The Trump Administration Has Threatened to Sell Off Our Public Lands and Waters Since Day One

FROM: America Fitzpatrick, Conservation Program Director, League of Conservation Voters
TO: Interested Parties
MEMO: The Trump Administration Has Threatened to Sell Off Our Public Lands and Waters Since Day One

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Trump and his allies in Congress have relentlessly attacked protections for our public lands and waters since day one of his administration. Our newly launched tracker chronicles their efforts to sell off our treasured public lands and waters to Big Polluters and billionaire executives at the expense of our communities, our cultural heritage, and our future generations.

SEE: LCV’s New Tracker on Trump’s Extreme Attacks on Public Lands And Waters

Trump’s sell off of our public lands and waters is deeply unpopular amongst the majority of people across the country. Recent polling shows that 74% of Americans oppose the closure of national public lands and 71% oppose the sell off of public lands to the highest bidder. The widespread support to protect our public lands and waters runs across the political spectrum — including Democrats, Independents and Republicans. People know these threats will have devastating impacts on the economies and communities that rely on our public lands and waters, especially communities who are already seeing the greatest impacts of the climate crisis and environmental injustice on our planet. 

On the campaign trail Trump promised to give away our public lands and let Big Polluters “drill, drill, drill,” — and on day one, he signed executive orders to declare a national “energy emergency.” Trump, his allies in Congress, and his administration with direct ties to corporate polluters have continued to attack protections for our public lands and put polluters over people ever since. Extreme Republicans in Congress are carrying out Trump’s Project 2025 agenda with their Big Ugly Bill, voting to open up millions of acres of our public lands to drilling, logging, and mining, take us back to dirty coal, and put polluters first. 

As we continue to work with our state and local allies to fight for permanent protections for our public lands and waters, our new tracker is exposing Trump’s efforts to:

• roll back bedrock environmental laws,
• sell off millions of acres of public lands and waters to Big Polluters and private entities,
• undermine policies and rules that hold Big Polluters accountable,
• defund conservation programs,
• gut land management agencies and their staff, and
• repeal protections for millions of acres of lands and waters.

A few lowlights of the Trump administration’s worst attacks so far include:

1. Selling off millions of acres of our public lands: Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill mandates quarterly lease sales that open up our public lands and waters to drilling, mining, and destructive development. They also tried to permanently sell off 3 million acres of public land in the West, but the intense public backlash forced them to reverse course. 
2. Handing the Arctic over to Big Oil: Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the world’s last remaining intact Arctic landscapes, to oil and gas drilling. Meanwhile, in June, the Trump administration also stripped drilling safeguards from 13 million acres of the Western Arctic, a blow to iconic wildlife, like caribou and polar bears, as well as the Indigenous communities who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial. 
3. Paving the way for President Trump to abolish national monuments: In May, the Department of Justice issued a legal opinion asserting that presidents have unilateral power to abolish national monuments. The administration is presumably setting the stage to erase protections for historic and sacred landscapes like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, upending a longstanding bipartisan conservation tradition used by Republican and Democratic presidents.
4. Opening 58 million acres of national forests to logging and construction: In June, the Trump administration rescinded the Roadless Rule, which has protected old-growth forests from logging and roadbuilding for more than two decades. This decision dangerously increases wildfire risk and ignores decades of public support for keeping these forests wild.
5. Gutting the agencies that steward our public lands: Within its first month, the Trump administration fired more than 2,000 staff at the Department of the Interior, including 1,000 National Park Service employees. Just months later, Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from land management agencies and conservation programs. Together, these cuts have hollowed out the agencies, leaving our parks and public lands overcrowded, unprotected, and even more vulnerable to polluter demands. 

This tracker follows LCV’s recently announced multi-state public lands campaign organized alongside local communities, artists, advocates, and elected officials to fight back against the Trump administration’s sell off of public lands, threats to our clean water, and highlight the value of these cherished places and resources.

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