Weekly Watch: Latest In Trump and Burgum’s Fail-by-Design Bag of Tricks
Latest In Trump and Burgum’s Fail-by-Design Bag of Tricks: Jacking Up Fees And Sell-Off Steve Pearce
HELENA, MT – Save Our Parks is tracking the massive assault against America’s national parks and public lands system by Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and their cronies, documenting the ongoing consequences of Trump’s unprecedented attack on our nation’s natural heritage.
This week, Doug Burgum has decided to play arsonist and firefighter, pretending to solve the funding crisis at our national parks that he and Trump started. Instead of just un-DOGEing the Department of the Interior and National Park Service by returning its staffing and funding to their normal levels, Burgum’s bright idea is to price-gouge international tourists without any understanding of the negative economic impacts to gateway communities and small businesses.
Billionaire Burgum should understand the simple economic principle that increased prices lower demand instead of cheerleading his own short-sighted and nontransparent decision, but this is just the latest in his fail-by-design bag of tricks meant to justify selling off our parks and public lands to the highest bidder. Trump and Burgum are determined to take our public lands out of public hands behind closed doors with essentially zero accountability from Congress, and they’re more than happy to screw over millions of Americans in our rural and gateway communities to do it.
Americans are seeing right through Burgum’s cheerleading B.S. and are overwhelmingly opposed to this administration’s sell-off and privatize plans. But Trump and Burgum are doubling-down on unpopularity by preparing to bring on a new ally in their quest to sell off and privatize our great outdoors: “Sell-off Steve” Pearce. Pearce has never met an acre of public land he didn’t want to auction off to his buddies in oil and extractive industries, and he’s licking his chops at the prospect of leading the entire Bureau of Land Management. If Pearce gets within a country mile of the BLM, there won’t be any land left to manage. Heading, and eventually destroying, the BLM would be the capstone of Pearce’s sorry career, which has been spent criticizing historical conservation efforts, profiting from oil and gas interests while serving in public office, attempting to defund independent ethics offices, plagiarizing the work of others, and being named one of the most corrupt members of Congress.
With a failed track record like that, the silence on Pearce’s nomination from Republicans in the Senate Stewardship Caucus is deafening. Montana Senator Steve Daines previously lauded Pearce’s nomination, saying he particularly likes “the fact that it’s a Westerner.” North, South, East, or West, “Sell-off Steve” is the worst choice imaginable when it comes to the responsible stewardship of a quarter-billion acres of American land, and anything less than outright condemnation of his nomination is a betrayal of “stewardship” values.
Though his new BFF “Sell-off Steve” is under fire from nearly every hunting and outdoors group under the sun, Doug Burgum is probably happy to have the spotlight taken off him for a while. Burgum is by far the most secretive Interior Secretary leading the most secretive, non-transparent Interior Department in modern history, and has ducked accountability and hid his public schedule from the American public for almost a full year now. Some House Natural Resource Committee members are starting to rightfully ask critical questions and demand answers from Burgum and his department, while Americans are desperately waiting on other congressional members to do the same.
It begs the question: what, exactly, is Burgum hiding from us? We know Burgum has close connections to major oil and gas executives, like Harold Hamm, and that he even personally received oil royalties as governor of North Dakota. Is he still profiting from private investments? We know that he’s running Interior like his own personal fiefdom, forcing political appointees to staff his meals and bake him cookies. The question is: what don’t we know about Doug Burgum?
Parks and Public Lands in the News:
Safety and Preparedness
Gallego, Colleagues: Trump Staffing Cuts at Forest Service Threatening Wildfire Prevention Efforts Across the U.S.
“The steep decline in hazardous fuels reduction efforts on Forest Service lands poses a serious risk to public safety, public health, and the economy. It is imperative that the Forest Service works closely with Congress to address shortfalls in wildfire mitigation and ensure staffing and budgetary resources are sufficient to fulfill the agency’s mission.”
SFGate: One of America's tallest national park peaks is shrinking
“The height of mountains may seem constant, but Washington’s five ice-capped peaks — including Mount Rainier National Park’s namesake summit — have been shrinking. A new study published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research states that all of the mountains are topped with a perennial layer of snow and ice that’s been been melting for decades. Columbia Crest, the large glacier that caps Mount Rainier, has dropped about 20 feet, exposing rock that is now, technically, the highest point of the mountain.”
Privatization and Sell-Offs
Meateater: Trump’s Pick to Head BLM Isn’t Exactly Pro-Public Lands
“Still, Peace continued to advocate for reducing federally-held lands—with a particularly keen eye for national monuments. In 2017, he supported a bill that would have limited the president’s ability to create new national monuments (but would’ve still allowed the president to shrink them). At a congressional hearing that year, Pearce advocated for cutting the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in New Mexico from 500,000 acres to 60,000 acres. The bill was also unsuccessful, but in his new role with the BLM, Pearce will likely resume where he left off in fighting against national monuments and other conservation designations in the name of energy development.”
Idaho Capitol Sun: Idaho deserves a BLM director who won’t sell our public lands
“Our BLM lands are already in enough trouble — understaffed, underfunded, and under increased pressure from invasive species, wildfires, and development and other risks. We do not need an auctioneer to hold a fire-sale of our public lands to the highest bidder or transfer them to the states (where they would inevitably be sold off).”
Denver Post: Western senators cannot support this Trump nominee who wants to liquidate public lands
“Even by recent standards, Pearce’s public lands record is radical. It is also unpopular. This spring, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee tried to include a public land sale provision in the sprawling budget bill, framing it as a housing solution. The measure would have mandated the sale of 2-3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service lands. But Lee’s amendment triggered immediate backlash from hunters, outdoor recreation groups and Western lawmakers. Within days, he abandoned the effort. If the Senate rejected Lee’s market-rate sell-off as radical, it should be easy now to reject a nominee whose goal is to get rid of even more public land.”
High Country News: The wealthy profit from public lands, and taxpayers pick up the tab
“The public-lands grazing program, formalized in the 1930s to contain the rampant overgrazing that contributed to the Dust Bowl, has grown to serve operations including billionaire hobby ranchers, mining companies, utilities and large corporate outfits, providing benefits unimagined by its founding law. President Donald Trump’s administration plans to make the program even more generous — pushing to open even more of the 240 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service grazing land to livestock while reducing oversight of the environmental damage.”
Community Impacts
Inside Climate News: New US National Parks Fees For International Visitors Draw Scrutiny
“‘Donald Trump is setting the Park Service up to fail,’ said Gerry Seavo James, deputy campaign director for the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign. ‘For nearly a year, the Trump administration has worked to undermine the National Park Service, slashing its budget and firing its dedicated staff. Gouging foreign tourists at the entrance gate won’t provide the financial support these crown jewels of our public lands need. Without that support, we run the risk of our true common grounds becoming nothing more than playgrounds for the super-rich.’”
ABC News: Higher fees for foreigners visiting US national parks stokes tourism concerns
“Those visitors already pay up to $35 per vehicle to enter the park. Adding the $100-per-person charge for foreigners, Howser said, ‘is a sure-fire way of discouraging people from visiting Glacier. It's going to hurt local businesses that cater to foreign travelers, like myself,’ he said. ‘You're discouraging them from seeing something in the country by attaching a fee to that experience.’”
Travel And Tour World: Is The U.S. Department Of The Interior’s ‘Modernization’ Of National Park Access Really A Step Forward, Or A Profitable Decision That Alienates Global Tourists?
“The new policy is likely to hurt the U.S. tourism industry, particularly in areas around the national parks that rely heavily on foreign visitors. The increased fees could lead to a decline in international tourism, as visitors from other countries may be deterred by the high costs. In turn, tourism businesses and local economies could feel the pinch as fewer foreign travelers make their way to these natural wonders.”
SFGate: Repercussions of DEI-related grant cuts are surfacing in national parks
“Seeds of native plants destined for national parks are sitting in a warehouse instead of being grown in fields. And across the West, National Park Service staff won’t know which birds are breeding in the parks this spring. Both of these problems stem from a deluge of grant cuts that halted nonprofit conservation work with the Interior Department earlier this fall.”
NPCA: The Longest Government Shutdown in US History Has Ended. What’s Next for National Parks?
“Despite clear warnings that keeping parks open without staff would put visitors and resources at risk, including urgent appeals from NPCA and our supporters, Interior Secretary Burgum ignored calls to close them. The administration told many parks to stay at least partially open despite 9,000 park staff being furloughed. This came on top of the loss of 4,000 staff since January and another 3,000 over the prior 15 years due to poor congressional funding.”
SFGate: Trump's face on new national park passes outrages conservationists
“‘For a person who has done so much to remove protections from significant federally protected lands to put his face directly on the national park access pass is extremely disingenuous, if not outright hurtful to the conservation community overall,’ says California-based naturalist and redwood forest guide Justin Legge. ‘We would not have national parks, or protected federal lands in general, if leaders with those ideals were in place while we were in the process of creating them.’”
National Parks Traveler: Planned Increase In National Park Entrance Fees Called "Greatest American Shakedown"
“But critics don't see the fees as helpful to the National Park Service, especially during a year when the administration oversaw a nearly 25 percent reduction in the agency's full-time workforce. It also could adversely impact fee revenues for the Park Service. Already the administration's tone towards Canada and tariffs on that nation have led to a decrease in Canadian tourism to the parks. There also remains the prospect of further employee cuts in the Park Service.”
Stories on the Trail
@western.priorities: Beware of “Sell-Off Steve”… he’s coming for your public lands. 🇺🇸 😤
@National_Parks_Traveler: Capping months of slashing the National Park Service workforce, proposing to jettison more than 300 National Park System units, and embracing an “Earth is flat” approach to science, the Trump administration will remind park visitors of this “management” of the world’s greatest collection of national parks by placing an image of President Donald Trump on the 2026 annual park entrance card.
@resistancerangers: First they push 24% of rangers out the door, and tell us we can’t hire anyone to backfill those positions. Then, they tell us to fill those positions with seasonal (temporary) rangers- the positions in the NPS with the least protections. But.... then they didn’t pay seasonal employees back after the government shutdown ended. That isn’t just immoral, but it breaks the law that requires all federal employees be paid back “as soon as possible when the government re-opens”.
@NPCA: We break down the impacts to parks and their staff during the 43-day shutdown and the outlook for the months ahead.
@NRDC: The Trump administration’s plan to open over a billion acres of U.S. oceans to offshore drilling will increase climate-warming pollution, endanger marine life and coastal communities, and raise the risk of catastrophic oil spills.
The Crisis Continues:
The crisis continues to escalate across America’s 640-million-acre public lands system and is poised to get worse after Trump’s spending package, passed by Congressional Republicans, slashed some $267 million of previously committed funding for national parks. The National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce since Trump took office, with some parks now operating without superintendents and at half-staff during peak visitation. Between Trump, DOGE, and Republicans’ draconian budget cuts, hiring freezes, and workforce reductions, the staffing shortages are forcing scientists, park rangers, and other safety personnel to clean toilets and pick up garbage instead of conducting critical work like ongoing maintenance and supporting visitor safety.
Save Our Parks documents and exposes conditions across America’s federal park and public lands system through monitoring reports, visitor testimonials, and accountability research. The campaign maintains comprehensive documentation through its website at SaveOurParks.us.
To speak with Save Our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill, email jayson@focalpointstrategygroup.com.
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