A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to evict hundreds of bison from public lands in Montana.

The preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order, issued by U.S. District Judge Brian Morris, marks a win for American Prairie, a Montana-based conservation organization that for more than two decades has worked to restore bison to public and private lands in the state.

“Bison belong on this landscape, and today’s ruling gives them a chance to stay,” American Prairie CEO Alison Fox said in a statement. “For more than 20 years, our bison have grazed these lands under federal authorization and without grazing violations. The court recognized the concrete harm that removing them would cause, not just to our work, but to our Tribal partners and the broader effort to return bison to their native home.”

The Bureau of Land Management withdrew American Prairie’s permits to graze buffalo on federal public lands earlier this year, arguing that the animals amounted to wildlife rather than “production-oriented” livestock. A few days later, BLM issued new grazing regulations that could block future permittees from grazing buffalo on federal public land.

American Prairie sued last month to challenge the BLM’s cancellation of its bison grazing authorizations. In his order, Morris indicated that BLM’s decision to exclude American Prairie’s bison from federal grazing lands was likely “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with the law.”

The state of Montana classifies American Prairie’s buffalo as livestock and they are confined to specific pastures, tagged for identification and monitored for disease, Morris’s ruling notes. And though American Prairie manages its buffalo as a conservation herd, many of its animals become meat either through donation to other conservation herds or through a public hunting program that has produced approximately 75,000 pounds of meat from some 370 bison since 2016.

“No statutory language or judicial precedent exists that requires a livestock operation to focus exclusively on production and entirely ignore conservation, range improvement, preservation, or other values,” Morris wrote in his order.

An Interior Department spokesperson declined to address the details of ongoing litigation, but wrote in an email that BLM’s decision “was firmly grounded in federal law and a thorough review of the administrative record.”

“The Department and BLM remain committed to administering public lands in accordance with the law and are confident in the legal and factual basis for its decision,” the spokesperson wrote.

BLM’s withdrawal of American Prairie’s permits marked a major reversal of federal policy. American Prairie secured its first permit to graze buffalo on federal public land back in 2005.

Morris’s ruling does not extend to the Bureau of Land Management’s new grazing regulations. But he noted that “BLM’s shift in interpretation comes after nearly two decades of practice applying the statute in another manner.”

The judge’s order is a setback for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who, in an unusual move, personally intervened last year to facilitate the cancellation of American Prairie’s bison grazing permits. As Public Domain previously reported, Burgum’s actions were a direct policy win for cattle ranching groups in Montana who oppose the presence of American Prairie’s bison on federal grazing lands.

Several of these groups, including the Montana Stockgrowers Association, or MSA, were the former legal clients of Karen Budd-Falen, a long-time conservative lawyer and rancher who is now a top Burgum aide and has been engulfed in ethics scandals. Before joining the second Trump administration, Budd-Falen personally represented the MSA in a challenge to American Prairie’s bison grazing permits.

The ruling on Friday only applies to the three federal grazing allotments where American Prairie currently grazes buffalo, though the organization had permission to graze buffalo on six allotments before BLM changed its policy. The order will preserve the status quo until American Prairie’s lawsuit is fully heard, Morris wrote.

Last year, Montana’s Republican congressional delegation emerged as an 11th-hour bulwark against the GOP’s most brazenly anti-public lands agenda. Led by U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, Montana conservatives played a key role in blocking schemes from Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R) and other Republicans to sell off as much as 3.2 millions of acres of federal land in the American West.

Montana Republicans have worked for years to cast themselves as public land defenders, even as their state party’s official platform called for turning federal lands within Montana’s border over to state control — a move that public land advocates and conservationists warn would cost the state billions and ultimately lead to them being sold or privatized.

Lee’s failed and widely condemned proposal provided a unique opportunity for the Montana GOP to shift course and align itself more closely with Montana voters. A whopping 84% of Montanans support banning the sale or transfer of public lands, according to an April poll commissioned by the University of Montana.

Instead, the Montana GOP doubled down, adopting an updated platform this summer that maintains support for public land transfers, but with new language about the importance of public access.

“Support transferring federally managed lands to the state with a transition plan and continued public access,” reads the updated document, which Montana Republicans adopted at their biennial platform convention in Missoula in June. (The previous iteration called for “relinquishing federally managed public lands to the states in order to secure statehood equality and provide for better management of public lands.”)

That new language serves as a kind of Trojan horse, according to Alex Blackmer, a spokesperson for Wild Montana Action Fund.

“Including vague references to a ‘transition plan’ and ‘continued access’ in the platform is a way to make support for selling off public lands more palatable,” Blackmer wrote in an email to Public Domain. “It’s an old trick.”

The updated document — a broad set of GOP policy priorities — also calls on Republican lawmakers to “oppose perpetual conservation easements and the sale of National Parks and Wilderness Areas lands.”

Taken together, the language seemingly makes clear that members of the GOP are expected to support large-scale land transfers while remaining open to the possibility of selling federal lands that Congress has not designated as national parks or wilderness areas. If the party opposed the sale of any and all federal lands, it could have stated that position explicitly — as the Montana Democratic Party did in its recently updated platform.

“It sure sounds like the only reason to explicitly mention those two is that you’re OK with selling off other types of public land, doesn’t it?” Blackmer said. “Either you’re opposed to selling off public lands or you’re not.”

It is unclear if any Republican Party delegates objected to the new platform language, either by voting against it or offering an amendment to the land transfer position. The Montana GOP told Public Domain in an email statement that it has “no record of” delegates debating the public lands policy statements at the June conference.

“They came out of the Natural Resources ‘plank’ committee to the full convention. They were not debated on the floor before passage,” Ashley Bianco, the political director of the Montana Republican Party, wrote in a statement. “The delegates generally agreed that careful planning must occur before any transfer of (non Park or Wilderness) federal lands to the state, and preservation of public access are essential policy priorities in any decisions regarding public lands.”

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Bianco did not provide a list of members of the national resources committee or minutes from the conference. She also did not respond when asked if any delegates voted against the party platform.

According to the Montana GOP’s bylaws, also adopted in June, delegates to the recent platform convention included Republican incumbents of national and statewide offices, as well as Republicans nominated during the June 2 primary elections. Those would include every member of the Montana Republican congressional delegation — Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy and Reps. Zinke and Troy Downing — as well as Kurt Alme and Aaron Flint, the Trump-endorsed Republicans running to replace Daines and Zinke, respectively. Neither Daines nor Zinke are seeking reelection.

Public Domain reached out to all six aforementioned Republicans to ask where they stand on the platform’s public lands language. Downing was the only one who responded. In an emailed statement, he said he has “consistently opposed sweeping efforts to transfer or sell off our public lands,” including the divestment mandate that was initially included in last year’s “Big, Beautiful” budget bill.

“Montanans expect continued access to the lands they hunt, fish, recreate on, and rely on. Any policy affecting public lands should protect that access and keep these lands in public hands,” Downing said. “As for the state party platform, I can speak to my own position and record. I do not support selling off Montana’s public lands, and I will continue working to protect public access.”

Downing’s office did not respond to follow-up questions about whether he or any other party delegates voted against or otherwise objected to the platform’s pro-transfer language.

The Montana GOP’s continued support for federal public lands being transferred to state control comes as Montana Republicans in Congress are still receiving accolades for standing against last year’s GOP sell-off attempts.

Last month, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation presented Zinke with its Excellence in Advocacy Award. In its press release announcing the award, RMEF noted that the outgoing Congressman “was outspoken in opposing Senate language in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ that would have sold off or transferred federal public lands and played a leading role in having the sell-off language removed from the bill.”

In 2016, Zinke made national headlines when he resigned as a delegate to the Republican National Convention over its support for handing federal lands over to states. Yet it is unclear if he supported or opposed the new state party platform; his office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

In recent elections, Montana conservatives have been forced to walk a fine line on the issue, voicing vague support for the federal estate — “public lands in public hands” has become a favorite talking point — without directly challenging the party line. Critics have accused Republicans in the state of posing a threat to America’s public lands and of trying to hide their support of public land transfers or sales.

Sheehy, for example, called for federal lands to be “turned over to state agencies, or even counties” in a podcast interview while on the Senate campaign trail in late 2023, then spent months working to distance himself from those comments and vowing to oppose any effort to liquidate federal lands.

Similarly, Flint, a longtime conservative radio host, is campaigning for Congress on a pledge to defend public lands, despite a long history of voicing support for transferring federal lands to state control, as Public Domain previously reported. Alme is doing the same, while getting a boost from a super PAC that has a history of funneling money to land transfer and sale advocates.

The updated party platform and the Montana GOP’s lack of transparency around it are likely to only further complicate things for Flint and Alme between now and the November election. A Center for Western Priorities analysis last month concluded that “selling off public lands is a third rail for Mountain West voters.” Among other things, it cited a January survey that found 84% of Montana voters want to see public lands protected and kept in public hands, compared to just 6% who want to see them sold or transferred to states or private interests.

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This article is co-published with High Country News.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order singling out the state of Alaska and its abundant stores of oil, gas and minerals. “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” called for expanding oil and gas development across Alaska’s North Slope, including some of the largest tracts of public land in North America.

The administration wanted to reverse regulations and new protections put in place during the previous administration — “punitive restrictions,” according to Trump — and streamline the permitting and review process for new projects, particularly in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve (NPRA).

Now, according to two sources familiar with the process and documents reviewed by High Country News and Public Domain, Trump and his team are following through on their promise to fast-track drilling in the NPRA by allowing new winter exploration and drilling to move forward without any kind of environmental review. The Department of the Interior is set to publish a “categorical exclusion” to the National Environmental Policy Act that would make it easier for the oil and gas industry to conduct seismic surveys, obtain rights of way and drill new exploration wells in the NPRA, an area that has become increasingly attractive to industry.

Seismic surveys, which are done with massive vibroseis trucks that weigh over 15 tons, can scar tundra and disturb wildlife, including female polar bears that den along the coastal region of the North Slope in winter and whose numbers have declined over the last two decades. Drilling and related infrastructure are also highly intrusive and, according to recent U.S. Geological Survey studies, have altered caribou behavior and Arctic migration patterns. The impacts of oil and gas development have been further complicated by rapidly warming conditions in the region, particularly thawing permafrost, which must be taken into account when operating on the North Slope.

But the Trump administration is stripping away existing environmental protections for nearly all stages of development. According to the sources, the categorical exclusion — tentatively titled “NPR-A Wintertime Oil and Gas Exploration Operations” — could be released as early as this week in order to facilitate seismic surveys and drilling over the winter. It was drafted without any public comment period or input from those in the region directly affected.

In an emailed statement, an Interior spokesperson confirmed that the department is working on a categorical exclusion, based on findings from “dozens of environmental reviews,” to speed up permitting for winter activity, including seismic surveys and exploratory drilling. According to the department, “These efforts are about using decades of experience and analysis to create a more efficient, predictable, and effective process while upholding environmental standards.”

The legal basis for a categorical exclusion is that the proposed activities will have “no significant impact” on the environment. Such exclusions are typically applied in places where the agency has determined there is little risk to natural resources. Jeremy Lieb, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group that has sued to block development in the NPRA, said that exploratory drilling and seismic testing have had well-documented impacts and are precisely the kind of actions that should be scrutinized by the land-management agency. The new rules, along with other changes being made by the administration, will effectively rubber-stamp industry operations in a remote and highly sensitive ecosystem.

“Drilling and seismic exploration for oil and gas in the Arctic are large-scale, industrial activities that cause significant, lasting negative impacts to the environment and nearby communities,” Lieb said in a written statement. “The administration cannot rely on a categorical exclusion to hide these projects from the public and avoid evaluating their environmental impacts.”

The 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve — the largest chunk of land managed by the Interior Department — provides important habitat to dozens of migratory bird species, denning polar bears and three distinct caribou herds, two of which have dramatically declined over the last decade. Under President Biden, a significant portion of the reserve was set aside for conservation purposes; the Interior Department was in the process of creating a roughly 1 million-acre caribou conservation area requested by the Native Village of Nuiqsut, which sits just to the east of the reserve and relies on the Teshekpuk Caribou herd as a significant food source. The agreement, signed just before Biden left office, would have imposed additional restrictions on drilling activity in the herd’s prime calving area.

Former Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, who now heads up an environmental nonprofit, said the area around the village has been inundated with new drilling activity. She added that there’s evidence that the Teshekpuk herd’s migration patterns have already been impacted.

“All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books,” she said. “We feel that it doesn’t matter that we have a unique DNA, a small community of 500 people, that are just being totally disregarded and sacrificed for the greed of development.”

Since Trump took office, Interior has scrapped the Biden-era regulations and canceled the caribou conservation initiative, instead prioritizing oil and gas development. Nuiqsut sued the department over its cancellation of the program and received a preliminary injunction in March. In May, after receiving a petition from the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), a trade group that promotes drilling in the state and whose former CEO and president, Kara Moriarty, is now a senior advisor at Interior, the federal agency announced that it would begin “streamlining permitting for oil and gas infrastructure” in the NPRA. (Interior’s senior advisor for Alaska during Trump’s first term, Steve Wackowski, replaced Moriarty as head of AOGA.)

This rule, effectively written by AOGA, would create a kind of blanket environmental impact statement that would apply to all oil and gas production sites in the NPRA, making it easier for industry to obtain approval for the construction of pipelines, gravel mines, access roads and related infrastructure. The new categorical exclusion appears to be focused on winter exploration activity — particularly seismic surveys — and follows recent guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality that underscored “the importance of CEs as a core feature of NEPA.”

The categorical exclusion is also being developed without any public input. Until recently, it was a legally required part of the process, but last April, the council relinquished its government-wide responsibility to oversee and implement NEPA, allowing federal agencies to forgo the 30-day public comment period.

Ted Boling, a partner at Ashurst Perkins Coie, who served as a member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 2000 to 2010 and during Trump’s first term, said this is largely uncharted territory for federal agencies. Given the size and complexity of the NPRA, he added, it could leave the forthcoming provision vulnerable to legal challenges.

“These (categorical exclusions) historically have been done if there’s a rulemaking procedure,” Boling said. “So, if they’re not going to get public comment on it, we’ll see how reliable it is.”

The elimination of standard environmental reviews for certain drilling-related activity comes as industry has acquired dozens of new leases in the NPRA — an area roughly the size of Indiana. During a lease sale held in March, nearly 200 parcels totaling more than 1.3 million acres were secured by oil and gas companies, including Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Much of the newly leased land is close to Conoco’s controversial Willow Project, which was approved during the Biden administration and includes infrastructure that will facilitate future development. ExxonMobil’s new leases — just south of Teshekpuk Lake, the largest body of freshwater in Arctic Alaska — fall within the caribou conservation area.

Matt Jackson, Alaska senior manager for The Wilderness Society, which is currently suing the Interior Department over its development plans in the NPRA, said that public lands in the Arctic are being "sacrificed for oil company profits."

The NPRA was first set aside as a naval petroleum reserve in the early 1920s, but despite its name, it has seen remarkably little development over the years, with most oil and gas drilling on the North Slope occurring on state-owned land in and around Prudhoe Bay. In the last couple of decades, however, ConocoPhillips has gradually expanded its operations westward and into the reserve. A new discovery by wildcatter Bill Armstrong in 2013 renewed interest in the area, especially the formation in and around the Willow Project, spurring talk of a “North Slope renaissance.” In the recent NPRA lease sale, Armstrong’s company, North Slope Exploration LLC, acquired the highest number of tracts and will now seek to develop those leases, with minimal environmental oversight.

The proposed development poses increased risk to an already fragile and rapidly changing environment. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, which has led to widespread permafrost thaw, coastal erosion and unpredictable winter weather during which most of the drilling activity takes place.

This past January, after an unusually warm week, one of the drilling rigs deployed by ConocoPhillips — known as “the beast” because it is the largest rig on the North Slope — toppled over and caught fire as it was being moved along an ice road toward the Willow project.

Several employees were injured, and thousands of gallons of oil were spilled on the surrounding tundra. It took the operator four months to remove the rig and clean up the site.

Lieb, the attorney at Earthjustice, said the incident was a good reminder of the “scale of these projects and the kind of things that can go wrong.”

Adam Federman is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations where he has written extensively on land-use issues in Alaska and the Arctic. He is the author of Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray.

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OUTSIDE COMSTOCK, Texas — On an overcast summer morning, Carolyn Boyd, an archeologist at Texas State University, stood at the foot of a cave in west Texas, looking up toward a series of towering murals painted on a rock wall. Three massive human-like figures soared toward an overhang that had sheltered the painting from the elements since they were drawn here perhaps 4,000 years ago.

An artist herself, Boyd knows how hard it would have been to paint these long, crisp lines. Before starting, the bands of Indigenous hunter-gatherers who lived in this west Texas valley, where the Pecos River empties into the Rio Grande, would have spent weeks pulverizing gypsum, hematite, limonite and manganese to make paint. They would have gathered massive quantities of sotol stalks to fold its fibers into scaffolding. The painting itself would have required teamwork and precision, with people at the bottom guiding artists on the wall as they painted figures stretching up to 30ft tall.

“As a muralist, I can tell you that just maintaining a straight line on an even surface is a challenge,” said Boyd. She’s spent 35 years analyzing these sites, some of which are older than the pyramids, and she describes them as a sprawling and still largely unreadable library storing some of humanity’s earliest stories.

“Look how perfect this line goes down and tapers,” she said, dragging a green laser pointer along its length. “It’s just stunning. I’ve brought fine artists, painters out here and they scratch their heads.”

The Trump administration is now dealing these rare treasures a potentially fatal blow. Last year, Republicans in Congress heaped a whopping $46.5bn for border wall expansion into Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill. The longest remaining unwalled stretch of the US-Mexico border lies in west Texas, a remote region that includes some of the state’s most-visited public lands, including the Big Bend national park.

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Since February, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has indicated it will use that massive war chest here to expand what it calls its “smart wall” – a mix of steel bollard fencing, vehicle barriers and hi-tech surveillance.

The area has remained unwalled until now, partly because geography already impedes most illegal crossings. Large ranches dominate the Mexican side, which contains no major cities and only few large towns to attract would-be migrants. Steep cliffs abound.

But with such vast sums on the table, CBP is pushing forward at breakneck pace with its plans – riding roughshod over virtually universal opposition from locals, business leaders and a growing number of political leaders from both parties. Most of that tension has focused on the controversy over CBP’s plans to mar the wilderness of the Big Bend national park, which the agency halted last week after activists publicized videos of bulldozers plowing up ground at the park’s famed Santa Elena Canyon.

The impending construction also threatens to mar or destroy an untold number of these millennia-old rock art murals that stand in the coming wall’s path. The slated construction includes 165 miles (266km) of four-to-six-foot-tall vehicle barriers and patrol roads starting a few miles outside the Big Bend national park and ending at Lake Amistad. It runs straight through the Seminole Canyon state park, which is home to 27 murals, including the Fate Bell Shelter where Boyd stood.

Boyd has emerged as perhaps the most prominent voice defending the region’s ancient heritage. One day, she hopes, archeologists teaming up with Indigenous communities who have preserved stories by word of mouth through the millennia will learn to decipher the murals the way we can now read the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt or Mayan pictographs.

“These are world-class masterworks,” Boyd said. “These are sacred sites. They’re the oldest-known books in North America. We need to protect them.”

Heritage threatened by border wall expansion

Boyd, 68, wore tiger-print framed glasses and a red bandana around her neck, and her tightly braided silver hair was covered with a green felt hat to shield her fair skin from the desert sun. She fell fast in love with rock art murals after first encountering them on a trip to the Lower Pecos region in 1989. Back then, she says, most scholars viewed the murals as little more than ancient graffiti – images that early humans haphazardly scrawled on the wall.

That seemed implausible to Boyd. Not only did the murals require great skill and teamwork to paint, they also demanded precious materials. Muralists used marrow from deer bones to make what amounted to an ancient variety of oil paint. In a region with few reliable sources of fat, hunter-gatherers depended heavily on marrow for calories.

“It’s not just a bunch of painted figures on the wall,” Boyd said. “They sacrificed food off their plates.”

Her husband, a 74-year-old archeobotanist named Phil Dering, shares her enthusiasm. They went on their first date at the Seminole Canyon state park back in 1992. They married a few months later.

After completing her dissertation, the couple settled in the town of Comstock in 2003, so Boyd could study the murals full-time. They founded a non-profit, the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, that has since educated about 13,000 students on the region’s rock art heritage and documented more than 250 rock art sites. Boyd has befriended local landowners, who have facilitated access to researchers, students and pilgrims to murals found on their properties. She has forged relationships with Indigenous communities on both sides of the border to share knowledge about the images and their meanings.

Boyd’s perpetual state of curiosity has collided head-on with the Trump administration’s single-minded fixation on wall-building.

The smart wall’s proposed path runs dangerously close to known murals and may cut through yet-to-be-discovered ones. Surveying for rock art is an arduous task, often requiring the skills of a rock climber and the knowledge of a graduate-level anthropologist. Covering a few miles in rough country takes weeks.

The expanded wall doesn’t have to touch the murals to damage them. A close look at Fate Bell Shelter reveals a string of superficial pockmarks ranging in size from that of a golf ball to a pancake. Limestone, which served as the early muralists’ canvas, is a porous rock that allows water to seep in. Daily and seasonal temperature swings cause changes in limestone’s internal pressure, leading bits and pieces of the rock face to flake off over time – a natural process called “spalling”.

But the vibrations from construction, which will probably include dynamite blasting and excavation with heavy machinery, threaten to supercharge this spalling, chipping away chunks of painted limestone up to several hundred yards away.

In Boyd’s nightmare scenario, entire panels could come crashing down – including from previously undocumented murals. Even if the rock art makes it through the process relatively unscathed, the new border barrier would leave at least 80 known murals on the southern side of the new fence, raising questions about access for the researchers who study them and Indigenous people who visit them as sacred ancestral sites.

“Many of those messages will be destroyed or damaged to the point where we cannot decipher them, work with them, or go to them for help or inspiration,” said Maria Rocha, 78, who identifies as Indigenous and has visited Lower Pecos rock art sites for spiritual reasons. “But deeper than that, we have a connection to those paintings for our creation stories.”

Attempts to buy out landowners

One of the murals that Boyd worries about the most is called Painted Shelter, which lies on a private sheep ranch owned for more than a century by the Zuberbueler family.

Painted in a series of installments by different peoples over a period spanning about five millennia, it contains several different styles that flourished in this area over the years. It’s also something of a historical record, containing images of people wielding the atlatl spear-hurling device, a traditionally shaped bow and a more modern, recurve-style bow.

The current smart wall map shows the vehicle barrier running very close to Painted Shelter, despite the fact that it is a Texas-designated historic landmark.

Fisher Sand and Gravel Co received a $2.7bn contract to build the barrier – a cost of about $16.5m a mile. To expedite construction, the Department of Homeland Security has waived dozens of federal laws that would normally require surveys, environmental reviews and damage mitigation plans to protect historical treasures.

Like other local landowners, Patrick Zuberbueler began receiving letters in February offering $5,000 to cede portions of the family’s ranch land for construction, without going through the eminent domain process. So far, the family has refused.

Still, Fisher Sand and Gravel Co has pushed forward with its construction plans, asking the family for access to millions of gallons of water for its proposed operations. With the ranch’s undulating terrain and rocky ground, Zuberbueler expects the company to blast extensively.

“It’s almost like [they’re saying,] ‘We don’t even really care what you think,’” Zuberbueler said.

Painted Shelter already suffers from significant spalling, with fallen shards as large as basketballs marring what is otherwise a remarkably well-preserved painting, naturally shielded by the overhanging cliff.

“Vibrations from blasting and heavy equipment will be devastating to the site,” Boyd said. “There’s no question.”

Even more frustrating to Boyd is the fact there’s little logical reason to guard this area from vehicle crossings. There are no paved roads along the Zuberbueler ranch, just shrubby landscape strewn with boulders.

Even if the land were easily navigable on four wheels, getting from the Mexican side into the United States requires plunging over oak- and laurel-studded cliffs at least 30ft high, fording the Rio Grande and then climbing back over equally steep precipices on the other side. Anyone who managed to accomplish that feat and make it to a paved road would then have to evade border patrol agents cruising the roads and pass undetected through one of the many checkpoints that dot the highways within 100 miles (160km) of the southern border.

CBP did not answer specific questions about the vehicle barrier’s potential impact on ancient rock art, nor the need for a locally opposed vehicle barrier in an area rarely crossed by car. But the agency said that it would conduct its own reviews.

“Even with the use of a waiver, CBP remains committed to environmental and cultural stewardship,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “Prior to border barrier construction activities, CBP conducts environmental and cultural reviews, seeks public input, and collaborates with state and federal agencies to minimize impacts and balance operational needs with responsible land stewardship.”

Fisher Sand and Gravel Co did not respond to a request for comment.

Raymond Skiles, a former wildlife biologist for the Big Bend national park, shares Boyd and Zuberbueler’s sense of frustration. He inherited a property that his grandparents bought for the scenic views overlooking the canyons and the Rio Grande.

But Skiles also started getting letters from CBP offering money to avoid an eminent domain fight back in February, followed by inquiries from Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. “My first response was ‘Can’t you find a job doing something that’s not hurting people and wrecking places?’”

The part of Skiles’s property outside the town of Langtry that CBP wants to seal off with a vehicle barrier is even more treacherous than the Zuberbueler ranch. Cliffs soar 130ft over a dry canyon that leads into the Rio Grande. Two separate murals lie about midway up the canyon walls. Skiles expects heavy blasting both to level terrain and break through rock, raising fears of damage to the rock art.

“You can’t do anything without blasting,” Skiles said. “My grandpa put in a little bit of fencing and a jeep road, and it was all dynamite.”

In all the time that Skiles, 71, has spent on the property, he has personally seen a total of eight people crossing illegally, all on foot. Six of them wanted to be found, he said. “It ain’t an issue,” Skiles said.

Imperiled messages from the past

Damage to the murals wouldn’t be the only tragedy, said Boyd. It’s also the loss of a long-term, deeply human goal: to understand the artists’ stories and messages from the past.

Even a very clear mural can keep a scholar occupied for decades. One of the best-preserved examples is White Shaman, a roughly 100ft panel tucked into a cave perched above the Pecos River. The muralists used four colors derived from pulverized rocks – black, red, yellow and white.

One of the mural’s central images is a headless white figure with outstretched arms that Boyd says represents the Moon Goddess, a central deity for the Nahua and Wixárika peoples. The painting faces west. As the sun sets on the lunar solstice, it moves up the wall, illuminating the painting and stops right at the Moon Goddess’s neck, visually “decapitating” her.

“Every time I look at it, I see more,” Boyd said. “This is a panel that just keeps on giving.”

On a recent morning, she hiked with trekking poles up a steep set of stairs toward the panel. At the entrance, which was surrounded by ocotillos flowering from the recent rains, she announced the arrival of our group – herself; her husband, Phil; the site’s director, Aimee Spann; and this reporter. With a broad smile, she waited for a moment before proceeding.

“The ancestors are still here,” Boyd said. “We need to respect them.”

The story is co-published with The Guardian.

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Public Domain this week sued President Trump’s Interior Department for the third time. Like our previous lawsuits, we filed our latest litigation in federal court in Washington, D.C. to force the agency to release public records.

We seek to obtain the emails and communications of Karen Budd-Falen, one of the most powerful political appointees at DOI and a major focus of our reporting in recent months. Budd-Falen has been embroiled in scandal ever since Public Domain late last year first uncovered her family’s ethically-dubious business dealings with a foreign mining company that operates on DOI-managed lands in Nevada. After our initial expose, Democrats in Congress called on DOI’s Inspector General to launch an ethics probe into Budd-Falen.

Budd-Falen, meanwhile, has continued to generate controversy given her many potential conflicts of interest and her brazen policy machinations. She was a long-time activist attorney working on behalf of cattle interests and conservative ideological groups. Her former clients continue to rack up policy wins from the Interior Department she helps run.

As the Trump administration guts watchdog offices across the government, packing them with hyper-partisan loyalists, the potential for corruption within an agency like DOI has never been greater. It is left to the press and the public to sniff out such corruption, and hold those responsible to account. With our aggressive reporting tactics, including our ongoing litigation, we at Public Domain hope to do our part. Please support us if you can. Our paid subscribers make this work possible!

– Jimmy, Chris and Roque

The Trump administration has paused all border barrier construction work at Big Bend National Park, after a flurry of videos showing bulldozers marring the protected landscape drove a furious backlash.

The move, announced Monday by Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, comes amid growing public outrage over the Trump administration’s fast-paced efforts to tarnish the pristine park with border security infrastructure that local leaders from both parties view as unnecessary in an area where unlawful crossings are rare and steep cliffs provide a natural barrier to entry. Several groups have filed lawsuits aimed at stopping the construction.

In a post to social media announcing the pause, Scott said he would visit Big Bend to “conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation.”

“CBP is firmly committed to protecting America, and that includes our national treasures like Big Bend National Park (BBNP),” he wrote. “We know the current and predictable national security threats and they are real. Now over the next couple of days, I will join a small team to evaluate the terrain and listen to local leadership, community members and stakeholders to ensure that we secure our borders while simultaneously protecting BBNP for generations to come.”

In recent days, advocates have documented bulldozers and other heavy equipment tearing up land — including at the mouth of the park’s famed Santa Elena Canyon, an iconic area where the Rio Grande is flanked by cliffs towering some 1,500 feet overhead. CBP did not announce the construction ahead of time, despite the fact that its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, had agreed in a federal lawsuit to provide at least 30 days notice before breaking ground there.

Construction activity at Big Bend National Park. Footage Taken by Natalie Newman.

CBP initially denied that construction was taking place, saying earlier this month that bulldozers filmed by activists were re-grading storm-damaged roads. Scott acknowledged last week that the heavy machinery at the park was conducting work related to the border barrier expansion, but said in a statement that “what people are seeing right now is survey and design work—NOT construction of a wall through the park.”

Former Big Bend National Park Superintendent Bob Krumenaker told Public Domain that he was “encouraged, but also wary” of the announcement.

“When he says construction activity is ending, I hope he means all activity with heavy equipment is ending,” said Krumenaker, who now chairs the advocacy group Keep Big Bend Wild. “It’s difficult to trust the words of CBP. We’re hopeful that they’re honest and we can trust them, but it’s too early to know.”

The sudden pause “proves how much non-partisan public pressure is mounting in West Texas and across America to stop the irreversible destruction unfolding in this crown jewel national park,” Laiken Jordahl, a public lands advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity who has been closely tracking construction activity in and around Big Bend, said in a statement.

“It’s welcome news, but construction at Big Bend is likely to resume at any moment,” Jordahl said. “We’re not resting until these contracts are canceled, these workers are sent packing, the waivers are rescinded and every wall plan for the greater Big Bend region is scrapped for good.”

Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill passed by the Republican-dominated Congress last year contained a whopping $46.5 billion to expand the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Since February, CBP has signaled that it planned to use some of those funds to expand it’s “smart wall” in the Big Bend region, a roughly 500-mile stretch along the Rio Grande that includes Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and Black Gap Wildlife Management Area.

CBP’s smart wall map at first appeared to indicate the agency had planned to erect 30-foot steel bollard wall across much of the length of the park. Facing widespread backlash from park users, business leaders and a bipartisan group of local sheriffs, CBP limited its publicized plans to 17 miles of non-contiguous vehicle barriers of up to six feet tall, along with some 200 miles of patrol roads. Southwest Valley Contractors of New Mexico secured a $1.7 billion contract in May to build border infrastructure, including the planned vehicle barriers and roads in the park.

But public land advocates still recoil at the thought of plowing up ground, obstructing river access and turning an area prized for its remoteness into a construction site.

There is “absolutely no risk of vehicles crossing the border,” Krumenaker, the former superintendent, told Public Domain earlier this summer. “It’s senseless destruction.”

Bulldozers have begun plowing up ground at the mouth of Big Bend National Park’s famed Santa Elena Canyon as part of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar “smart wall” expansion on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to new footage taken by activists who have been monitoring the site.

Tensions have run high since the Trump administration announced plans to erect new border security infrastructure in the roughly 500-mile Big Bend region of south-west Texas, which includes the Lone Star State’s largest and most-visited national park.

Since last week, activists have shared video footage that appeared to show heavy machinery laying the groundwork for new border infrastructure that Customs and Border Protection did not announce and initially denied was happening. By Thursday, photographer Natalie Newman captured video footage of bulldozers plowing earth at the mouth of the Santa Elena Canyon, an iconic and frequently visited stretch of the Rio Grande flanked by 1,500-foot cliffs.

“It’s just devastating,” said Laiken Jordahl, a public lands advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. “They’re bulldozing a brand new road through the most beloved stretch of the park.”

Construction activity at Big Bend National Park. Footage taken by photographer Natalie Newman.

Big Bend National Park is a vast, 800,000-acre expanse of Chihuahuan desert punctuated by the Chisos mountain range and bordered by the Rio Grande river. Local businesses, river guides and political leaders from both parties have decried the administration’s plans to mar the wilderness in the name of border security – not least because the region sees so few unlawful crossings.

Immigration authorities made between 100 and 125 arrests annually in 2023 and 2024 within the park’s boundaries, according to the park’s former superintendent, Bob Krumenaker, who now leads the advocacy group Keep Big Bend Wild. Those numbers almost certainly dropped last year, as unlawful crossings plunged across the U.S.-Mexico border after Trump re-took office and began a broad immigration crackdown in January of 2025.

But Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has looked to the park as a site for new security installations ever since the Republican-dominated Congress threw a whopping $46.5 billion for border wall expansion into the “Big, Beautiful” spending bill that Trump signed into law on July 4 of last year.

Over the following months, the Trump administration’s plans for Big Bend constantly shifted. CBP first signaled in February that it planned to erect a 30-foot steel bollard wall across an area that is naturally obstructed by steep cliffs. Facing a sharp backlash from park users and locals, CBP walked those plans back, eventually publishing a more limited plan of about 200 miles of new patrol roads and four sections of non-contiguous vehicle barriers measuring about six feet tall and totaling 17 miles. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) waived dozens of federal environmental and cultural protection laws to speed construction along.

Opponents first began filming bulldozers clearing dirt and plowing into trees and brush last week, marking what they described as the beginning of construction of a new road and likely one of the four vehicle barriers that CBP has contracted to build. Big Bend National Park’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Construction activity at Big Bend National Park. Footage Taken by Natalie Newman.

At first, CBP publicly denied that the bulldozers had anything to do with its construction plans, issuing a statement last week that instead said the agency was re-grading roads damaged by heavy rains. CBP spokesperson John Mennell later backtracked, telling SF Gate that the bulldozers were turning up ground to assess the soil for construction. This week, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott said more barriers and roads were needed to keep the park “free from fear of cartel activity.” Scott said the bulldozers were doing prep work for planned roads and vehicle barriers, but that construction had not started.

“What people are seeing right now is survey and design work–NOT construction of a wall through the park,” Scott said. “We are working to preserve the landscape and protect the access visitors and local businesses depend on.”

But opponents of the Big Bend border wall expansion say the bulldozers are clearly breaking new ground.

“They are obscuring what they are doing,” said Krumenaker, the park’s former superintendent. “They refuse to tell people what the complete plan is.”

The construction activity has continued to draw broad condemnation from local politicians of both parties. Democrats in Congress have repeatedly lambasted plans to degrade the wilderness of Big Bend in the name of border security, citing the low number of unlawful crossings and widespread public opposition.

But despite the unpopularity of the border barrier expansion through the state’s public land crown jewell, the most prominent Texas Republicans have largely kept quiet. Governor Greg Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris said back in March that rugged regions like Big Bend are “great opportunities to deploy technology to aid in securing the border,” but has shied away from commenting on CBP’s more controversial construction plans. Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running for a U.S. Senate seat, has also remained silent.

Outgoing U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, however, penned a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week asking him to halt construction in order to spend more time hearing from locals and community leaders.

Southwest Valley Contractors of New Mexico secured a $1.7 billion contract in May to construct border security infrastructure in the area that includes the park.

The Friends of the Ruidosa Church, river guide Billy Miller and the Center for Biological Diversity are currently suing DHS, the parent agency of CBP, contending that waiving dozens of federal laws to expedite construction violated due process and other constitutional rights. DHS had agreed in June to provide at least 30 days notice before “commencement of any ground disturbing activities in Big Bend Ranch State Park or Big Bend National Park.”

“They’ve shown time and time again that we have absolutely no reason to trust them,” Jordahl said. He remains concerned that CBP’s plans won’t stop at vehicle barriers.

“They issued this contract back when they were still planning to build a wall,” Jordahl said. “They have the money they need to build a whole border wall through the national park.”

This article was co-published with The Guardian.

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UPDATE: On Aug. 7, President Donald Trump officially nominated Dennis Kirk to serve as inspector general of the Interior Department. The position requires Senate confirmation.

Dennis Kirk, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump and an author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, has been installed within the Interior Department’s internal watchdog office, according to the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) condemned Kirk’s assignment in a statement Wednesday, calling him “a fake and fraudulent watchdog.”

“Everyone should have their eyes wide open,” Huffman said. “Each and every thing this political puppet does will be in service of Donald Trump.”

Kirk’s new role is part of a broader trend that has seen the Trump administration tap loyalists for historically nonpartisan ethics and oversight positions. He joins Interior’s Office of Inspector General on the heels of a controversial stint at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he served as a senior advisor to former DNI Tulsi Gabbard and was later promoted to ODNI’s chief operating officer.

While there, Kirk reportedly worked within ODNI’s internal watchdog office while continuing to report to Gabbard — an arrangement that Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.), the acting ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, condemned in a June 2025 letter to the acting Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.

Public Domain was first alerted to Kirk’s new Interior Department post via a statement that former DOI Inspector General Mark Greenblatt published to his website on Tuesday. Trump fired Greenblatt within days of being sworn into office last year, part of a broader purge of more than a dozen other inspectors general.

Greenblatt warned that Kirk’s placement within Interior OIG “should concern anyone who values independent government oversight.”

“This is not about one individual, or whether Mr. Kirk is capable or well-intentioned,” he wrote. “It is about whether placing a political operative inside an independent watchdog office creates a structural conflict that undermines public confidence in the office’s independence.”

A spokesperson at Interior OIG — an independent body that investigates potential waste, fraud, abuse, and ethical failures within the massive federal agency — declined to confirm Kirk’s new post.

“We do not have a comment on this matter, which relates to personnel issues,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

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

Interior OIG has received numerous requests from Congress to investigate potential misconduct by high-ranking agency officials, including Karen Budd-Falen, the agency’s No. 3 official who has deep financial ties to a controversial lithium mine in Nevada, and Matt Giacona, a former offshore oil industry lobbyist and a current top political official at Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Public Domain was the first to uncover the potential misconduct by both Budd-Falen and Giacona.

It remains unclear whether the Inspector General’s office has launched a probe into either official — or what Kirk’s tenure at the office could mean for current and future investigations.

“It’s no surprise the White House suddenly wants its own man inside the one place that Trump’s cronies still have reason to fear,” Huffman said.

During the first Trump administration, Kirk served in senior positions at the Office of Personnel Management. Prior to rejoining the current Trump team, Kirk was an associate director at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, where he co-authored a chapter of Project 2025, the sweeping policy blueprint that MAGA operatives compiled to guide Trump in a second term. He was also featured in a 29-minute Project 2025 training video on background checks and security clearances.

In his statement, Greenblatt, who served as Interior’s inspector general during both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, said placing someone with Kirk’s background inside an IG’s office “raises serious questions about the independence of one of the federal government’s most important accountability institutions.”

“Inspectors general are not political allies,” he wrote. “Nor are they political adversaries. They are the taxpayers’ watchdogs tasked with conducting fair, objective, and independent oversight. An inspector general should never have to convince the public that he or she is independent. The structure of the office should make that self-evident.”

Kirk’s installation at Interior follows Trump nominating Michael Chamberlain, a dark money political operative, 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.

In January 2025, prior to being sworn in as secretary of the Interior Department, Doug Burgum signed an ethics agreement that restricted him for one year from meeting with North Dakota officials without first obtaining written authorization from agency ethics officials.

That recusal requirement stemmed from Burgum’s eight-year tenure as governor of North Dakota, during which his administration filed numerous lawsuits against the federal agency he now leads.

Official calendars that the Interior Department released last month show Burgum twice met with former North Dakota colleagues within his first year on the job. The calendars briefly disappeared from the Interior Department’s records library then were reposted after Public Domain asked about them.

In July 2025, Burgum met with state attorney general Drew Wrigley, who Burgum appointed to the post back in 2022. In May 2025, he met with Doug Goehring, North Dakota’s agriculture commissioner. Both meetings were held in Burgum’s office in Washington, DC, according to agency documents.

It is unclear what Burgum discussed with his former colleagues.

In an email to Public Domain, an Interior Department spokesperson said “these were personal meetings, as clearly labeled on the Secretary’s calendar, wherein the Secretary met with old friends from his home state when they were in town.”

“There was no business discussed at these meetings,” the spokesperson wrote.

Present at both meetings was JoDee Hanson, Burgum’s chief of staff. Hanson worked with Burgum for more than two decades in North Dakota, including serving as his chief administrative officer during his tenure as governor. The Interior Department did not respond when asked about the fact that every single entry in Burgum’s official calendar — hundreds of meetings, events and dinners — are labeled “personal.”

In his ethics agreement, Burgum agreed to “receive a written authorization to participate personally and substantially in particular matters involving specific parties in which I know the State of North Dakota is a party or represents a party.”

Records indicate Burgum consulted agency ethics officials prior to dozens of meetings. When he met in March 2025 with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other company executives, for example, ethics officials granted him permission to participate, but flagged his recusal obligations, including those pertaining to North Dakota, and recommended that “he consider including in this meeting appropriate subject matter experts from the DOI, including representatives from the Office of the Solicitor, as determined appropriate” in case off-limit matters came up.

The calendars include no record of ethics officials weighing in prior to Burgum sitting down with his former North Dakota colleagues. The Interior Department did not respond to questions about whether Burgum consulted with ethics staff or why the calendars were temporarily removed from the agency’s website.

Tony Irish, a longtime former Interior Department attorney who now works as a senior counsel at the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, noted that ethics rules require executive branch employees to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. “Certainly in a normal world, the ethics team would have been made aware of this” and had the opportunity to weigh in, he said.

“Ethics is always cognizant of the fact that whatever your intent going into a meeting is, the other party may have a different intent, and is going to inform you of what you need to avoid should it come up,” he said.

In an effort to pinpoint the nature of the North Dakota meetings, Public Domain filed a pair of state records requests to the attorney general’s office and the Department of Agriculture.

The AG’s office provided Public Domain with a screenshot of Wrigley’s calendar showing the meeting with Burgum, with no additional details. When asked directly what the two met to discuss, Suzie Weigel, North Dakota’s Chief Deputy Attorney General, told Public Domain that “a request for information is not a request for records, and a public entity is not required to provide explanations or answers.”

“To the extent that you are requesting a comment, this office declines to comment,” she wrote in an email.

The North Dakota Department of Agriculture separately provided Public Domain with several emails, including one in which an Interior Department official confirmed Goehring’s meeting with Burgum. Agency officials not respond when asked what Burgum and Goehring discussed.

During Burgum’s tenure as governor, North Dakota sued the Interior Department at least five times. Wrigley, the attorney general, also signed onto a friend of the court brief in support of Utah’s effort to wrest control of more than 18 million acres of public land from the federal government.

Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for the conservation campaign Save Our Parks, said in an email statement that meetings with North Dakota officials are part of “a pattern of secrecy, backroom deals, and corruption by Doug Burgum and his cronies at the expense of our parks and public lands.”

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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?”