The Fight for Wild Lands: Part 2

EDITOR’S NOTE: Activists and advocates from across the state will convene the Rally for Public Lands at the Capitol on February 19. While the rally has routinely drawn the biannual Legislature’s biggest crowd for the past decade, 2025 has a different urgency. An unprecedented flood of change from the new Trump administration appears poised to dismiss concerns for wildlife, conservation and ecological health in favor of energy development and federal cost-cutting.

The environmental community could be forgiven for feeling like a herd of buffalo getting stampeded across a prairie, wondering where the pushkin might lurk ahead. 

“I forgot how tiring this is,” said Aubrey Bertram, staff attorney for Wild Montana, as she helped arrange logistics for the February 19 statewide Rally for Public Lands in Helena. “I need to work up my stamina.”

For the past five legislative sessions, the rally has drawn hundreds of activists united by their relationship to public land, whether they make a living selling its attractions or a lifestyle protecting its ecosystems. But Bertram had a bigger “this” wearing her down in 2025: the swarm of challenges to public land protections, public land management and public land workers unleashed by President Donald Trump at the start of his second administration. 

In the first days of February, Trump oversaw the firing of at least 3,400 U.S. Forest Service employees and another 1,000 National Park Service workers — with an estimated 360 of those in Montana alone. He’s suspended funding for government grants and programs that underpin environmental research, social programs and medical services at Montana State University and other state institutions. He’s imposed trade tariffs and restrictions that have already started to ripple through the national and Montana economies. 

“In January 2017, President Trump was a new entity, and the way he conducted his form of government-by-chaos was all new,” Bertram said. “It required an immediate response because it was new.

“Trump 2.0 2025 government-by-chaos is not new. It certainly has a different flavor, but it’s not new. And we have the playbook in Project 2025 [the Heritage Foundation proposal for shrinking the federal bureaucracy]. They tried to distance themselves from that, but we … know what they’re doing. So we’re in this for the long haul. We’ve got to save our energy. It’s running an ultramarathon rather than a sprint.”

All of government, all of the above, all hands on deck — these cliches for comprehensive action have been buzzing out of Washington, D.C. for years now. But the wave of change coming from the nation’s capital this winter may crash against the Rocky Mountain West with disproportionate force. 

Montana and Wyoming each depend on federal funding for about 30 percent of their state revenue, while Idaho gets about 22 percent of its public budget from the feds. The federal footprint on the ground is even more pervasive. Just over half of Idaho is federally owned or managed. So is 42 percent of Wyoming, and about 30 percent of Montana. 

Trump’s executive orders don’t explicitly target the West, but carrying them out will have big impacts here. For example, a new National Energy Dominance Council, announced on February 14, will be chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Its missions include “strategies to achieve energy dominance by improving the processes for permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation across all forms of American energy.” 

As overseer of the Bureau of Land Management, Burgum directs energy development on one of every 10 acres of the United States, and 30 percent of its mineral estate. BLM’s underground assets are considerably more extensive than its surface lands. That includes 43 million acres of underground minerals in Wyoming. Its Montana holdings are about 18.5 million acres of mineral estate. It has title to 36.5 million acres of underground minerals in Idaho. 

A White House fact sheet about the council claimed credit for “open[ing] up millions of acres for domestic energy development” during Trump’s first term while accusing President Joe Biden of producing “over two billion fewer barrels of oil than anticipated by trend (had President Trump’s energy policies been kept intact), a vast quantity of lost supply that could have lessened the burden of energy prices on American families.”

During the Biden administration, BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning made it a signature accomplishment of her tenure to release the Public Lands Rule, which required BLM to consider conservation values alongside development interests when making decisions about public land use. 

Burgum has made uprooting that rule among his top priorities. There is also a bill pending in Congress to do the same thing. For Michael Carroll, BLM campaign director at The Wilderness Society, either would be a blow to environmental protection.

“The rule told the BLM they need to put conservation on equal footing with other uses of public lands,” Carroll said. “They should be doing that now to address things like drought and wildlife issues. The Public Lands Rule is the key tool to continue to meet their mission and live up to their multiple-use mandate. But these executive and secretarial orders will more than likely have a chilling effect. They want to halt all implementation of those rules.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service has approximately 17 million acres of national forest in Montana, 20 million acres in Idaho and 9 million in Wyoming. The Department of Agriculture, which supervises the Forest Service, hasn’t been much of a player in Trump’s energy dominance agenda. 

However, it has been a sore spot for farmers and ranchers who looked to USDA funding for energy efficiency grants. Trump’s federal fund freeze especially targeted renewable energy projects such as solar panels and wind turbines. Biden administration initiatives such as Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Rural Energy for America Program moved $3.1 billion for climate-smart agriculture activities in 2024,  much of it now frozen or “under review.” 

The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation has had its federal wildfire mitigation funding suspended, according to a report by ProPublica. The Forest Service’s usually 10,000-member seasonal firefighting force is also in limbo as the service sorts out Trump’s federal hiring freeze. Early-season prescribed burns have already been canceled due to the lack of fire crews to manage them.

That has many Montanans concerned of bigger economic disruptions to come. 

“With all these federal funding freezes and terminations of federal public servants managing these lands, there’s no way we’re not heading toward a recession,” said Whitney Tawney of Montana Conservation Voters. “How do we make up that financial blow?”

Expedited permitting could also upend efforts to protect the region’s remaining unroaded wild country. With Trump-aligned Republicans controlling majorities of both the Senate and House of Representatives, environmentalists forecast a lot of fast-track legislation getting passed. 

“In Congress now there’s the Fix Our Forest Act,” said Clint Nagel of the Gallatin Wilderness Association. “It’s a horrible decision, and we fear it will sneak through in some other bill, because it won’t stand its own scrutiny … It allows whomever to come into a forest and increase logging, increase thinning. All that affects wildlife and makes the forest hotter.”

The bill was introduced by Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas, and has 56 cosponsors, including Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke and Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman. It designates high-risk firesheds, reduces project review under the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act and Federal Land Management and Policy Act, and limits court review of fireshed management projects. It passed the House on January 23 with a vote of 279-141.

“In a time of intense partisanship and legislative gridlock, it’s really good news to see policymakers coming together and prioritizing needed changes to help solve the wildfire crisis,” Bozeman-based Property and Environment Research Center Policy Director Hannah Downey wrote in January. “It’s a package that includes pieces ranging from establishing fireshed management areas and improving the supply of seeds and saplings for revegetation efforts after a wildfire, to directing studies on existing U.S. Forest Service policies.”

Michael Garrity at Alliance for the Wild Rockies, an advocacy group focused on protecting habitat for wildlife, said the discombobulation of federal land management agencies could be a good thing.

“The Biden administration didn’t follow the law either,” Garrity said. “I remember back in 1990, [University of Montana economist] Tom Power wrote the Forest Service was thoroughly corrupted by the timber beasts, and the only solution was to dismantle the agency and start over. I haven’t seen any improvement in the next 30 years. They’re still putting out money-losing timber sales. Elon Musk should get rid of them.”

Trump’s maneuvers could have contradictory effects. For example, his energy dominance agenda depends on global economic forces over which he has little control. And some of its goals, such as boosting domestic oil and gas production, could actually hurt the energy industry stakeholders he seeks to help.

“U.S. foreign policy — from the expected maximum pressure sanctions on Iran, to the fate of the current licensing system for Venezuela, to the implementation of sanctions on Russia — will play an outsize role in the price formation for gasoline for U.S. consumers,” said David Goldwyn of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center. “The new administration’s expected policies have driven those prices up, not down.”

Fellow Atlantic Council expert Liliana Diaz added that Trump’s rejection of renewable energy policies could rebound on a global scale.

“Ultimately, the lack of coordinated federal action is likely to undermine international cooperation and technology transfer, vital for building climate resilience both at home and abroad,” Diaz said. “With extreme weather events already reaching century-high costs nationwide, the Trump administration may need to include solutions to address escalating physical risks in its toolkit to ‘make America great again.’”

Environmentalist George Wuerthner has closely followed energy development across the Rocky Mountain West. 

“One thing I’ve learned is there’s a bottom line for producers of oil and gas where it’s economical for them to operate,” Wuerthner said. “They don’t have a lot of control over that. So when Trump is calling for more oil and gas in Alaska, that’s one of the more costly places to operate. If the market is flooded, that reduces the price and makes it less economical to operate up in the Arctic.”

The cuts also could impact the government infrastructure that much of Montana’s private recreation industry depends on. Tawney said she knew of seven workers at the Bozeman District Ranger Station who were laid off in the Forest Service job cuts. Those people were all working at keeping Bozeman’s popular Hyalite Canyon facilities open and accessible.

The National Park Service fired about 1,000 workers just as it announced it would be hiring 5,000 seasonal staff for the coming summer tourist deluge. While law enforcement and firefighting posts had hiring freeze exemptions, entrance gate staff, maintenance workers and other employees who define the day-to-day visitor experience have no similar priority. And despite the promised exemptions, firefighting positions are reported unfilled across the country.

“We are concerned about smaller parks closing visitor center doors and larger parks losing key staff including wastewater treatment operators,” National Parks Conservation Association President Theresa Pierno said in a February 14 press release. “Exempting National Park Service seasonal staff from the federal hiring freeze means parks can fill some visitor services positions. But with peak season just weeks away, the decision to slash 1,000 permanent, full-time jobs from national parks is reckless and could have serious public safety and health consequences.”

Coming next: The combination of climate change and unprecedented government restructuring under the new Trump administration has forced conservationists and environmentalists to rethink their priorities. Might it also lead to evolving new political coalitions, or reviving the radical protest tactics of the 1980s?

Part 1 in our series: The Fight for Wild Lands, Part 1