As Election Season Ramps Up, Trump Administration Tries to Appease Certain Subsets of Public Land Users
Ranchers, OHV users, and hunters alike got some "good" news from the administration recently in attempt to get their votes (back)
With primary season now well underway and the November election rapidly approaching, the Trump administration appears to be desperately trying to bring people who rely on public lands and waters back into the fold.
After spending the past fifteen months gutting land management agencies, rolling back environmental protection laws, cutting budgets, and opening public lands to more drilling, mining, and logging—along with implementing policies that have increased the cost of living for pretty much every single regular American—they’re clearly in damage control mode.
And when it comes to public lands and waters, they’re now actively trying to appease a variety of (traditionally more conservative) users.
This is where we are now.
As the primary season grinds on and the midterms begin to loom like a thunderstorm on a prairie horizon, the administration has found a familiar use for public lands. But it’s not stewardship, ecological resilience, or the long and boring work of making sure future Americans inherit healthy lands, clean water, and thriving wildlife populations.
It is, of course, politics.
It’s politics wrapped up in language that sounds almost logical but is, in fact, hollow. It’s words like “access,” “multiple use,” “local control,” “common sense,” “balance,” “cutting red tape.” Remember those words—they’ll come back later.
Specifically, this is the politics of appeasement.
Let’s start with grazing.
In May, the Interior Department finalized its repeal of the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, a Biden-era policy that had placed conservation more clearly on equal footing with other uses of BLM lands.
That rule did not lock up the West. It didn’t end grazing, drilling, recreation, or access. It simply recognized the obvious: that restoration, intact wildlife habitat, clean water, climate resilience, and healthy landscapes are legitimate uses of public land, too. The administration’s repeal restores what it calls “balance” by prioritizing access, local decision-making, energy policy, and multiple use.
That word—balance—is doing a lot of work.
Because almost immediately, the administration paired the repeal with a proposed overhaul of federal grazing regulations. The Bureau of Land Management says the changes would “streamline” grazing administration, simplify processes, and make it easier for ranchers to respond quickly to changing conditions on the land. But the political message is clearer than the bureaucratic one: ranchers are being told that Washington is back on their side.
Livestock grazing on public lands is routinely presented as some kind of inalienable right. In much of the West, cows on federal land are not treated as one use among many. They’re considered rural heritage and country culture—the number one priority.
That makes grazing extremely useful politics. Propose to “streamline” grazing regulations, give ranchers more flexibility, reduce oversight, and suddenly the administration can declare itself the defender of rural America.
Never mind that public-land grazing is already heavily subsidized. Never mind that poorly managed grazing can hammer riparian areas almost beyond repair, spread invasive weeds, compact soils, and turn creek bottoms into lifeless, hoof-punched mud.
The message isn’t really about range health at all. It’s about reassurance. The administration has been telling ranchers: We see you. We hear you. We’re putting the annoying people with degrees in ecology back in the box.
This approach became crystal-clear last month when news about the Interior Department’s kicking bison off federal land in Montana went viral. Many outlets and publications framed that story around the administration’s disregard for wildlife and conservation. While that is indisputable, this is about more than that.
It’s about votes.
It’s about trying to win back farmers and ranchers, folks who’ve been struggling as the result of the administration’s own policies. I wrote the following about the decision to remove bison from public lands about four weeks ago:
The Montana decision points in another direction: toward a much narrower view of public lands as little more than productive working landscapes. Toward public lands where conservation is acceptable only when it does not disrupt older grazing hierarchies, where struggling businesses owners—cattle ranchers—are now being tricked into believing the current federal government has their backs, while the only thing it’s after is their votes in November and in 2028.
The biggest problem most local Montana ranchers have with American Prairie is not that it’s grazing its private bison herd on public lands. It’s that it’s buying up private lands and, by doing so, they say, raising the cost of living in the area.
Of course, the real reason life is more expensive now in many ways than it was just a couple of years ago are tariffs and an oversees war over oil and fertilizer.
The bison issue is just a part of the larger public lands grazing story, though. Yesterday, June 1, the Interior Department proposed a new grazing rule that “would give ranchers more flexibility, improve the health of rangelands and support rural communities across the West.”
“For too long, ranchers and land managers have been forced to work under outdated rules that do not match today’s challenges,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a statement. “President Trump has made it clear that we must cut red tape, support the people who feed our nation and ensure our public lands remain healthy for future generations. These updates will help us do exactly that.”
Interior specifically referred to its Public Lands Rule repeal in its statement about expanded grazing on public lands.
Decisions that result in fewer bison and more cattle on public lands are attempts to get votes (back) from ranchers.
Then there is off-highway vehicle access, the loudest possible example—literally—of this politization of public lands in an election season.
Responsible motorized recreation belongs on public lands. Pick-up trucks, dirt bikes, ATVs, and other 4WD vehicles can be legitimate tools for access, exploration, and fun on public lands, provided that it’s done responsibly.
Plenty of riders and drivers follow the rules, stay on designated routes, and care deeply about the places they visit.
But anyone who has spent time on Western public lands has also seen the other version: unauthorized tracks braiding across desert crust, mud holes turned into playgrounds, and subalpine meadows treated like obstacle courses.
Managing that use is not tyranny. It’s the core of responsible public land management. Agencies designate routes for a reason. They close some areas for a reason. Wildlife habitat, soil stability, watershed protection, and quiet recreation are not imaginary concerns invented by bureaucrats who hate fun.
But in campaign language, nuance is always absent.
Restrictions become “closures,” planning becomes “red tape,” and conservation becomes “locking up the land.” And the administration gets to tell OHV users that it’s restoring access, when what it’s really doing is converting a complicated management problem into a bumper sticker.
Last Friday evening, May 29, President Trump did exactly that.
In his Executive Order “Removing Unnecessary and Counterproductive Restrictions on Access to Federal Lands,” he revoked two older executive orders that limited off-highway vehicle access on public lands. They were signed by Nixon and Carter and had been in place for decades.
Does this order mean new backcountry roads will be build for off-highway travel, though? Absolutely not.
Generally speaking, all it does is—potentially, not certainly—allow noisy ATVs on backcountry roads where they’re currently banned (but where other loud vehicles like motorbikes or huge pick-up trucks are allowed).
Jonathan P. Thompson pointed out the possible reasons for the OHV order in his The Land Desk newsletter:
Trump probably did this at the behest of the Blue Ribbon Coalition and the likes of Sen. Mike Lee, who has pushed legislation that would open up national parks to OHVs.
Maybe he’s trying to garner support from somewhere, given his terrible favorability ratings. Or perhaps he’s trying to appease the motorized crowd, which is probably a bit miffed that their drug of choice—gasoline—is so damned expensive thanks to Donny’s dumb war. Maybe he’s even trying to increase national park entry fee revenues so he can funnel it to his ballroom/drone-port or his White House UFC fight.
Opening up public lands to OHV use is an attempt to secure the votes of a particular subset of public land recreationists who may have gotten upset about other things like gas prices.
Hunting is the more complicated example here, because hunting actually has one of the strongest conservation stories in American life. Hunters and anglers helped build and develop the modern North American wildlife conservation system. They fund habitat work through license fees, duck stamps, and excise taxes.
Many hunters understand better than anyone that healthy habitat and clean water aren’t luxuries. They’re the whole game.
No habitat, no game. No clean water, no fowl. No animals, no hunting. Even a campaign consultant could probably follow that, given enough coffee.
So when the administration announces expanded hunting and fishing access like it did last week on May 26, it sounds like conservation. Sometimes it may even be good policy. There are places where access can, in fact, be expanded responsibly, and sportsmen and women deserve a seat at the table.
In its press statement, the Interior Department announced it’s removing “unnecessary restrictions” on hunting in National Park Service units where hunting is legally allowed. It also boasted about the “largest expansion of hunting and sport fishing opportunities in [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] history,” making 95% of the agency’s lands available for hunting.
Context matters a lot here.
This does not mean there will be any hunting whatsoever in any of our 63 National Parks. What it does mean is that some hunting regulations may be revised at certain park sites where hunting is already allowed.
For the record: 60% of all National Park Service-managed lands—more than 51 million acres across 76 different units—are currently open to hunting by law. The administration cannot add any acres or units to that tally, nor can it remove any. Only Congress can do that.
This executive order also doesn’t mean hunters are going to shoot endangered species in National Wildlife Refuges. In fact, none of these things will make a huge difference on the ground. It’s basically empty fluff to generate headlines and spark controversies.
Wes Siler summarized this hunting “expansion” best in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter:
This is part of a larger playbook that the administration has been using since its first attempt at an autocratic takeover. Hunting is a highly regulated activity that’s governed by literal books full of rules and laws.
Trump’s Department of the Interior has a pattern of cleaning up some minor part of those regulations—clarifying the definition of “daylight,” or something similarly irrelevant—then making some big announcement about how it’s “opening up hunting opportunities” across some obscene amount of acres, when all they’re really doing is changing one word in one of thousands of sentences in those regulations.
No one would ever notice any difference if we didn’t all get so upset about every little thing, then allow these assholes to take advantage of that to win elections.
When expanded hunting access is packaged alongside weakened conservation rules, looser grazing oversight, more motorized access, and more pressure for extraction, it starts to look less like wildlife policy and more like political camouflage.
Announcements about expanded hunting on public lands are an attempt to bring hunters, many of whom distrust the administration after recent public land sell-off attempts and federal staff reductions, back into the fold.
That’s the trick.
Nobody says, “We’re weakening the ecological foundation of public lands to juice turnout in key Western races.” Instead, they say “We’re expanding access.” They announce “We’re restoring common sense.” Or they proclaim “We’re putting Americans back in charge of their land.”
The short-term danger here is not that cows graze, riders ride, or hunters hunt. Those uses are part of the public land story right now, and they aren’t going away anytime soon.
The real danger this year is that these things are being isolated and weaponized as voting blocs while the broader conservation framework is quietly taken apart behind them.
So will there by more grazing on public lands? Maybe. Will there be more noisy ATVs disturbing the peace on public lands? Could be but unlikely. Will there actually be more hunting at national park sites? Not really.
However, those three particular groups of public land users did receive news recently that they liked and have actually thanked the Trump administration for those announcements.
And that’s the whole play.
More access. Fewer rules. Less Washington. You’re welcome. Now vote for my party.
If you’re part of one of those groups, don’t fall for it.
Thanks for reading!
See you on our public lands and waters,
Bram
Image 1: Greg Shine / BLM
Image 2: BLM
Image 3: Chuck Traxler / USFWS