Trump’s Billionaire Interior Secretary Doug Burgum Treating America’s Natural Heritage As Items On Corporate Balance Sheet
Wes Siler Exposes Trump and Burgum’s Plan to Systematically Exploit and Privatize America’s Parks, Public Lands, and Wildlife
HELENA, MT – This week, Save Our Parks released a new research report, “Parks & Public Lands Under Siege,” detailing how America’s natural heritage and birthright, our parks and public lands, are under unprecedented assault by Donald Trump, billionaire Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and their cronies. The report was covered by Wes Siler in his newsletter, where he detailed the current crisis facing our national parks and public lands system.
On the research report, Save Our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill noted: “The mask is completely off Trump, Burgum, and their cronies’ effort to undermine our parks, public lands, and wildlife. This research report exposes the true agenda behind billionaire Burgum’s fail-by-design scheme: deliberately understaffing, underfunding, and mismanaging our public lands, parks, and wildlife so that they can be sold off and privatized.”
The reporting reveals the alarming scope of Burgum’s systematic destruction of Americans’ birthright—our national parks, public lands, and wildlife—through weaponized budget cuts, mass layoffs, and dangerous policy changes that deliberately undermine the agencies responsible for protecting our most treasured natural resources. This coordinated assault represents the most extreme threat to America’s public lands in the 109-year history of the National Park Service, with devastating consequences already visible across the country’s most beloved parks and wilderness areas.
The full Parks & Public Lands Under Siege research report documenting the systematic destruction of America’s public lands under Trump and Burgum’s leadership is available here.
Read more below:
Wes Siler's Newsletter: Where National Parks And Public Lands Stand Now, As Trump Administration Prepares To Privatize
Despite our recent victory in fighting to remove the sell-off of million acres of public land from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration is still proceeding headlong with its plan for something much worse. Let’s check in on where national parks and other public lands stand right now, and look at how the Department of the Interior is gearing up to destroy them.
“Doug Burgum [the Secretary of the Interior] is telling you what his plan is,” Jayson O'Neill, spokesperson for Save our Parks, a pro-public lands advocacy group, told me yesterday. “Believe him.”
This week, Save Our Parks published research on the current state of public lands. This reporting is drawn from that research.
“The staff is being decimated right now,” retired national park superintendent Bob Krumenaker told Time Magazine last month. “The morale is as bad as it has ever been. The big issue is it would appear that this Administration is systematically destroying the workforce and the values of the National Park System that are really important to the American people.”
Despite limited staffing, Burgum has ordered that all national park trails, features and attractions must remain open, unless a closure is approved personally by the Secretary of the Interior. This comes as visitation to national parks exceeds records. What’s giving?
In May, the White House published its budget proposal for FY2026, which included cutting the NPS budget by a further 38 percent next year.
And obviously we have Senator Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) effort to sell 3.3 million acres of BLM and USFS land, and to authorize the future sale of hundreds of millions of acres more, which he was forced to withdraw in June. As all that was making headlines, I drew heat from conservative-leaning public lands non-profits for connecting the name of Senator Steve Daines (R-Montana) to that effort. But, speaking to O’Neill yesterday, he revealed an off-the-record source that confirmed my original reports.
“Daines wanted to see how far a sell-off could go, without having his name connected to it,” O’Neill told me, citing a source close to the senator. He went on to caution that Daines’ attempts to greenwash his image through performative legislation should not distract from the larger picture that both he and other mainstream Republicans are prepared to pursue the sale of public lands, if and when it can be messaged in such a way that it won’t cost them a significant number of voters.
O’Neill also points out that these efforts align with William Perry Pendley’s goal in the chapter on public lands he authored for Project 2025. During its first six months in power, the administration has achieved 47 percent of the goals laid out in that manifesto, according to the Project 2025 Tracker.
Recent reporting in the New York Times indicates that Hassen may have left the agency, but O’Neill tells me that’s incorrect, and that while Hassen may be stepping back from daily management duties following controversy around his appointment, he remains involved behind the scenes, and continues to work to reduce staffing at the agencies DOI manages.
On August 1, Burgum also signed an order appointing Kevin Lilly, an investment banker from Houston with no conservation experience, as acting Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. In late June, Lilly himself stated that he had already been hired to the position, which was only formally announced after leaks reported by SFGate. That order also appointed former oil and gas lobbyist William Grofy as the acting Director of the BLM.
Such actions also point in one, clear direction, according to O’Neill. “This pattern of installing industry insiders and financial operatives reveals Burgum and the administration’s true intentions,” O’Neill writes. “Burgum’s approach treats America’s natural heritage as items on a corporate balance sheet rather than irreplaceable public trust resources that belong to all Americans.”
O’Neill has another concern: Wildlife. North America is unique in that wildlife here is held in trust for the public and every person has an equal opportunity to participate in hunting and fishing, activities used to fund the management of that wildlife. That stands in contrast to the rest of the world, where wild animals are owned by royal families or private corporations, and access to them is sold to the highest bidder. In places like Europe or Africa, hunting and fishing are only accessible for the rich.
O’Neill connects the dots between Lilly and Hassen hailing from Texas, the only place in the United States with a broad-reaching system of private wildlife management, Burgum’s inept management of North Dakota’s wildlife during his two terms as governor of that state, along with his stated desire to turn public lands into “assets,” and sees the potential that our uniquely egalitarian access to wildlife could be replaced with for-profit management intended to raise massive amounts of money.
But this is all very complicated way to explain something very simple. O’Neill asks rhetorically:“Why would one real estate developer appoint another real estate developer-slash-tech bro to oversee property? And why would that real estate developer-slash-tech bro hire oil CEOs and private equity guys to help him? The answer is obvious: They’re going to try and sell our birthright.”
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