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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– Roque, Chris and Jimmy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A three-decade debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing a ‘record number of mountain lions’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pressing pause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vehicle barriers and surveillance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Border crossings remain low

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• This story is co-published with The Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Prairie BLM Appeal

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

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

Western Watersheds Project BLM Appeal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the podcast above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A ‘roadmap’ around an injunction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continental Resources did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

‘A changed world’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Auch contributed to this report.