate appeals seeking to halt the Trump administration’s decision to evict more than 900 bison from large swaths of federal land in central Montana.

The administration’s decision in early May to rescind American Prairie’s bison grazing permits marked a victory for ranching groups who see the iconic native mammal as a threat to their livestock operations and way of life. Among those who advocated to remove the bison was the Montana Stockgrowers Association, a former legal client of Karen Budd-Falen, the third highest-ranking official at the Interior Department, which oversees grazing across millions of acres of federal public land.

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Late last week, American Prairie, a conservation nonprofit that is working to restore bison to thousands of acres of private and public lands in the state, appealed the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to revoke the nonprofit’s permits to graze the animals on at least six different federal allotments near Malta, Montana.

BLM justified the decision to cancel American Prairie’s grazing leases on the grounds that its buffalo are wildlife that do not qualify as “production-oriented” domestic livestock.

But neither federal laws like the Taylor Grazing Act nor agency rules impose that requirement, American Prairie argued in its appeal. Such a sweeping change would require BLM to go through the much longer and more tedious rule-making process mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act.

Even so, American Prairie contends that its bison herd does qualify as production-oriented livestock. The organization contributes animals to tribal food sovereignty programs and runs a public hunting program that has produced an estimated 75,000 pounds of meat, according to the appeal.

American Prairie received its first grazing permit for bison more than two decades ago.

American Prairie BLM Appeal

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Western Watersheds Project, a conservation group and vociferous critic of the cattle industry, followed up with its own appeal on Monday. The group argues that BLM’s new grazing requirement amounts to illegal rule-making. BLM’s change also should have triggered a National Environmental Policy Act analysis, the appeal says.

Both filings ask the Interior Department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals to stop the Trump administration from canceling the grazing leases until their appeals are adjudicated. Defenders of Wildlife also filed an appeal last week challenging the Trump administration’s bison policy. Together, the appeals are the first step in what could become a prolonged legal battle.

Western Watersheds Project BLM Appeal

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The BLM was “confident in the legal and factual basis for its decision,” a spokesperson wrote in an email to Public Domain.

“While we do not comment on pending litigation, the Bureau of Land Management’s decision was firmly grounded in federal law and a thorough review of the administrative record,” the spokesperson wrote. “The agency determined that American Prairie’s bison operation does not satisfy the statutory requirements for a federal grazing permit under the Taylor Grazing Act because the herd is managed primarily for conservation purposes rather than livestock production.”

In its press release Monday, Western Watersheds cited Public Domain’s recent reporting detailing how Budd-Falen, as a private attorney, challenged BLM’s 2022 decision allowing American Prairie to continue grazing bison. The self-proclaimed “cowboy lawyer” represented three pro-ranching entities in the case — the Montana Stockgrowers Association and the North and South Phillips County Cooperative State Grazing Districts. She argued that allowing bison to graze public lands violated multiple laws and regulations, including the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, and caused “significant harm” to her clients.

“The political origins of this reversal are clear,” Western Watersheds wrote in its release. “As reported by Public Domain, the 2022 bison grazing decision was appealed by ranching groups represented by Karen Budd-Falen—now one of the highest-ranking officials at the Interior Department. Further, Secretary Burgum personally intervened to direct BLM to reconsider, ultimately producing the outcome Budd-Falen’s former clients sought.”

One of the grazing allotments affected by BLM’s recent reversal is the Flat Creek allotment in Montana. In her most recent financial disclosure, Budd-Falen lists the “Flat Creek Allotment” in Malta, Montana, as one of her former legal clients, Public Domain previously reported.

“Karen Budd-Falen has followed all ethical guidelines and recused herself from all matters involving her former clients,” a spokesperson for the Interior Department said in a previous statement to Public Domain concerning the bison eviction.

The battle over the grazing permits in central Montana has torched a rare opportunity for the American public to hunt buffalo.

American Prairie “had to make the difficult decision to cancel this year’s public bison harvest due to these efforts by state and federal officials to remove bison from public lands grazing,” the group’s Public Affairs Director Beth Saboe wrote in an email to Public Domain.

The organization had planned to issue 17 permits this year, according to its website.

Somewhere between 30 million and 60 million wild buffalo roamed North America when European colonization began. Around half a million remain, with livestock accounting for the vast majority of them.

Budd-Falen, herself a lifelong rancher, has become embroiled in scandal since re-entering the Trump administration, including facing mounting scrutiny over her work on grazing policy — an issue she was prohibited from working on or discussing during the first Trump administration. In March, the Interior Department’s ethics office issued Budd-Falen a sudden waiver that gave her wide latitude to work on grazing, despite potential conflicts of interest, as Public Domain first reported.

Months before receiving the waiver, however, Budd-Falen was openly talking about the Trump administration’s forthcoming rewrite of federal regulations that govern public lands ranching across the American West. In a December interview with Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Budd-Falen described grazing regulations as an issue “closest to my heart” and boasted that “we went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”

Last month, the BLM incorporated the “production-oriented” qualification used to revoke American Prairie’s bison permits into new proposed grazing rules published in the Federal Register. In addition to thwarting American Prairie’s operations, the new rules could eliminate tribal bison grazing on federal public lands, Inside Climate News reported.

Note: This story was updated to include reference to the appeal filed by Defenders of Wildlife.

Public Domain co-founder Jimmy Tobias joined WAMU’s 1A on National Public Radio this week to talk about the Trump administration’s dismantling of public land protections to clear the way for the White House’s “Energy Dominance” agenda.

“The administration is really pushing the boundaries of law and policy to promote the interests of their allies and donors, and particularly the oil and gas industry,” Jimmy told 1A’s Jenn White. “They’ve used pretty bare knuckle tactics to advance their interests.”

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The two discussed several issues Public Domain has covered over the last year and a half, including the Trump administration’s use of the “God squad” loophole to torch Endangered Species Act protections for the imperiled Rice’s whale in the Gulf of Mexico, the unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act to undo mining restrictions that could impact Minnesota’s iconic Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and the conflict-of-interest scandals surrounding the Interior Department’s No. 3-in-charge Karen Budd-Falen.

The show offers a multidimensional exploration of current threats facing public land and water. It leads with reporter Alex Hager from KJZZ public radio, who details the current fights playing out over how to divvy up the dwindling supplies of the Colorado River — a water source relied upon by seven states, several tribal nations and Mexico. It closes with an appearance from reporter Heather Hansman, who discussed her recent feature for Re:Public about how bots are gaming the Recreation.gov system that we depend on to draw limited permits for campsites, river floats and backcountry hikes.

Listen to the podcast above.

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Since launching his bid for Senate in mid-March, Montana Republican Kurt Alme has said little about his agenda for America’s public lands, other than promising to “protect” them. Outgoing Republican Sen. Steve Daines handpicked Alme as his replacement in an 11th-hour maneuver that some condemned as a “backroom deal” that circumvented a competitive GOP primary.

Shortly after Alme entered the race, the American Leadership Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based super PAC tied to Daines, began running TV and radio ads touting Alme as someone who would fight for President Donald Trump’s “America First” policies in Congress, including “protecting Montana’s way of life — our public lands, our guns, our conservative values.”

Although the American Leadership Fund is now boosting Alme as a public lands champion, it has a history of funneling money to land transfer and sale advocates.

Alme’s campaign did not respond to Public Domain’s questions about his agenda for public lands if he is elected in November. Alme, who previously served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana and as budget director for Gov. Greg Gianforte, does not mention public lands on his campaign website.

“Kurt Alme talks a big game about protecting public lands, but he has entirely failed to put his money where his mouth is,” Gus Nathanson, a spokesperson for American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal super PAC, said in an email statement. “Alme’s financial ties to groups that want to sell off public lands prove that he is uninterested in honesty, transparency, or the best interests of Montanans.”

In 2024, the American Leadership Fund gave $1.35 million to Advancing American Freedom Inc., a nonprofit policy shop founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, according to its most recently available IRS filing. In its policy agenda, titled “American Freedom,” Advancing American Freedom calls for the federal government to “sell or donate millions of acres of federal land to the states” and to “advance state and local authority over common shared resources, public lands, and water rights.”

Advancing American Freedom also voiced support for Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s controversial and failed attempt last year to sell off millions of acres of public lands under the guise of combating America’s housing crunch. John Shelton, the nonprofit’s policy director, told the National Review at the time that making federal public lands available for sale “isn’t a brand new proposal by any stretch of the imagination,” pointing to the 1862 Homestead Act which opened up millions of acres across the West to settlers.

The American Leadership Fund did not respond to a request for comment.

At a campaign event last month in Roundup, Montana, Alme told a crowd that “we need to continue to protect public lands and private property,” without elaborating. And in a social media post last week, Alme wrote that he is “so grateful for our public lands!”

Montana’s Republican congressional delegation was widely credited with blocking Lee’s sell-off scheme from making it into last year’s sweeping budget bill. The recent shakeup in Montana’s 2026 elections — the last-minute withdrawal of Daines and Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke from their respective races — has raised questions about whether the so-called “Montana firewall” against federal land disposal will survive the midterms.

As Public Domain previously reported, Aaron Flint, a longtime conservative radio host and Trump-endorsed veteran running to replace Zinke, is painting himself a champion of federal public lands, despite having a history of calling for federal lands to be transferred to state control.

Montanans deeply oppose federal land sales and transfers. A survey released last month and conducted by the University of Montana found that 84% of Montana voters support a ban on the sale or transfer of national public lands.

Yet, the Montana Republican Party platform still calls for “relinquishing federally managed public lands to the states in order to secure statehood equality and provide for better management of public lands.”

Alex Blackmer, a spokesperson for Wild Montana Action Fund, wrote in an email to Public Domain that Alme’s situation “represents something we see way too often in Montana: candidates saying one thing about their commitment to protecting public lands to get elected, and then doing the opposite once they’re in office.”

“Candidates know that publicly supporting privatizing public lands makes them unelectable … so they campaign on their commitment to protecting them,” Blackmer wrote in an email statement. “At the same time, they’re taking money from shady groups that want to sell them out from under us. They expect us not to notice. And once they’re elected, they’re indebted to these groups. Guess who they’ll listen to and take meetings with?”

The Senate on Monday narrowly confirmed Steve Pearce, a former New Mexico congressman with a long history of pushing for federal public land sell-offs, to serve as director of the Bureau of Land Management.

The vote, entirely on party lines, puts a man who has argued that “we do not even need” most federal lands in charge of overseeing nearly 250 million acres of them. It also lays bare the extent to which public lands remain wildly partisan in the halls of Congress, despite overwhelming public support.

Pearce’s nomination was widely seen as a major test for the Senate Stewardship Caucus, which formed in October with the stated goal to advance efforts to “protect and expand access to public lands.” But instead of speaking with one voice on their issue, the caucus’s membership fractured along party lines.

On Monday, three of the four Republican members of the caucus — Sens. Tim Sheehy (Mont.), Steve Daines (Mont.) and Katie Britt (Ala.) — voted to confirm Pearce to the powerful post. Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), the fourth Republican caucus member, did not vote.

All four Democratic caucus members — Sens. Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), John Hickenlooper (Colo.) and Chris Coons (Del.) — voted against him.

Pearce’s confirmation to helm the largest federal public land agency was included in a bill advancing a bloc of dozens of nominees that passed 46-43. Eleven senators did not vote.

“It’s telling that Senate leadership had to package Pearce’s vote with nearly 50 other nominees in order to get him confirmed,” Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, a public land advocacy group, said in a statement. “We will not allow self-proclaimed pro-public lands senators to shirk responsibility for this vote. The Senate Stewardship Caucus had a chance to stop Pearce from becoming BLM director, and they failed.”

At his confirmation hearing back in February, Pearce was pressed about his public lands record. He did not disavow his past positions, telling senators, “I’m not so sure that I’ve changed.”

Anna Peterson, executive director of The Mountain Pact, a public land advocacy coalition, said she was “deeply disappointed” in Monday’s vote.

“Pearce’s confirmation will be a disaster for our communities, and puts precious natural landscapes, and irreplaceable cultural resources, in serious jeopardy,” she said in a statement.

Pearce will enter BLM following an exodus of agency leadership. Only four of BLM’s 12 state offices currently have a permanent director, E&E News reported Monday.

At least seven BLM state directors or associate state directors, including Nevada state director Jon Raby, a 37-year veteran of the agency, left last month after accepting the Trump administration’s latest round of buyout and early retirement packages, according to a list compiled by the Center for Western Priorities. The group confirmed many of the recent departures through autoreplies from the former BLM officials’ government email addresses.

In August 2022, Karen Budd-Falen, a private attorney at the time who now serves as the third highest-ranking official at the Interior Department, sent a 53-page appeal challenging a Bureau of Land Management decision to allow a conservation nonprofit to continue grazing bison on public land in central Montana while expanding its access to new areas.

The nonprofit, American Prairie Reserve, seeks to restore bison to many thousands of acres of private and public lands in the state. A July 2022 decision by the BLM authorizing it to maintain its herds on numerous parcels of federal land furthered that effort. The prairie reserve however, has drawn fierce opposition from ranching groups in the state, who see its bison restoration mission as a threat to their livestock and way of life.

Budd-Falen, a self-proclaimed “cowboy lawyer,” filed the appeal on behalf of three pro-ranching entities: the Montana Stockgrowers Association and the North and South Phillips County Cooperative State Grazing Districts. In it, she argued that the BLM’s authorization of bison grazing on the Montana allotments had violated multiple laws and regulations, including the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, and caused “significant harm” to her clients.

The appeal was filed with the Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) — an administrative law body within the Interior Department that normally has the power to issue its own rulings. But in a rare move, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum personally intervened, overriding OHA’s authority over the case.

On December 9 last year, Burgum assumed jurisdiction over three separate appeals challenging American Prairie Reserve’s federal grazing permits, including the appeal Budd-Falen filed. Shortly thereafter, Burgum directed the BLM to reconsider its decision and “take into account the arguments raised” by Budd-Falen’s former clients and other appellates. By then, Budd-Falen had been serving as one of Burgum’s top deputies for approximately nine months.

At the Office of Hearings and Appeals, the administrative law judge whose authority Burgum was overriding emailed a colleague on Dec. 10, 2025 to flag the “high-profile” nature of the bison grazing cases. The judge explicitly highlighted the involvement of Budd-Falen’s long-time law firm in the administrative battle.

“I wanted to alert you to the fact that Falen Law firm (formerly the Budd-Falen law firm) represents one of the parties to the administrative proceeding,” Dawn Perry, an administrative law judge at Interior’s Office of Hearings and Appeals wrote to Amy Sosin, then the acting director of the appeals office. (Budd-Falen divested her interest in her namesake law firm in March 2025. Her husband, Frank Falen, remains at the firm.)

The judge’s email and other case documents were obtained by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and exclusively shared with Public Domain.

Last week, the BLM — an agency that Budd-Falen helps oversee as Interior’s associate deputy secretary — finalized its decision to revoke American Prairie’s permits to graze bison on at least six different federal allotments, fulfilling the very request that Budd-Falen and others made of the agency back in 2022. Among the grazing allotments affected is the Flat Creek allotment in Montana. In her most recent financial disclosure, Budd-Falen lists the “Flat Creek Allotment” in Malta, Montana, as one of her former legal clients.

The Montana Stockgrowers Association did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment Thursday. In a press release last week, the association applauded BLM’s reversal and touted its 2022 appeal

“Since the initial 2022 decision, MSGA has consistently argued that BLM failed to properly apply the law and overstepped its statutory authority by allowing bison grazing outside the production livestock framework required under the [Taylor Grazing Act],” the organization wrote. “This final decision validates those concerns and marks a significant precedent for public lands grazing policy across the West.”

The Interior Department, in a statement, said that “Karen Budd-Falen has followed all ethical guidelines and recused herself from all matters involving her former clients.”

“Karen Budd-Falen is a highly qualified, principled public servant who brings the utmost expertise to her role at the Department,” the statement continued. “Frankly, your attempt to smear a successful woman who is passionate about her work and dedicated to improving life for the American people is an insult to every hardworking woman across this country.”

At the time of this story’s publication, the Falen law firm had not responded to Public Domain’s queries.

The American Prairie case isn’t the only time Burgum has intervened in an appeal that involved Budd-Falen’s clients. In February 2025, the month before Budd-Falen joined Interior, Burgum assumed jurisdiction over a large number of OHA appeals related to grazing permits in Idaho. One of the appellants involved was a grazing association represented by Budd-Falen herself. She withdrew from the case the same month she joined DOI.

Burgum’s intervention in the Idaho cases in February 2025 also involved Josephine Creek Ranch, which is tied to Mike Boren, a multimillionaire conservative donor. Boren’s name is listed in one of the cases that Burgum took control over. Boren currently serves as the Under Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment at the Department of Agriculture. Last year, he also served a stint at President Trump’s Interior Department.

A Department of Agriculture spokesperson, in a statement, said that Boren has never “conversed with” Burgum about the case and follows his ethics guidance. “Mr. Boren is a minority shareholder of Josephine Creek Ranch, Inc., and gave up any management of the ranch before he entered the administration,” the spokesperson said, adding that “to the best of Mr. Boren’s knowledge, this settlement of the lawsuit has had no impact on the practices of Josephine Creek Ranch, which has always been managed with conservation in mind, although it is likely to be detrimental to the income of several environmental activist attorneys.”

Doug Burgum’s apparent pattern of delivering policy changes that involve or benefit Budd-Falen’s former clients has raised concerns among conservation groups.

“Public lands should be managed for the long-term benefit of all Americans, not for the short-term personal gain of Karen Budd-Falen or her clients,” said Landon Newell, staff attorney at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “Recent news coverage,” he added, “makes clear that an investigation into her actions at DOI is warranted.”

Since joining the Interior Department last year, Budd-Falen has become embroiled in major ethics scandals. As Public Domain has extensively reported, Budd-Falen is facing calls for investigations over potential conflicts of interests stemming from her personal financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine. She is also facing scrutiny over her work on grazing policies — an issue she was barred from even discussing during the first Trump administration. Her influence on grazing has the potential to benefit her family’s sprawling ranching operations. In March, amid questions from this outlet over her involvement in several grazing policies, the Interior Department’s ethics office granted Budd-Falen a partial waiver that gave her wide latitude to work on grazing, despite her large ranch holdings.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

A top Interior Department official is under renewed scrutiny as growing ethics scandals engulf the powerful public lands agency.

Over the weekend, Campaign for Accountability, a government watchdog group, sent letters to the House and Senate seeking Congressional investigations into Karen Budd-Falen, the third highest-ranking official at the Interior Department and a longtime rancher and attorney. The letters, which extensively cite Public Domain’s reporting, detail what the Campaign describes as “serious and escalating ethics violations” and the Interior Department’s “apparent failure” to address them.

“The evidence now available — including on-camera statements by Ms. Budd-Falen herself, financial disclosure records, and ethics documents obtained through public records requests — establishes that she has been actively directing federal public lands policy in ways that benefit her family’s extensive ranching operation, in apparent violation of both the specific ethics commitments she made in the first Trump administration and the federal conflict of interest statute,” the letters read.

As detailed in her latest financial disclosure, Budd-Falen and her family have major financial holdings in western ranches, including permits for grazing on federal land. During her tenure at the Interior Department in Trump’s first term, she was strictly barred from working on or even discussing grazing policy given her potential conflicts of interest. But shortly after reentering the Interior Department early last year, she began working on a variety of grazing-related matters even though she and her family retained major financial stakes in ranches in Wyoming and Nevada. As Public Domain previously reported, her work on grazing-related issues has included involvement in the Interior Department’s recent overhaul of National Environmental Policy Act regulations. That overhaul stands to benefit public land ranchers across the country.

The Campaign for Accountability, in its letter, particularly highlighted a video posted on YouTube in December in which Budd-Falen described working on grazing policies that could directly benefit her family’s large ranching holdings.

“There are around 1,300 vacant allotments for the [Bureau of Land Management] right now,” Budd-Falen told Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) in the video. “By the end of next year, every single vacant allotment will be filled by a rancher, who will be able to get their cattle in there grazed. We’ve added some categorical exclusions so that if you have places like in northern Nevada, where my father-in-law’s place is … We added categorical exclusions so you can move cattle in there temporarily, get some of this grass grazed off, that will also really help the wildfire situation.” What Budd-Falen didn’t mention in the video is that her father-in-law passed away several years ago, and that his long-time ranch is now owned in part by her own husband.

Budd-Falen also described grazing regulations as an issue “closest to my heart” and discussed her excitement about the Interior Department’s work to rewrite the federal regulations that govern public lands ranching in the American West.

“You want to know what put the public ranchland out of business — it was Bruce Babbitt’s regulations,” she told Lummis, referring to the Clinton-era Interior secretary. “By the first of next year, you will see fully new regulations that don’t just fix a few of the Babbitt things — we went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”

The Interior Department is releasing its proposed revisions to federal grazing regulations this week. The Washington Post was the first to report on the YouTube video.

On March 11, amid questions from this outlet over her involvement in grazing policy, the Interior Department’s ethics office granted Budd-Falen a partial waiver that provided her wide latitude to work on grazing issues, despite her large ranch holdings. Since issuing the waiver, Interior has openly touted Budd-Falen’s work in the grazing space. The ethics waiver, however, does not appear to retroactively cover her participation in grazing issues during the first year of her current tenure. The waiver does not appear to have been in effect, for example, when Budd-Falen spoke with Sen. Lummis in December.

Delaney Marsco, director of ethics at Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog organization, wrote in an email to Public Domain that “the major red flag” with the waiver is that “while Budd-Falen had a very broad recusal in the first Trump administration, when her role was more narrow and unlikely to touch matters related to her financial interest, she is now allowed to participate in specific policy matters affecting her financial interests when she is in a more senior role with decision-making powers related to those interests.”

“The waiver acknowledges that the issues related to grazing require hyper-specific knowledge precisely because they impact a niche area of law and a very limited class of landowners, of which Budd-Falen is a member,” Marsco wrote. “These factors seem to make recusal or sale of the financial interest even more, not less, critical, because of the high chance Budd-Falen’s actions in these matters could affect her own bottom line. At the very least, her participation in grazing matters would raise the appearance of a conflict of interest and could impact the public’s trust in the work of the Interior Department.”

The Campaign for Accountability, in its letter, condemned the ethics waiver that Budd-Falen was granted in March. It called on the House and Senate to investigate whether ethics officials at the Interior Department had failed to prevent or address ethics violations.

In an email statement, an Interior spokesperson said Budd-Falen “has complied, and continues to comply, with any and all legal requirements, ethical standards and ethics guidelines.” The statement said Public Domain’s reporting attempted to “smear a successful woman who is passionate about her work.” Frank Falen, Budd-Falen’s husband, did not respond to a request for comment.

Public Domain recently obtained further proof of Budd-Falen’s involvement in grazing-related matters. Emails from July 2025 between Budd-Falen and Bureau of Land Management officials show her weighing in on policy changes sought by the American Sheep Industry Association, a trade industry group that represents sheep producers, including producers that use federal lands for grazing. Public Domain obtained the emails from a FOIA request.

All this comes atop the scandal surrounding Budd-Falen’s financial ties to the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada. As Public Domain first reported, Budd-Falen’s husband struck a deal to sell water rights from one of the family ranches to Lithium Nevada, the company behind the controversial mine, shortly after Budd-Falen joined Interior during the first Trump administration. Budd-Falen repeatedly failed to disclose the deal in her required financial disclosures, and the recent waiver giving her permission to work on grazing policy notably makes no mention of it. The New York Times later reported that the Budd-Falen family ranch sold the water right for $3.5 million. Congressional Democrats asked the Interior Department’s inspector general to investigate Budd-Falen over her family’s ties to the lithium mine.

Aaron Weiss, director of the Center for Western Priorities, said you’d have to go back to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, which involved the Interior Department issuing secret oil leases in Wyoming, to find such an egregious level of self-dealing.

“A $3 million water rights deal with a lithium mine wasn’t enough the first time around, so she went back to re-write grazing regulations that benefit her personally,” said Weiss in a statement about Budd-Falen. “This stuff makes [former Interior secretary] Ryan Zinke’s quest for a brewpub look quaint.”

In a post to X over the weekend, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, called Budd-Falen’s recent actions on grazing policy “brazen” and said the situation “cries out for investigation.”

This story was supported by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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This piece was produced in partnership with Fieldnotes, a watchdog organization that investigates the oil and gas industry.

On April 23, 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s aide received a text message from an employee at Continental Resources, the oil and gas behemoth founded by billionaire Harold Hamm. The Continental employee was writing to confirm the details of a get-together between the two powerful men at Oklahoma City’s Skirvin Hotel. Burgum, who runs a federal department that controls vast oil and gas resources, was at the hotel to attend a summit on energy and artificial intelligence hosted by the Hamm Institute for American Energy.

“The secretary will be meeting with Mr. Hamm at 5 PM in the Pearl Mesa room,” Burgum’s aide later confirmed.

Few Americans have such access to top government officials, but Hamm and Burgum have tight ties that go back to Burgum’s tenure as the governor of North Dakota. During the 2024 election cycle, Continental donated $250,000 to support Burgum’s run for president. Burgum has earned up to $50,000 in royalties since late 2022 from a lease his family signed allowing Hamm’s Continental to develop oil and gas on 200 acres of the family’s farm. (When he became Interior Secretary, Burgum was required to divest from his financial ties to Continental.) Burgum even blurbed Hamm’s memoir.

Hamm has not been shy about trumpeting his relationship with members of the Trump administration — particularly Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who he has called “a dream team of unimaginable proportions.”

It is unclear what exactly Hamm and Burgum discussed at their hotel room meeting. Burgum, however, made a major announcement that same day, telling the summit of tech leaders and energy executives that he planned to open more federal lands to oil, gas and mineral extraction while speeding up the issuance of permits.

Since then, the Interior Department has delivered a series of policy changes that have been favorable to oil and gas companies in the Western United States. Continental, which is controlled by Hamm and his family, has directly benefited. Public Domain and Fieldnotes obtained public records that show how Hamm’s company has used its access at the Interior Department to shape the Bureau of Land Management’s oil and gas oversight and obtain permits for new wells on federal land. Continental’s influence is particularly evident in Converse County, Wyoming, where Hamm’s company has staked much of its future.

Hamm’s company wanted federal drilling permits in Converse County, despite a court injunction that had halted BLM oil and gas permitting across much of the county. Emails show that a Continental staffer last summer contacted a top political appointee at Burgum’s Interior Department, providing a “roadmap” that laid out how the BLM could issue the permits anyway while effectively skirting the court injunction. The Interior Department and the BLM largely obliged. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the BLM has granted Continental permits for 71 new wells across the county.

“This reminds me of days of the Bush-Cheney administration’s massive push to drill the West, when it was obvious that the oil industry was calling the shots when it came to public land management,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Projects, a conservation group involved in litigation over oil and gas drilling in Wyoming. “But we never had such direct and obvious proof that oil corporations were giving the orders, and BLM officials at the highest levels were obediently carrying them out.”

In a statement, an Interior Department spokesperson said that “Secretary Burgum has complied with all federal ethics requirements and remains committed to protecting America’s ability to responsibly use and care for our federal lands for the profit and benefit of future generations.”

A ‘roadmap’ around an injunction

Converse County, rich in federally-owned oil and gas resources, is critical for Hamm and his company. The county sits at the southern end of the Powder River Basin, which along with the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, is one of the few U.S. regions where Continental believes it can grow oil production.

North Dakota’s Bakken is “tapped out,” said Hamm at an industry conference in Texas last May. “The only ones that really got a lot of growth is the Permian and the Powder.

In 2020, the final year of the first Trump administration, the BLM greenlit up to 5,000 new oil and gas wells across 1.5 million acres in Converse County. Soon after, conservation and local landowner groups sued over the landscape-scale environmental impact statement underlying the decision. In the fall of 2024, a federal judge found that the BLM in its environmental review had relied on flawed modelling that overestimated available groundwater by a factor of 10,000. The judge issued an injunction that led BLM to temporarily pause the approval of new federal drilling permits across much of the county.

This caused a headache for Continental. At the same industry conference that Hamm spoke at in Texas last May, CEO Doug Lawler said that the company expected to run out of approved permits in the area by the end of the year. “In the Powder River Basin, the issue with the BLM and the speed with which permits have been approved is a major, major issue to us,” he told the crowd.

Last summer, things started to change. A couple months after the Hamm-Burgum confab in April 2025 in Oklahoma, a top Interior Department appointee received an email from an employee at Continental.

Continental was seeking permits for three wells in Converse County, some 30 miles northeast of Casper. In a June 3 email, the Continental staffer asked that the BLM review the company’s applications in accordance with the Interior Department’s new emergency permitting procedures. Continental also specifically requested that the BLM complete its environmental analysis of the applications “without tiering to or otherwise using the Environmental Impact Statement prepared for the Converse County Oil and Gas Project” (emphasis in original). In other words, the company explicitly did not want its permits associated with the environmental review that was the subject of the court injunction. Continental attached a six-page memo laying out a “roadmap” for how the BLM could do that.

The morning after receiving Continental’s email, Adam Suess, a former oil and gas executive then serving as Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, reached out to the BLM’s leadership seeking fast action on the request. “Please let’s talk today about the path forward,” he wrote.

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When the acting BLM director suggested they follow the normal procedures, Ryan Hofmann, an advisor to Suess, agreed. “We would want to follow our established process if possible, and ensure that the WY office does the first stage in vetting,” Hofmann wrote.

Still, Suess sought to keep close tabs on Continental’s permits as they moved forward. “If you don’t mind, please keep us up to speed so that we can aid in your efforts,” he wrote to the BLM Wyoming office’s leadership in early June.

In August, the BLM began approving a flood of permits in Converse County, within the area covered by the 2020 environmental review that conservationists had sued over. Continental and other companies have since received approval to drill and frack hundreds of new wells.

The BLM had closely followed Continental’s suggested course of action, basing the approvals on an 18-year-old environmental impact statement as well as a pair of environmental assessments finalized in August and September last year. The agency, per Continental’s request, did not base the new permits on the 2020 environmental impact statement that was tied up in court. In following this strategy, the agency effectively circumvented the judge’s 2024 injunction that had hindered a slew of new federal drilling permits in Converse County.

Conservationists were confused to see permits getting approved, then frustrated when they learned about the workaround. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — a bedrock law that mandates environmental reviews for major federal actions, including drilling projects on federally-owned land — is being undermined, they believe.

“Continental effectively handed the agency a playbook for sidestepping the new NEPA analysis, and BLM was all too willing to follow it,” said Sarah Stellberg, a lawyer with Advocates for the West, which represents the conservation groups involved in the lawsuit over Converse County oil and gas drilling. “The priority was clear: Move permits out the door and sideline environmental safeguards.”

Continental Resources did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

‘A changed world’

Maria Katherman, a local who has lived in Converse County for 30 years, says what the BLM is doing is “dishonest.”

“We have regulatory protections that if you have a landscape-level development, then you also have a landscape-level environmental analysis of its impacts,” said Katherman, who is on the board of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a group involved in the lawsuit. Now, the BLM is allowing oil and gas development to surge ahead without the proper analysis, “but it still is having those landscape-level impacts to the water, to the wildlife,” she said.

In contrast, Hamm seems elated. “It’s a changed world, all of a sudden,” he said, speaking in October 2025 at a summit hosted by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. “You can get permits in Converse County, Wyoming for the first time.”

In February 2026, the federal judge threw out the disputed 2020 environmental impact statement for oil and gas development in Converse County because it didn’t consider alternatives that would have slowed the pace of development and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It was a win for the conservation groups who challenged the project. The state of Wyoming, Continental, and Devon Energy are now appealing that decision.

Despite the court’s ruling, the BLM continues to sign off on new drilling permits in Converse County using workarounds. Since Trump took office for a second time, the agency has approved a total of 511 wells within the county — 482 of them within the area covered by the now-vacated environmental impact statement. The majority of the drilling permits have gone to Anschutz Exploration, Devon Energy, Continental, and Anadarko Petroleum. These totals don’t include wells drilled on private land to access privately-owned minerals.

As the drilling boom continues, it’s changing the landscape irrevocably. Katherman used to ride her horse in the area where much of the oil and gas development is occurring. She’d see antelope, eagles, and sage grouse on the windswept steppe.

“One of the great beauties is the open sky, because you can stand there and you can see for miles and miles,” she said. Now, “you see flares, you see well pads, you see a tremendous amount of truck traffic.”

Hamm, on the other hand, seems pleased with the changes the Trump administration has made to public land policy.

“Some of the regulatory hurdles that was there before, they’ve been removed,” he said at an event in Washington, DC in January. “And that does lower our cost of doing business.”

Ted Auch contributed to this report.

The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to the resumed use of so-called “cyanide bombs” on Bureau of Land Management parcels across the country, according to an internal April 2026 memo. The memo shows that BLM has effectively abrogated a Biden-era ban on the deployment of the controversial devices on the agency’s land.

M-44s, also known as “cyanide bombs”, are poison traps — spring-loaded devices that spray a powder of sodium cyanide when triggered. They are used by USDA’s Wildlife Services — a federal agency that conducts predator control programs — to kill coyotes and other animals that interfere with ranchers and other industry groups.

M-44s gained national notoriety in 2017 when 14-year-old Canyon Mansfield and his dog were sprayed by a cyanide bomb that had been placed in the hills behind the Mansfield family home in Idaho. The dog, Kasey, collapsed and died while Mansfield was rushed to the hospital and survived.

In 2023, the Biden administration barred Wildlife Services from deploying M-44s on BLM lands, a move that was cheered by conservation groups.

The new memo between BLM and Wildlife Services appears to abolish the Biden-era directive. It no longer contains the Biden-era language that prohibited M-44 use on BLM land. Rather, the new memo specifically contemplates their revived deployment on BLM land, directing Wildlife Services to provide notice to local BLM offices prior to use “of restricted-use pesticides such as … M-44s that deliver sodium cyanide.” The memo will remain in effect until 2031.

You can read the April 2026 memo here.

“These devices are indiscriminate killers and cannot be used safely,” said Brooks Fahy, the executive director of Predator Defense, who has long campaigned against M-44 use and first obtained a copy of the April memo. “We are going to fight this tooth and nail.”

The Interior Department, in a response sent to Public Domain after publication, stated that the April 2026 memo between BLM and Wildlife Services “identifies restricted‑use pesticides—including M‑44 devices—as tools that may be considered under existing law and environmental review. The MOU does not itself authorize or expand use of M‑44s; any proposed application requires advance notification to BLM, compliance with NEPA and other statutes, and must conform to all laws and regulations. BLM will continue to evaluate proposals case‑by‑case and may prohibit or restrict such tools where warranted to protect public safety, pets, wildlife, and designated lands.”

In a video announcing his Congressional bid in Montana last month, longtime conservative radio host Aaron Flint bemoaned the prospect of “public lands being fenced off.”

Flint, the Trump-endorsed veteran running to replace outgoing Montana Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, has been quick to paint himself as a champion of federal public lands — a smart move for anyone seeking elected office in The Treasure State, where polls show that federal lands are wildly popular.

“Public lands in public hands,” Flint told Northern Ag Network radio in a mid-March interview. “I’m so proud of our Republican congressional delegation who led that charge to protect our public lands. I stood with them then and I will stand with them defending our public lands moving forward.”

Montana’s Republican delegation — Zinke, Sen. Steve Daines, Sen. Tim Sheehy and Rep. Troy Downing — was widely credited with helping block a GOP effort last year to sell off millions of acres of public lands under the guise of combating America’s housing crunch. Zinke and Daines both announced in early March that they will not seek reelection.

But if Flint wins the election, it is unclear whether he will fortify or undermine this so-called “Montana firewall” against federal land divestment. Flint enters his race with a history of voicing support for transferring federal lands to state control — a move that would forever strip them from the broader public’s hands and could ultimately lead to privatization.

"If the state of Montana is doing a better job managing their land, then why do we want the federal government to own the land,” Flint said during a 2014 interview with fellows at the Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC, a Montana-based nonprofit that has a history of advocating for the privatization of federal acres. “If you really were an environmentalist, you would be supporting efforts to get some of this federal land back into state hands because the federal government is failing right now.”

In a 2015 post to X (formerly Twitter), Flint declared that “many Montanans want to transfer it from the bankrupting fed govt to state owned public land.”

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In another post from 2014, he argued money from the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses oil and gas revenue to acquire and protect lands and water resources, “should be used to transfer more fed lands into state lands.”

Here are a few other things Flint has had to say about federal public lands over the years:

In response to Flint’s pro-public-lands social media post last month, a Public Domain reporter noted in a post to X that the current Montana Republican Party platform, adopted in June 2024, calls for “relinquishing federally managed public lands to the states in order to secure statehood equality and provide for better management of public lands.”

Heather Swift, a longtime spokesperson for Zinke, swooped in with a Trumpian defense of Flint.

“Let me introduce you to a wild concept that the liberal brain can’t comprehend: differing opinions,” Swift wrote on X. “In 2016 Zinke resigned as a delegate in protest of the party plank to sell public lands. In 2025 Zinke defeated GOP attempts to sell public lands. And candidate Flint opposes the sale of public lands. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

But Flint’s past pronouncements, issued back in 2015 long before voters were paying attention to him, align with that of the Montana GOP platform.

“Arguably the members of the federal delegation should be leading the Montana party not ‘differing’ with it,” Dave Chadwick, a former executive director of the Montana Wildlife Federation, wrote in an email to Public Domain. “Either they are brazenly misleading their own party grassroots leadership by including transfer language which they then oppose, or they are misleading the rest of us by saying that they oppose it.”

“If Flint wins the primary, he will also be a voting delegate to the 2026 Montana GOP platform convention,” Chadwick added. “Will he support transferring federal public lands to the state or will he disregard the Montana GOP platform?”

Montana Republicans have a history of running away from pro-land-transfer positions once they come face-to-face with their state’s voters. Polls show Montanans deeply oppose federal land sales and transfers. A 2026 survey conducted by the University of Montana found that 84% of Montana voters support a ban on the sale or transfer of national public lands.

Sheehy called for federal lands to be “turned over to state agencies, or even counties” in a podcast interview shortly after launching his bid for Senate in late 2023, as Public Domain co-founder Chris D’Angelo previously reported for HuffPost. Sheehy spent the remainder of the campaign working to distance himself from those comments and PERC, where Sheehy served as a board member.

Flint was among those who came to Sheehy’s defense at the time. In an interview with Sheehy on his Montana Talks radio show, Flint railed against “BS” TV ads “lying” about Sheehy’s public lands agenda. Flint’s radio show guests over the years also included William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during the first Trump administration and has a long history of advocating for federal lands to be sold off.

Flint’s campaign did not respond to queries about whether he disavows his past pro-land-transfer statements. Have his views changed? If so, why? The aspiring Congressman did not answer these and other questions.

Flint’s Democratic opponents, meanwhile, slammed his past statements.

“Western Montana needs representatives who will fight like hell to defend public lands and oppose public land transfer and privatization,” said Sam Forstag, a progressive Forest Service smokejumper who is running in the Democratic primary for Zinke’s old seat, “that’s exactly why I’m running.”

Ryan Busse, a Democrat from Kalispell and former gun industry executive who is also running for Zinke’s seat, said “the veneer that the Republicans and Democrats are the same on public lands is pretty much gone here.”

“I think this is going to be a big, big moment for public lands here,” Busse added. “This will be an election where it finally is front and center.”

This story has been updated with comments from Flint’s interview with PERC in 2014.

Toward the eastern edge of Big Bend National Park lies a stretch of Texas public land that sprawls across the rugged Chihuahuan desert. Black Gap Wildlife Management Area is home to bighorn sheep, black bears, mule deer and quail. At more than 100,000 acres, it is the state’s largest wildlife management area, or WMA. In a state that is 95 percent privately owned, it’s one of the most remote public parcels that hunters can freely roam in search of small game.

The Trump administration’s planned border wall threatens to cut right through it.

Since February, Customs and Border Protection has drawn furious backlash from the public over constantly shifting plans to expand its border wall infrastructure into two cherished west Texas wildlands — Big Bend National Park and neighboring Big Bend Ranch State Park.

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But the wall expansion is also likely to impact several public parcels held by the state that have attracted less attention, including unique public hunting grounds in a state where pay-to-play access dominates. The Trump administration’s plans appear to impact two large walk-on properties, and several more that conduct a limited number of coveted big game hunts by lottery.

“We have some great public hunting opportunities in Texas, but it’s limited and hard to come by,” Texas Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Policy Chair Jake Walker wrote in an email. “Losing these areas would be a huge step back for sportsmen and women looking for that rugged sense of adventure you typically have to leave the state to find.”

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologists were caught off-guard by the sweeping border wall expansion when CBP first contacted them to ask for access to state holdings for construction in January, according to communications that Public Domain obtained through an open records request.

Some Texas Parks and Wildlife officials appeared unaware that Congress had stuffed a walloping $46.5 billion into Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill last year to expand the border wall. Some staffers appeared to find out only after the superintendent for Kiewit Infrastructure Co. wrote to them on Jan. 15 to ask logistical questions about road building on state park land, “blasting and material for fence alignment,” and access to the Rio Grande for construction water usage.

Wall construction was slated to begin in August, the infrastructure company wrote in an email to TPWD.

“This came to my attention today,” TPWD’s state regional parks director for west Texas wrote to colleagues in a Jan. 15 email in reference to the infrastructure company’s queries. “We don’t have much if any background on what this entails but wanted to ensure that everyone was aware and see if others are read in. It appears from the message that some work may be imminent.”

“We were not aware,” the Texas State Parks natural resources program director responded. “This is quite the surprise.”

Most of the discussions between Texas and federal officials centered on Big Bend Ranch State Park, the Lone Star State’s largest park, at 300,000 acres.

Border Patrol official Paul Enriquez wrote to Texas Parks and Wildlife officials on March 6 to tell them that the Big Bend parks were both “currently low priorities for the Border Patrol.” The letter was first reported by Inside Climate News.

“Once all our border wall contracts are awarded and the higher-traffic areas are addressed, we will review our plans for these areas to evaluate operational requirements that dictate barrier, roads, and/or technology,” Enriquez wrote. “However, at this time, we are placing our construction efforts on hold adjacent to TPWD land and the Big Bend National Park.”

CBP also made clear, however, that it intends to push the wall expansion through several other state-held public lands. The agency said in a series of letters that it may attempt to use eminent domain to secure access to Texas-owned properties if the state won’t provide it.

TPWD did not respond to a request for comment for this article. In the past, the agency has referred Public Domain to CBP for questions about the wall expansion.

The planned wall expansion through Texas public hunting lands has raised concerns from conservationists about both hunter access and the health of wildlife populations. Roughly 14 miles of Black Gap WMA run along the bank of the Rio Grande. The river offers key habitat and water for wild ungulates, black bears, quail and other wildlife. But an interactive wall map posted to CBP’s website over the last few months showed that the agency has contemplated walling off river access — likely with 30-foot tall steel bollard fencing. CBP started reaching out to Texas Parks and Wildlife officials in February to discuss its intent to build border wall infrastructure there, the records show.

Such an imposing wall would block hunters from one of the most fertile grounds in the WMA. It also would disrupt river access and wildlife migration for the large mammals found in the region, including a state-threatened black bear population and desert bighorn sheep — a species the state has spent millions of dollars trying to restore.

Those trade-offs might be worth considering if the region presented security threats or unlawful migration problems, according to Texas Wildlife Association’s Chief Executive Officer Justin Dreibelbis. But the 500-mile border stretch that CBP classifies as the Big Bend sector, which includes Black Gap, has long seen low numbers of migrant apprehensions. The roughly 3,000 Border Patrol apprehensions in the Big Bend sector last year accounted for less than 2 percent of arrests on the southwest border.

“If there’s a need for it, I think it would be a good thing to show people what that need is based on — I just haven’t seen it,” Dreibelbis told Public Domain. “We just don’t think the Big Bend region is one of those high-traffic areas. The risk is far higher than the reward when we’re talking about some of these pristine landscapes and some of these affected species like bighorns.”

CBP also appears to be considering expanding the border wall through Lake Amistad National Recreation Area, a National Park Service property at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Devil’s River.

Public hunting grounds account for less than 1 percent of Texas land. Because demand far exceeds supply, hunters can only access many of those properties by drawing a special permit that allows them to hunt for a few days.

Lake Amistad is the only public land property where Texas bowhunters can chase aoudad, an exotic sheep common in the state, without drawing a permit. The area also offers walk-on hunting access for whitetail deer, hogs and small game. CBP is considering wall plans in the area that would block access to large chunks of the hunting grounds at Lake Amistad, according to map files posted in recent months to CBP’s website.

“The first map we saw from DHS had [Lake Amistad NRA] public hunt area 1 completely behind the wall,” Walker, from Texas BHA, wrote. “That’s a third of the public hunting land in the whole park, and the hunting area with the most shoreline. The worst part is that the more this drags on, the less we seem to know about it.”

CBP’s plans have consistently confused and enraged environmentalists, public land users and even Texas elected officials. The agency quietly revised an interactive map of the border wall on its website in February, showing that it planned to erect large segments of “primary wall border system” in Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park.

Facing widespread opposition from the public and across the political spectrum, the agency appeared to backtrack, revising the map multiple times. Later iterations showed that CBP planned only “detection technology” in the two parks — an unclear term that can include everything from underground sensors to roving, lighted towers.

Publicly, CBP has only said that it is weighing its options and talking with local stakeholders. The agency removed the interactive map from its website this month.

The Friends of the Ruidosa Church, river guide Billy Miller and the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Department of Homeland Security last week, alleging that DHS violated federal law by hastily waiving a slew of environmental and historic preservation laws in February in order to fast-track border wall construction in the Big Bend region.

“The Department of Homeland Security has unconstitutionally gutted our nation’s bedrock environmental laws to build a wildlife-killing wall that would permanently lock away the Rio Grande,” a public land advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity wrote in a statement.

The U.S. Senate voted 50-49 on Thursday to roll back a mining ban on land adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a move that will primarily benefit a foreign mining corporation.

It is an unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act — a little-known law that allows Congress to rescind regulatory rules — and slashes protections for an iconic Midwestern wilderness area prized for its canoeing, camping and fishing. Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta Plc, has for years angled to establish a copper-nickel mine on national forest land near the wilderness area. Among other things, the company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire influential Trump-aligned lobbyists in D.C. to push its agenda.

In a speech on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) warned that the GOP move “would have far-reaching consequences not just for the beautiful Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, but public lands across our country.” An emotional Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) called it “a dark day” for the Senate and a “boondoggle.”

The House of Representatives passed the measure back in January. It now heads to the White House for Trump’s signature.

Environmental and conservation groups have staunchly opposed the rollback of the mineral withdrawal that has shielded a quarter million acres in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest from mining development in order to protect the watershed from pollution.

But Trump and his Republican colleagues in Congress have repeatedly tried to undo the Boundary Waters protections as part of their development-first agenda that prioritizes mineral, energy and timber development over conservation.

To learn more about the controversy over the Republican campaign to strip conservation protections from the Boundary Waters, see Jimmy Tobias’s story below.

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Chris D’Angelo contributed to this report.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s committee consulted with the Trump administration the day before Lee introduced his wildly unpopular bill to force a sell-off of up to 3.2 million acres of federal public lands across the West, Public Domain has learned.

Internal emails show that President Donald Trump’s Interior Department shared research with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Lee chairs, and helped craft talking points that Lee used to pitch his controversial proposal.

Lee introduced his measure in June as an amendment to Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful” budget bill and pitched it as a common-sense solution to America’s housing crunch. Many treated Lee as a lone actor pushing an extremist public lands privatization agenda, though the Trump administration launched a task force months earlier to study selling off as much as 400,000 acres of federal land for housing development.

As public backlash to Lee’s proposal reached a boiling point, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum attempted to distance the Trump administration from Lee’s effort.

“I don’t think anybody is really spending much time thinking about it up there,” Burgum told Scripps News in front of the White House in late June, adding that “it doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill because that wasn’t part of the president’s agenda to be part of the bill in the first place.”

Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), a former Trump Interior secretary who was widely credited with helping block a House effort to sell off federal lands weeks prior, applauded Burgum’s comments in a June 27 post to X, writing “the great Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says public land sales are not part of the Trump agenda.”

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But two weeks earlier, Burgum’s team provided Lee’s committee with technical data about the impact of his proposal and offered feedback that Lee ultimately used to downplay the significance of his proposal.

On June 10, Chris Prandoni, Lee’s legislative assistant on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, emailed two Interior staffers with draft language for their review.

“This is the quote I’ve been working up with your guys to accurately reflect your research: ‘The Department of the Interior estimates that the Bureau of Land Management has about 1.2 million acres of land within 1 mile of a population city center and another 800,000 acres within 1-5 miles of a population center. Much of this land may qualify for disposal under this section,’” Prandoni wrote. “We also are going to dedicate five percent of the revenue to maintenance backlog.”

The subject of the email — “[EXTERNAL] DRAFT / PRE-DECISIONAL RE: land disposal for housing--new question” — suggests Interior’s engagement with Lee’s staff went beyond what is detailed in the exchange.

DOI/Sen. Lee federal land disposal

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Greg Wischer, a former critical minerals consultant who was tapped last year to serve as Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, signed off on the quote later that evening.

“Good to go on the quoted content. Thanks for running it by us!” Wischer wrote.

That talking point appeared verbatim at the top of an FAQ that Lee released the following day alongside his public land sell-off proposal.

In that same email chain, Jeremy Arendt, Interior’s deputy assistant secretary of natural resources and infrastructure, encouraged Lee’s’ staff to “include a % of total acres this represents for BLM, which is about 0.7% of the total, or about 30% of lands within 5 miles of population centers.”

The committee’s FAQ dismissed the idea that the proposal is “a massive sell-off of federal land,” noting that it “requires disposal of only 0.5%-0.75% of the [Bureau of Land Management] and [Forest Service] estates. It leaves the remaining 99.25% untouched.”

The communications also indicate that several Interior employees were scheduled to meet with Lee’s staff on June 11, the day Lee unveiled his proposal.

“Thanks, guys. See some of you all tomorrow,” Prandoni wrote after Wischer approved the draft quote.

“Thanks Chris, looking forward to it!” replied Matt Schafle, a former National Rifle Association employee and current congressional and legislative affairs director at Interior.

The Wilderness Society, an environmental organization, obtained the emails through a public records request related to the Trump administration’s housing task force and shared them with Public Domain.

Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, said the documents “paint a troubling picture.”

“Rather than engaging the public or pursuing real housing solutions, the administration appears to have spent that time coordinating messaging with the same members of Congress who pushed large-scale public land sell-offs last summer,” he said in an email. “That’s not problem-solving — it’s laying the political groundwork to sell off America’s public lands.”

The Interior Department and a spokesperson for Lee’s committee both characterized the internal conversation as routine.

“The Bureau of Land Management has, for decades, used Congress’s existing land‑disposal authorities to address local needs—including creating opportunities for affordable housing—through a careful, public process that includes land‑use planning, environmental review, and appraisal,” an Interior spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “Providing routine, factual briefings to Congress about how these long‑standing authorities work is standard, non‑partisan practice and does not indicate support for any particular legislation.”

“Committees regularly seek input from subject-matter experts across the executive branch to ensure proposals are informed by existing law, program experience, and a clear understanding of potential impacts,” a spokesperson for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee wrote in an email. “President Trump has consistently supported using underutilized federal land for housing, including pledging in Nevada to open new tracts for large-scale development and directing the Departments of the Interior and Housing and Urban Development to stand up a joint task force to identify suitable federal lands for housing.”

Neither the Interior Department nor Lee’s committee responded to questions about the meeting referenced in the emails.

“This shows Doug Burgum’s top people were literally writing talking points for Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off America’s public lands,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group, said in an email after reviewing the documents. “This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Burgum has been clear that he only sees our lands as dollars on a balance sheet, not a promise to be kept for future generations. The fish rots from the head, and these emails make it crystal clear: Doug Burgum is only here to degrade, exploit, and eventually sell off America’s public lands. Our parks and park rangers deserve so much better.”

Interior was also in touch with the American Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank that advocates for selling federal lands to private sector developers, the emails show.

In May, Ed Pinto, a senior fellow and co-director of the housing center at AEI, sent Interior officials AEI’s analysis of Reps. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) and Celeste Maloy’s (R-Utah) amendment to the House’s sweeping budget bill to sell off thousands of acres of federal public lands in their states for home development. AEI found that selling off 544,000 acres of BLM land in Nevada and Utah “could yield $100 billion for the U.S. Treasury” over the next ten years and emphasized that the House amendment “could be the first step toward further BLM land release in nine other Western states (AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NM, OR, UT, and WY).”

Ryan Hofmann, an advisor at the Interior Department, thanked Pinto for sending the document.

“This analysis is very helpful to have on hand, going forward,” Hofmann wrote.

AEI/DOI federal Land Disposal

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In the months since the GOP’s failed public land sell-off attempt, the Interior Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have said little about their own push to privatize federal acres.

The joint task force, which launched in March, was charged with identifying “underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development.” The memorandum that Burgum and HUD Secretary Scott Turner signed gave the two agencies until April 15 — last year or this year, it did not say which — to submit a report to the White House’s National Economic Council “detailing the number of land parcels identified, the number of housing units developed, infrastructure progress, and any policy recommendations for improving the program.”

Asked for an update on the administrative effort, an Interior spokesperson said it would share information “once the interagency process concludes and any materials become publicly releasable.”

Disclosure: Public Domain has received funding support from The Wilderness Society.

Note: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Chris Prandoni’s last name.

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