Last January, during what now seem like
the halcyon days of the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump and his son
Donald, Jr., sat down for an interview with Field & Stream at the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor
Trade Show, in Las Vegas. The discussion, though brief, was packed with vintage Republican rhetoric. The elder
Trump declared himself “very much into energy” and “very much into fracking and
drilling,” called gun violence “a mental-health problem,” decried President
Obama’s frequent use of executive orders (“you have to go through Congress”),
and twice noted that New York City had awarded him one of its ultra-scarce
concealed-carry handgun permits. The younger Trump talked about how “hunting
and fishing kept me out of so much other trouble I would’ve gotten into
throughout my life.” On one point, however, the Trumps departed from G.O.P.
dogma. Asked whether the federal government should transfer some of the six
hundred and forty million acres of public land it manages to state control,
Trump demurred. “I don’t like the idea because I want to keep the lands great,”
he said. Trump, Jr., spoke of “refunding” public lands in order to improve
maintenance, and preserving hunting access by keeping them out of private
hands. Compare that with the Republican Party platform, released seven months later,
which called it “absurd” for “official Washington” to control so much acreage,
and enjoined Congress to “immediately pass universal legislation” redressing
the issue.
Trump’s
enthusiasm for energy development and his stated opposition to land transfers
are shared by his pick for Secretary of the Interior, the Montana congressman
Ryan Zinke, whose nomination was approved on Tuesday morning by the Senate
Energy and Natural Resources Committee and will soon be taken up by the full
Senate. “I am absolutely against transfer or sale of public lands,” he said in
response to a question from Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington,
during his recent committee hearings. “I can’t be more clear.” Zinke’s voting
record shows the same. For now, however, the “refunding” of public lands seems
to be a low priority for the Administration. Last week, in one of a number of
high-profile orders, Trump instituted a ninety-day hiring freeze across the
executive branch—a heavy blow to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau
of Land Management, the National Park Service, and other chronically
short-staffed agencies. According to a recent survey by the nonprofit Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility, more than ninety per cent of wildlife-refuge
managers report that they lack the staffing to fulfill their core conservation
mission. One B.L.M. employee, responding to a related survey, said, “I have 1.8 million acres of
land in my field office to manage and I am the only natural-resources staff member.”
The Interior Department, which oversees these agencies, did not respond to
repeated requests for comment on Tuesday morning.
Congress,
meanwhile, has been quietly pursuing the vision laid out in the G.O.P.
platform. Current rules require that any legislation that costs the federal
government money must be offset by budget cuts or new sources of revenue. Under
a measure passed in early January as part of a House rules package, however,
all federal-land transfers will be labelled as cost-free. Rob Bishop, the Utah
congressman who proposed the measure, has said that fears of extensive land
transfers are “bullshit,” and that he and his colleagues have simply eliminated
a “stupid accounting trick”—a reference to the Congressional Budget Office’s
method of assessing the value of public lands, long the subject of partisan
disagreement. But Bishop, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, is
one of the most powerful members of a movement dedicated to weakening federal
management of Western lands, and that movement has lately pressed the
advantages it gained in the November election. Senator Orrin Hatch and Governor
Gary Herbert, both of Utah, are backing a bid for the B.L.M. directorship by
Mike Noel, a current state representative and former bureau staffer known for
his fervent commitment to land transfers and his extreme disdain for his
onetime employer. (Appointing Noel as B.L.M. director “would be like having an
atheist teach Sunday school,” the former director Pat Shea told the Salt Lake Tribune.) Last week, Representative Jason Chaffetz, also
of Utah, introduced a bill that would transfer 3.3 million acres of public land
across ten states, drawing protests from conservation and hunting groups.
The
political tension over federal land ownership goes back a long way. In the
century or so after the founding of the republic, the U.S. government acquired
1.8 billion acres of land, culminating in 1867 with the purchase of Alaska from
Russia. Some two-thirds of those acres were eventually disposed—transferred to
state and private hands in order to raise money and encourage settlement. But,
from the beginning, some lands were reserved for public schools, military bases,
and other purposes deemed in the national interest. In 1872, the creation of Yellowstone National Park began
a tradition of setting aside some federally managed land for recreation and
conservation. Today, most public land lies within the borders of a dozen
Western states, where it is variously grazed, mined, and logged by private
permittees; covered with wind turbines, solar panels, and drilling rigs by the
same; and protected from development in the form of national parks, monuments,
wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas. By law, it is managed through a public
process that, while highly imperfect and often agonizingly slow, is intended to
reflect the country’s changing values.
For generations, however, some Westerners—and
their political leaders—have viewed this land as Washington’s hostage. In the
eighteen-nineties, when Congress established the first public-land forest
reserves, one Colorado newspaper encouraged its readers to “arise in your might
and protest this damnable outrage.” A Colorado cattleman told the Denver
Chamber of Commerce that the reserves were an act of tyranny “not equalled
since the days of William the Conqueror.” Eighty years later, outraged by a wave
of new environmental laws, anti-federal Westerners mounted the so-called
Sagebrush Rebellion, bulldozing a road into a Utah canyon proposed for
wilderness protection and issuing death threats to agency staffers. Ronald
Reagan, campaigning in Utah in 1980, told supporters to “count me in as a
rebel.”
The
rebellion has resurfaced periodically since then, perhaps most dramatically
early last year, when a group of armed extremists, led by the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, took over the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge, in southern Oregon, for forty-one days. One of their first
actions was to cover the refuge sign with one that said “Harney County Resource
Center.” At the time, Bishop pointedly refused to condemn the takeover, instead
blaming the situation on “what we feel is the abuse of individuals by the
land-management agencies.” Trump, then on the campaign trail, was more
critical, though back in 2014 he complimented the Bundys’ father, Cliven, who
had been involved in an armed confrontation with law enforcement over his
two-decade-long refusal to pay grazing fees on public lands in Nevada. “I like
him,” Trump said. “I like his spirit. I like his spunk.”
There
are plenty of grounds for civil disagreement over the management of public
lands. But the argument for large-scale federal-land disposal makes little
legal, financial, or practical sense. The government’s constitutional right to
own and hold property has been upheld by the Supreme Court. The fees that
federal agencies charge for grazing, mining, and other extractive activities
are heavily subsidized, and would almost certainly rise were the land
transferred to states or counties. The job of managing so many millions of
acres would also place a heavy burden on state and local governments—two
hundred and eighty million dollars a year just in Utah, according to a 2014
study by economists from three of the state’s universities. In addition, a mass
land transfer would likely lead to environmental disaster, much as unregulated
grazing of the Western range in the early nineteen-hundreds caused chronic
erosion and helped create the Dust Bowl. The states’-rights argument is also
morally dubious: in response to the Bundy brothers’ stated determination to
give Malheur back to its rightful owners, Charlotte Roderique, the chairwoman
of the Burns Paiute Native American tribe, said, drily, “I’m sitting here
trying to write an acceptance letter for when they return all this land to us.”
The
land-transfer movement is, at its heart, an expression of frustration. The arid
interior West has never been an easy place to make a living off the land, and
the Western myth of self-sufficiency has always been underwritten by federal
subsidies and supported by federal infrastructure. In states like Utah and
Nevada, where more than half the land within state borders is managed by the
federal government, the feds have become a convenient scapegoat for an
impossible climate, an unattainable cultural ideal, and a changing economy. To
say that these objections are born of frustration, however, is not to say that
they pose no threat. Frustration, as we saw on November 8th, can have real
political consequences.