MAGA Report Cards — Public Lands

The Trump Administration Wants to Open 336,400 Protected Acres Beside Chaco Canyon to Drilling and Uranium Mining.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:01:49 +0000

There is a place in northwestern New Mexico where you can stand in the ruins of a thousand-year-old city and look up at a sky as dark as the people who built it saw.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park is 53 square miles of ancestral Puebloan ruins — great houses, roads, and settlements built by Indigenous Pueblo peoples who were serious astronomers. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Astronomers recognize it internationally as a dark-sky area, ideal for viewing the stars.

In 2023, the Interior Department drew a 10-mile buffer zone around it. Inside that ring: no new oil and gas drilling, no uranium mining.

The Trump administration's Bureau of Land Management now wants to erase it. That would open 336,400 acres right next to Chaco to drilling and mining.

The comment period was 14 days. 100,000 comments came in anyway.

Before a change like this takes effect, the BLM opens a window for the public to comment on it.

The window it opened here was 14 days — unusually short, and it closed in July.

Roughly 100,000 comments came in anyway, and they were mostly hostile. Tribal leaders, archaeologists, and conservation groups lined up against it.

Fourteen days is not how you handle a decision about a World Heritage Site. It is how you handle a decision you have already made.

The United Nations is now asking questions

UNESCO confirmed it has received information about the plan and is waiting on a response from the federal government about what it would do to Chaco.

Its position is not ambiguous.

"The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status," a UNESCO spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that projects proposed outside a World Heritage property "should not adversely affect their outstanding universal value" — the specific qualities that got the site listed in the first place — and should get proper impact assessments before anyone decides anything.

The United States has 27 World Heritage Sites, including Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty. One of them, the Everglades, is already on UNESCO's "in danger" list because of development and pollution. Others can be added if what's happening next door is judged harmful enough.

That is the actual risk here. Not a fine, not a lawsuit — an internationally recognized American landmark getting formally listed as endangered because of a decision made in Washington.

What drilling next door actually does to it

Opponents laid out the specifics, and they are not abstract.

Air pollution — a haze over a park people travel across the world to see, which would cut visitor numbers.
Water — fracking activity near a place where, as one Navajo community leader put it, the aquifers are currently pristine.
Light and flaring — bright industrial lighting and burning gas, in a night sky astronomers recognize internationally. The Pueblo people who built Chaco tracked the stars from it. So do stargazers now.

Daniel Tso, who served as a Navajo Nation council delegate, holds land allotments inside the buffer.

"I have allotments inside the buffer zone where the land is untouched, the aquifers are pristine," he said. "If the oil and gas companies go in there the sacredness of that land is gone."

Then he described what the outside of the line already looks like: "Outside this zone, some of these oil and gas wells are within 100 feet of Navajo people's homes, causing tremendous health impacts."

Within 100 feet of people's homes. That is what Tso fears is coming for the 336,400 acres inside the line.

The argument for doing it doesn't hold up

The pitch is urgency — America needs the energy, and it needs it from here.

Maude Dinan, New Mexico program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, pointed out the hole in that.

"Almost all of the federal land around places like Chaco and Carlsbad is already leased for oil and gas drilling, so the idea there's an urgent new demand for this is an illusion."

The industry is already there. It has already been given nearly everything around the park. The buffer is the exception, not the obstacle.

Deb Haaland, the former Interior Secretary who oversaw the buffer zone's creation, said removing it would cause "irreversible damage." Of Trump and BLM director Steve Pearce, she said: "Their attempt to profit off this sacred place shows a clear lack of consideration and disrespect for the lives that New Mexicans live."

Chaco is not the only one

Chaco is where the threat is largest, but it isn't isolated.

Some Republicans have been lobbying the president to lift the ban on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, also a World Heritage Site. And the administration has already leased thousands of acres for oil and gas drilling near Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, above a fragile underground cave system.

It fits a pattern this site has been tracking all year. The administration cut Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments by nearly 3 million acres — about 90%. It has moved to scrap the Roadless Rule protecting untouched national forest, after 99% of the Americans who commented said not to. It erased the rule that made it illegal to destroy the habitat endangered animals live in.

Dinan said the run of decisions has changed how she reads this one.

"It makes me wonder where the line in the sand is; it feels that no matter how valuable or sacred a place is, the administration is willing to trade it all in."

The Interior Department and the National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment.

What it adds up to

The Bureau of Land Management wants to open 336,400 acres beside a UNESCO World Heritage Site to oil, gas and uranium extraction. It gave the public 14 days to object, got about 100,000 mostly hostile comments, and is moving ahead — while UNESCO waits on an answer the federal government has not given, and the industry's own leases already cover nearly all the land around the park.

Source

Oliver Milman, "Trump's Plan to Allow Drilling Near New Mexico Heritage Site Sets off Global Alarm", originally published by The Guardian and reproduced by Mother Jones through the Climate Desk collaboration, August 2026. Photo: Jon G. Fuller / AP.

The Order Protecting the Boundary Waters Expires 90 Days After Walz Leaves Office. Lisa Demuth Wants the Copper Mine.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:06:31 +0000

On Tuesday, August 18, Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order aimed at blocking a copper-nickel mine upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

There's a catch written into it. The order expires 90 days after Walz leaves office.

Which means the person who really decides whether the Boundary Waters gets a sulfide-ore mine in its watershed is whoever wins the governor's race this November.

One of the two major-party nominees is Lisa Demuth. The Star Tribune summed up her position in six words: "Pro-mining, all mining, including Twin Metals."

What's actually at stake

The Boundary Waters is a million acres of lakes and forest in northern Minnesota. People take their kids there. It is one of the most visited wilderness areas in the country, and the tourism and recreation economy built around it depends on one thing: the water staying clean.

Twin Metals wants to put a copper-nickel mine outside the wilderness but upstream from it. That word does all the work. Water runs downhill. Anything that leaks out of that site runs into the Boundary Waters.

This is sulfide-ore mining, which Minnesota has never done. It's a type with a long, documented record of leaving polluted water behind. Conservation groups warn a failure would flow downstream and permanently contaminate the wilderness.

And the company that would cash in is not a Minnesota company. Twin Metals is a subsidiary of Antofagasta, a Chilean mining conglomerate.

How the protection got knocked down in the first place

In 2023, the federal government pulled about 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest — the land that drains straight into the Boundary Waters — off the table for mining leases for 20 years.

Minnesota Congressman Pete Stauber wrote a resolution to erase that. It passed the Senate 50-49 in April, Trump signed it on April 27, and the 20-year protection was gone. Every Senate Democrat, including Amy Klobuchar, voted against lifting it.

That vote is what pushed conservation groups to ask Walz for a state-level order. Which is what he signed Tuesday. Which is what expires 90 days into the next governor's term.

So the whole thing now rests on one election.

What Demuth says

Demuth's public statement about the order didn't discuss the specifics of Twin Metals' proposal. It went after the politics:

"Tim Walz, Amy Klobuchar and Democrats in the legislature continue their hostility toward Minnesota mining, taking job growth opportunities off the table before they can even go through the regulatory review process."

She has said before that she supports the Twin Metals project specifically.

In her own words to reporters this week, on why the review should go ahead:

"It provides jobs. It provides minerals and I think we can look better at Minnesota and how we can help with those critical minerals rather than just shutting down the process."

And then the claim worth writing down:

"I believe that we can do the mining safely in Minnesota, safer than any other place in the country if not the world for those critical minerals that we absolutely need and that review process should be allowed to go forward."

Safer than any other place in the country. If not the world.

That is a big promise about a kind of mining Minnesota has never done once, on a site where the water runs into a national wilderness. It is offered as a belief — "I believe that we can" — not as evidence.

The jobs argument cuts both ways

Demuth frames this as jobs versus environmentalists. That framing skips something.

The Boundary Waters already supports jobs. Outfitters, guides, lodges, resorts, restaurants, gear shops — a whole regional economy that exists because people come from all over the country to paddle clean water. Those jobs are here now, and they are the ones that disappear if the water goes bad.

The trade isn't jobs versus no jobs. It's a Chilean conglomerate's mine versus the tourism economy Minnesotans already built, with the wilderness itself as the collateral.

Demuth's statement said mining can be approved while protecting "our beloved outdoors." She did not say how, and she did not address what Twin Metals specifically would put in the watershed.

The pattern

This is a candidate who has been comfortable claiming more than the record supports before.

She took credit for a viral daycare video — and the YouTuber who made it said he had no idea who she was. She had herself elected Speaker of the Minnesota House, and ten days later the state Supreme Court ruled it never legally happened. And a billionaire who funds abortion bans is bankrolling her run for governor.

Now she is telling Minnesotans that a copper-nickel mine upstream from the Boundary Waters can be done more safely than anywhere on earth.

Voters get to decide whether they believe that, because the order protecting the place runs out 90 days after the next governor is sworn in. There is no do-over on a poisoned watershed.

Sources

Dave Orrick, "Klobuchar vs. Demuth: Where they stand on mining near the Boundary Waters", The Minnesota Star Tribune, August 18, 2026.

"Republican Demuth Opposes Governor's Executive Order Protecting BWCAW from Mining", Learfield / willmarradio.com, August 19, 2026.

99% of Americans Who Weighed In Said Don't Touch the Roadless Rule. Harriet Hageman Wrote a Bill to Make Sure It Never Comes Back.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:52:10 +0000

In 2001, the Forest Service put 58.8 million acres of national forest off-limits to new road building. It's called the Roadless Rule, and what it does is keep new roads from being cut into the backcountry. The land stays public and stays open — it just stays roadless.

Wyoming has 3.3 million of those acres, spread across nine national forests.

Last year the Trump administration moved to erase the rule, and did the thing agencies do before a big change: it asked the public what it thought.

The public answered. More than 99% said don't.

Harriet Hageman read that result and introduced a bill to make the repeal permanent.

What the public actually said

The Forest Service ran a 21-day comment period in the summer of 2025. When it closed, regulations.gov showed 223,862 comments posted, on top of roughly 400,000 more submitted in bulk petitions — about 625,737 submissions in all.

The Center for Western Priorities pulled a random sample of 5,000 and coded them. The result: 99.2% opposed the repeal, 0.6% supported it, 0.2% were neutral, with a margin of error of 1.4 points.

"Across state lines and party lines, Americans spoke with one voice to tell President Trump to stop this attack on America's forests," the group's deputy director, Aaron Weiss, said.

This is not a new or partisan opinion. When the Clinton administration proposed the rule in the first place, it drew 1.6 million comments, more than 90% in favor. A 2019 Pew poll found 75% support — the same in rural areas as in cities.

What Hageman's bill does

On February 25, 2026, Hageman introduced H.R. 7695. Four Republicans signed on the same day: Troy Downing of Montana, Celeste Maloy of Utah, Pete Stauber of Minnesota, and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin.

The bill does two things. It declares the 2001 rule to have "no force or effect" — writing the administration's repeal into statute. And it goes further than the administration went: it says a future Agriculture secretary "may not take any action to propose, finalize, implement, administer, or enforce any rule substantially similar to the rule."

That second clause is the point. An agency rule can be undone by the next agency. A statute can't. Hageman's bill is designed to take the question away from every future administration — and from the 223,862 people who just answered it.

The Wyoming Outdoor Council's public lands program manager, Gabby Yates, put it this way: "By sidestepping the already scant public process that the administration is using to rescind the rule, H.R. 7695 adds insult to injury and ignores hundreds of thousands of Americans who are currently opposing the rescission."

The wildfire argument, and what the Forest Service said about it

At a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing on May 21, 2026, Hageman testified for her bill. She called the Roadless Rule an "environmental catastrophe."

"The Roadless Rule has been devastating to the Interior West," she said. "The Roadless Rule has been devastating to Wyoming."

Her evidence is wildfire. She told the subcommittee that nine of the ten "most catastrophic" national forest fires have happened since 2001. When Rep. Andrea Salinas of Oregon argued that building roads can increase fire risk — citing the Forest Service's own assessment and an analysis finding 85% of wildfires are human-caused — Hageman told her she was "absolutely wrong."

"The science and the facts and the history demonstrate, without question, that you are absolutely wrong," Hageman said.

Then the Forest Service's own associate chief, Chris French, testified. His agency supports the repeal and supports Hageman's bill; he offered "technical assistance" to help pass it. And he still would not back her up on that point. It is a "longstanding fact," French said, that "most" wildfire ignitions are human-caused and "most are going to be associated with where humans go, including roads."

He added that severity can be worse in untreated roadless areas, and that "there are different facts you can pull out to support an opinion."

That's the agency on her side of the bill declining to say the thing she said "without question."

This is her second run at Wyoming's public land

Hageman has been fighting the Roadless Rule since it existed. Twenty-five years ago, as a private attorney, she litigated against it on Wyoming's behalf. That's a long-held conviction, and she's entitled to it.

But she is now the person Wyoming sends to Congress, and the last time she got out ahead of Wyoming on public land it went badly for her.

In 2025 she backed a provision in Trump's budget bill that would have required selling off federal land across 11 Western states, Wyoming included. Wyomingites showed up at her town halls furious, and she pulled her support — while telling the Powell Tribune she still favors selling federal land. She changed her position, not her mind.

The pattern is the same here. National hunting and angling groups have come out hard against ending the Roadless Rule, because roadless backcountry is where the elk and the native trout are. Wyoming conservation groups oppose it. Nearly everyone who bothered to file a comment opposes it. The people lined up behind the repeal are Western Republican officeholders and a timber industry that's been shrinking for decades — Gov. Mark Gordon and Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis are all on record for it.

Hageman's response to that lineup isn't to argue the public out of its position. It's to write a law saying the public doesn't get asked again.

Why this matters right now

Hageman is running for Cynthia Lummis's open Senate seat, and Wyoming's primary is August 18, 2026 — one week from today. Her main opponent, rancher Sam Mead, is running on a pro-public-lands platform.

Hageman has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 1% lifetime score. She chairs the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries. Her donors include Peabody Energy, the country's largest coal producer, and Koch's corporate PAC. We've written about her bill to kill the lawsuits towns file when energy companies wreck them, and about her resolution to strip California's power to limit vehicle pollution.

H.R. 7695 fits the set. What makes it different is who it's aimed at. The clean-air resolution was aimed at California. This one is aimed at the 223,862 people who filed a comment, and at every American who might file one in the future.

Wyoming has one voice in the House. Right now it is being used to argue that the public has already said too much.

Source

Wyoming's Hageman aims to block future 'roadless areas,' despite overwhelming support to keep public land pristine — Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile, May 21, 2026.

Photo: The northern Wyoming Range. Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile.

Mike Simpson Wrote the Bill That Delists Wolves and Yellowstone Grizzlies — and Says No Court Is Allowed to Review It

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:00:02 +0000

There is a way to change a law without ever passing a bill about it. You attach a paragraph to the spending bill that funds the agency, and you attach a second paragraph saying no court may review the first one.

On May 20, 2026, the House Appropriations Committee released its Interior and Environment spending bill for the coming year. The chairman of the subcommittee that wrote it is Mike Simpson, the Republican who has represented Idaho's 2nd District since 1999. He holds the pen on the bill that funds the Interior Department, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Park Service and the EPA.

Here is some of what he put in it.

Wolves, delisted by paragraph — with the courthouse locked

Section 125 orders the reissuance of the Trump-era rule stripping gray wolves of Endangered Species Act protection nationwide, and specifies that the action "shall not be subject to judicial review." That last clause is the whole trick. Ordinarily, when the government strips a species of protection, the science behind that decision can be tested in court. Section 125 says: not this time.

The Wolf Conservation Center notes this is not a new tactic — it traces to a 2011 rider that delisted wolves in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Utah, the first time since the Endangered Species Act was written in 1973 that Congress removed protections for a species by legislation. An identical rider was in Simpson's previous bill, the FY26 version. It came out after public opposition. He put it back.

What makes this specifically an Idaho story is what Idaho has already done with the wolves it manages.

In 2021 the Idaho Legislature passed Senate Bill 1211, and Governor Brad Little signed it. According to Idaho Fish and Game's own summary, the law established a year-round wolf trapping season on private property, allowed unlimited purchase of wolf tags, and made any method legal for taking coyotes and foxes legal for taking wolves. In practice that means night hunting with spotlights or night vision, hunting over bait on private land, using dogs, and hunting from motorized vehicles — none of which are allowed for other big game.

To be fair about what the state says: Fish and Game Director Ed Schriever pushed back at the time on the widely reported claim that the law would cut Idaho's wolf population by 90%, saying the Commission's rules would "reduce wolf conflicts while maintaining a viable wolf population that is not subject to relisting under the federal Endangered Species Act."

Read that last clause carefully. Idaho's own wildlife director described federal relisting as the backstop — the thing that keeps state policy inside a line. Simpson's rider removes the backstop, and then says no judge may look at whether removing it was justified.

Grizzlies, in four ecosystems at once

The bill does not stop at wolves.

Section 141 requires the government to reissue its 2017 rule delisting the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly population within 180 days — again with judicial review blocked.
Section 149 requires a final delisting rule for the Northern Continental Divide grizzly population, to be issued "without regard to any other provision of law."
Sections 127 and 128 prohibit spending any money to establish experimental grizzly populations in the North Cascades and the Bitterroot ecosystem.

The Bitterroot straddles the Idaho–Montana line. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem reaches into eastern Idaho — Simpson's own district. He is not writing about somebody else's mountains.

And the list keeps going. In Western Watersheds Project's section-by-section reading of the bill, Section 126 targets wolverine protections. Section 124 covers the northern long-eared bat, Section 123 the lesser prairie-chicken, Section 147 the Canada lynx, Section 146 the northern spotted owl. Section 116 is a standing prohibition on the government even writing a threatened or endangered listing for the greater sage grouse. Section 131 blocks three 2024 rules that strengthened the Endangered Species Act across the board. Section 134 freezes management of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to the Trump administration's 2020 plan.

On top of the riders, the bill slashes funding for listing threatened and endangered species by nearly half the previous year's level, and two-thirds below FY25. If you can't list a species, the protections never begin.

Mary Beth Beetham, Director of Legislative Affairs at Defenders of Wildlife, put it plainly:

"Anti-wildlife Members of Congress just can't seem to appreciate that the American people cherish our shared wildlife."

The judicial review bar is the point

Strip out the species names and one design choice runs through the whole bill: decisions get made, and then courts are told to stay out.

That is not a fringe idea in this Congress. Bruce Westerman's Endangered Species Act rewrite — which conservation groups call the "Extinction Act" — does the same thing, barring courts from reviewing decisions to strip a species of protection. His own party pulled that bill from the floor rather than vote on it on Earth Day.

Simpson doesn't need a floor vote on a standalone bill. He has a spending bill that has to pass, and a gavel that lets him decide what's in the first draft. That is a quieter way to do the same thing, and it is why appropriations riders exist.

This is the second liability shield in two years

Simpson has used this bill for exactly this kind of work before. The FY26 version of the same spending bill carried Section 453, a provision that would have shielded Bayer and other pesticide makers from cancer failure-to-warn lawsuits. Democrats spent six months getting it out.

Both riders follow the same pattern: something that would never survive as a standalone bill, tucked into must-pass funding legislation, with the courts written out.

His League of Conservation Voters score reflects it — 3% in 2025, and 10% for his career.

Idaho pays for this too

Idahoans who hunt, fish, guide, outfit and run backcountry businesses have a stake in whether the animals and the country around them are managed on evidence or by rider. Simpson has spent decades presenting himself as the delegation's conservationist, the Republican who cares about Idaho's rivers and backcountry.

The bill he wrote in May tells a different story. It delists two of the West's most contested species by fiat, blocks grizzly recovery in the Bitterroot on Idaho's own border, defunds the process for listing anything new, and forecloses the one place a citizen could challenge any of it.

We deserve better.

Sources

Defenders of Wildlife, "House Interior Bill Attacks Crucial Protections for Imperiled Wildlife and Public Lands", May 20, 2026; Wolf Conservation Center, "House Interior Bill Seeks to Strip Key Protections for Gray Wolves", May 2026; Western Watersheds Project, "Copy and Paste: The FY27 Interior Appropriations Bill Continues Attack on Wildlife and the West". Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Celeste Maloy Wrote the Bill a Golf Developer Needed. Three Days After It Passed, He Wrote Her a $15,500 Check.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:02:28 +0000

On March 16, 2026, the U.S. House passed a bill written by Utah Congresswoman Celeste Maloy. It took forty minutes of debate and a voice vote — no roll call, no record of who was for it.

Three days later, a resort developer who needed that bill gave $15,500 to a fundraising committee set up in Maloy's name. The next day he gave $4,500 more.

He had already given her campaign $10,500 in December.

Total: $30,500 from one man — the managing partner of the company that wants to build a 1,250-acre golf resort on the Shivwits Band of Paiutes reservation, and that needs Maloy's bill to do it on the terms it wants.

What the bill actually does

The Shivwits Band of Paiutes Jurisdictional Clarity Act sounds like housekeeping. It isn't.

It does two things:

It moves lawsuits off the reservation and into Utah state court. Any civil case involving the Shivwits Band that arises on the band's trust land now goes to state court instead of tribal court. The bill spells out that disputes over any contract or lease count as civil cases — so a fight between the band and a developer gets decided by a state judge, not a tribal one.
It lets the band sign leases for up to 99 years. That's not a lease. That's four generations.

Maloy introduced it on April 29, 2025. It sat in the Natural Resources Committee — a committee she sits on — until January 2026, then moved to the floor and passed by voice vote in March. It's now in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, where an identical bill from Utah Sen. John Curtis has already had a hearing.

Who needed it

In October 2025, Shivwits Band leaders announced a joint venture with Reef Capital Partners, the developer behind the Black Desert Resort in nearby Ivins. The plan: three 18-hole golf courses, a practice course, a hotel, a sports complex, restaurants, cabins, and more, spread across 1,250 acres of reservation land west of St. George.

Patrick Manning is Reef Capital's managing partner and the developer of Black Desert Resort. He is also the man who wrote the $30,500 in checks.

Manning has been open about why the bill matters to him. He told KSL it gives "clearer legal certainty around civil matters tied to agreements on Shivwits lands," and that "that kind of certainty can support responsible investment and long-term planning."

That's the honest version. A company building a resort on tribal land wants to know that if the deal goes bad, it can sue in a court it understands, under rules it knows — not in the tribe's own court.

The bill delivers exactly that. And the man who wanted it delivered $30,500.

The timing is the story

Campaign money to a member of Congress isn't unusual. The calendar here is what makes it hard to look at.

Date	Amount	To
Dec. 19, 2025	$10,500	Celeste for Congress
March 16, 2026	—	House passes H.R. 3073
March 19, 2026	$15,500	Team Celeste
March 20, 2026	$4,500	Team Celeste

All of it is on the record at the Federal Election Commission, filed under Manning's name with his employer listed as Reef Capital Partners and his city as St. George. Team Celeste is a joint fundraising committee — a vehicle that lets one donor write a much bigger check than the law allows for a campaign account alone.

$20,000 of the $30,500 arrived in the four days after the House passed his bill.

The band is split, and the people who lost are the ones who live there

Maloy's defense is that she was doing what the tribe asked. "This legislation is the result of those conversations and reflects the solutions the tribe believes will help them move forward while serving their members," she said in a statement on the House floor. The elected Shivwits Band Council backs the bill, saying it "supports self-determination and sovereignty" and helps "remove uncertainty that can discourage responsible investment."

But the band is not of one mind, and the people objecting are band members.

Mary Snow, a band member who runs a group called Red Mountain Land Preservers, laid out the mechanism plainly to KSL:

"In order for big companies to have businesses on federal land, those businesses don't want to have to go through tribal court. So they come with their deals and their agreements, and part of that agreement is you give up sovereignty, which is the protection of the federal government. Then they take you to state court and you lose sovereignty to that land."

She also pointed out what a 99-year lease means in practice: "They're telling us that we don't have to go up to 99 years, but the thing is, that once this development is built, it's not going anywhere."

Other band members have said the project would sit on ground they consider sacred. Land resource manager Lawrence Snow told St. George News that Red Mountain is "a spiritual place. That's where the spirits go." Elder Joel Bushhead put it harder: "They stabbed us in the back. For their money."

Members told that paper the deal was announced on October 3 with almost no advance notice to the community, that they raised objections in council meetings and weren't heard, and that the lease agreement itself was never made available for them to read.

And then there's the water

Southern Utah is in an emergency drought. Gov. Spencer Cox declared one after a record-low snowpack. In the middle of that, the plan is three golf courses in the desert.

Opponents inside the band argue the resort would soak up all or most of the band's water rights, leaving nothing for anything the Shivwits might want to build for themselves later. Band leadership says there's enough water. Nobody disputes that a 99-year lease locks in whichever answer turns out to be wrong.

This is the same move, over and over

Maloy's whole record in Congress runs one direction on land. She pushed to sell more than 10,000 acres of Utah public land as an amendment to Trump's budget bill. She sponsored a bill to strip presidents of the power to create national monuments. And in July 2026 she stood next to Trump as he cut nearly 3 million acres out of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, then said she wanted Congress to make the cuts permanent. The League of Conservation Voters scores her at 3% for 2025 and 5% for her career.

She is not the only Republican writing law about Native land while Native constituents object. In Alaska, delegates at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention voted to formally oppose a bill written by their own congressman — who said he was only asking for feedback.

The bottom line

Nobody has shown that Celeste Maloy traded a bill for a check, and she says she wrote the bill because tribal leaders asked her to.

Here is what is on the record anyway. She sponsored a bill that moves tribal court cases into state court and unlocks 99-year leases. A developer needed both of those things to build a resort on that land. That developer's managing partner gave her and her PAC $30,500 — with $20,000 of it landing in the three days after the House passed the bill.

If you are the band member who stood up in a council meeting and got told no, you don't need a prosecutor to tell you what that looks like. And the bill is still moving. It's in the Senate now.

Source

Celeste Maloy faces questions over donations from developer backing proposed Shivwits golf resort — The Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2026
House passes bill for Shivwits Band's 99-year land lease with Black Desert Resort — KSL, March 18, 2026

Congress Protected the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge From the Border Wall. Monica De La Cruz Voted for the Bill That Removed the Protection.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:33:29 +0000

Last week of June 2026, the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, Texas posted a short notice on Facebook. The levee would be closed to bicycles and pedestrians for the rest of the summer. Bicyclists should use Bobcat Trail instead.

That was how people in the Rio Grande Valley learned that the border wall was finally coming to Santa Ana.

The refuge sits in Monica De La Cruz's district. She voted for the bill that made it possible, and when her constituents asked her to stop it, her office did not answer.

What is being built

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection map shows a nearly three-mile stretch labeled the "Rio Grande Valley 4 Project" cutting through the top of the refuge along Levee Road.

Scott Nicol, a longtime anti-wall activist in the Valley, described what that means on the ground:

"What's going to happen is they're going to carve away the river-facing (side) roughly one-third of that levee and replace that side of it with a concrete slab, so just a straight vertical wall that'll be around 10-feet tall. Then at what is now the top of the levee, they'll put steel posts that are 6-inches wide and spaced 4-inches apart, and that'll stand about 15 to 20 feet above that concrete wall … and so you get a total of 30 feet."

Thirty feet of concrete and steel bollards, with four inches between the posts.

"Because of the limited space between the posts and the concrete is impassable to most terrestrial animals, you know a bobcat or an ocelot, they can't get up that 10 feet and they can't get between those bollards, so it's going to be absolutely devastating for wildlife."

Santa Ana is 2,088 acres of subtropical woodland — one of the last remnants of the forest that used to line the Rio Grande. The Fish and Wildlife Service calls it "the jewel of the National Wildlife Refuge System," a premier birding destination with species found nowhere else in the country outside deep South Texas, and home to more than 300 kinds of butterflies. And when the river floods, the levee is how animals get to higher ground. A wall on the levee cuts that off.

Nicol says the project is part of a $1.14 billion contract to Spencer Construction that also covers La Lomita, the National Butterfly Center, Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, the Salineño Wildlife Preserve in Starr County and areas near La Grulla.

This had already been settled

Here is what makes this De La Cruz's story and not just Washington's.

During Trump's first term, activists in the Valley won this fight. They convinced Congress to write protections into law exempting Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, the National Butterfly Center, La Lomita chapel and Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park from border wall construction. Rep. Henry Cuellar, the Laredo Democrat, put the language in.

Those protections were not repealed by a court. They were not overturned by a president. They came out because Congress passed a new bill without them.

That bill was the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It put $46.5 billion into border barrier construction, and it carried none of the Rio Grande Valley carve-outs.

On July 3, 2025, Monica De La Cruz voted for it. Roll call 190 — she is recorded as "Aye."

She is the member of Congress for Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. The protection that had kept a wall out of it disappeared in a bill she voted for.

In February, her constituents asked her to fix it

This didn't happen quietly. In February 2026, more than 100 people rallied at the refuge to oppose the plans. What they wanted from De La Cruz was specific and small: back the restoration of the protective language in the ongoing congressional negotiations. Put it back the way it was.

Marisa Oliva, president of Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, warned that without action "we are going to leave the gates wide open" for the funding to reach Santa Ana.

Cuellar, who wrote the original protection, said of the administration: "They're trying to go around the language that I added."

De La Cruz's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Four months later, construction began.

"It could happen tomorrow"

When the levee closure was announced in June, Nicol called on De La Cruz, along with Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz — all three of whom voted for the bill — to intervene.

"They could push for this contract to be canceled or rewritten. It could happen tomorrow. I don't think they're going to do that, but I also don't think that just because they're in the same party as the president they should get a pass for that. Basically, they're deciding that they care more about fealty to Trump than they care about people in the Rio Grande Valley or the environment in the Rio Grande Valley."

That is the whole question in one paragraph. There is no procedural obstacle here. A member of the majority party, representing the district, asking her own party's administration to rewrite one contract in one place is about as easy a lift as exists in Congress.

She has not done it, and she has not explained why.

The Texas Observer asked her about the wall through Santa Ana in July. She did not respond to a request for comment.

The ocelot problem is not sentimental

Fewer than 100 ocelots are left in the United States. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, they survive in two small, isolated breeding populations in South Texas — the whole federal recovery effort is about giving those populations room to disperse and reconnect.

A 30-foot wall with four-inch gaps is a wall to an ocelot in exactly the way it is a wall to a person.

This is also happening at a moment when the federal government has stopped counting habitat destruction as harm at all. In July, the Interior and Commerce departments finalized a rule redefining "harm" under the Endangered Species Act so that wrecking the place an endangered animal lives no longer counts — only directly injuring the animal does. A study of species listed between 1975 and 2017 found that 81% were threatened by habitat loss and only 17% by direct killing.

So the wall goes up through the habitat, and the law that used to call that harm has been rewritten to say it isn't.

What her district gets

De La Cruz's constituents did not get a vote on this. They got a Facebook post about a closed bike path.

They also got the rest of the bill she voted for. In Texas's 15th District, an estimated 65,193 people are projected to lose health coverage as a result of the health care cuts, according to the Joint Economic Committee. 55,480 households in the district — about 21% of all households — rely on SNAP, which the same bill cut.

And a wildlife refuge that Congress had already agreed to protect is getting a 30-foot wall through the top of it, on her watch, with her vote.

Sources

The construction announcement and Scott Nicol's description of the project were reported by Francisco E. Jimenez for MyRGV.com / The Monitor: Border wall construction set to begin in Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge (June 19, 2026). The February rally and the removal of the congressional carve-outs were reported by Texas Standard. Photo: Pintail Lakes Trail, Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mike Kennedy's First Bill Would Freeze Road Management on 6 Million Acres of Utah — Until Courts Settle 12,500 Claimed "Roads"

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:46:30 +0000

The very first bill Mike Kennedy introduced after being sworn into Congress was not about health care, which is his profession. It was about dirt roads.

On January 14, 2025 — eleven days into the job — he filed H.R. 376, the Historic Roadways Protection Act. Sen. Mike Lee filed the matching Senate bill the same day. Kennedy's three fellow Utah House Republicans signed on as cosponsors.

Here is how Kennedy explained it in Lee's announcement:

"The Bureau of Land Management has a long history of overreach in rural Utah, and their attempt to make decisions about road access on public lands—before these roads are fully identified and established—is yet another overstep. I am pushing back with this legislation."

That sounds modest. Finish identifying the roads first, then plan around them. Reasonable, even.

It is not modest at all, and the reason is buried in the phrase "fully identified and established."

What has to happen first

The roads Kennedy is talking about are R.S. 2477 claims. R.S. 2477 was a line in an 1866 mining law that let states and counties build roads across federal land to encourage settlement of the West. Congress repealed it in 1976, but preserved any right-of-way that already existed.

So who owns which two-track in the desert is now a question for the courts. And Utah went to court in a big way.

According to the State of Utah's own public lands office, the state and 22 of its counties filed litigation covering 12,500 right-of-way claims. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance counts more than two dozen lawsuits filed in 2011 and 2012, claiming title to over 12,000 alleged rights-of-way totaling more than 35,000 miles across public land.

How is that going? The state's own website answers it. In 2015 the federal district court set up a "bellwether" process: pick 15 representative rights-of-way in Kane County, resolve the legal questions those raise, and only then appoint special masters to work through the rest of the state.

Fifteen, out of 12,500. That process started more than a decade ago. As SUWA puts it: since Utah filed in 2011–12, "not a single case has been adjudicated by the district court."

Kennedy's bill says the Bureau of Land Management may not finalize or implement travel plans until those cases are adjudicated. Given the pace of the actual litigation, that is not a pause. It is a stop.

What the "historic roadways" actually are

The name of the bill does a lot of work. It conjures wagon ruts and pioneer trails.

Roughly 80% of Utah's claimed rights-of-way are unimproved dirt roads and trails — cow paths, stream bottoms, faded two-tracks. SUWA notes that some "do not even exist on the ground and are instead simply lines on a map." The photograph at the top of this post is one of the claims, in Garfield County.

The claims are not confined to backcountry nobody cares about, either. Utah and its counties are claiming rights-of-way inside national parks, national wildlife refuges, national monuments, national recreation areas, congressionally designated wilderness, wilderness study areas, critical habitat, and archaeological sites. And the state isn't only seeking title — it wants the right to improve and widen these routes, in some cases up to 66 feet wide.

Sixty-six feet is a six-lane road's worth of disturbance through a slot canyon approach or an archaeological site.

The four plans he'd cancel

H.R. 376 isn't only forward-looking. The bill text names four travel management plans the BLM has already finished and bars spending any money to implement them: Indian Creek (Canyon Rims), San Rafael Desert, San Rafael Swell, and Labyrinth/Gemini Bridges.

It also bars any new plan for ten named travel management areas: the Henry Mountains and Fremont Gorge, Dinosaur (North), the Book Cliffs in both the Vernal and Moab field offices, Nine Mile Canyon in both the Vernal and Price field offices, the San Rafael Swell, the Dolores River, Trail Canyon, and Paunsaugunt.

And read how the freeze ends. The prohibition runs until "the Secretary certifies to Congress that each of the R.S. 2477 cases has been adjudicated" — and the bill then lists those cases by name and docket number. There are 22 of them, one per county, and every docket number starts with 11 or 12. Every single one of them has to be finished before the BLM can plan a route anywhere on that list.

Kennedy's bill would leave those lands with no current plan at all — which, in practice, means whatever anyone drives on becomes the route.

Add it up and SUWA's estimate is that the legislation would stop the BLM from managing motorized vehicle use across more than 6 million acres of Utah redrock.

"If Senator Lee had his way, millions of acres of southern Utah would be a motorized playground free-for-all," said SUWA staff attorney Laura Peterson. She named the places at stake: "Labyrinth Canyon, the San Rafael Swell, and the Dirty Devil."

Why it matters that it's him

Kennedy is not a bystander on this. He is Vice Chair of the Federal Lands Subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee — the panel that writes the rules for the land that makes up most of his state.

And this isn't the only place his committee work has landed. Utah's congressional delegation, Kennedy included, welcomed Trump's shrinking of Utah's national monuments as "appropriate" — a move that turned out to be the largest removal of protected land by any president in American history, by more than five times over.

The Historic Roadways Protection Act is moving. On February 4, 2026, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved the Senate version on a party-line vote, 11 to 9.

The tell

Strip away the pioneer framing and the structure of the bill is simple.

Kennedy wants public-land management suspended until a court finishes a job that has produced zero final decisions in fourteen years and, by design, has to work through fifteen sample routes before it can even start on the other 12,485.

If you genuinely wanted the roads sorted out first, you would push to speed up the litigation. This bill doesn't touch the litigation. It just turns off the management and waits.

The waiting is the point.

Sources

Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, "SUWA Statement on Historic Roadways Protection Act", February 4, 2026. Photo: an R.S. 2477 claim in Garfield County, Utah, courtesy SUWA. Bill quotes from Sen. Mike Lee's announcement, January 14, 2025.

Threats and Assaults on Park Rangers More Than Doubled in a Year. Rudy Yakym Wrote a Bill to Put Guns Inside Their Buildings.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:14:38 +0000

On July 16, 2026, Rudy Yakym introduced H.R. 9719, the Federal Lands Lawful Carry Act, with Texas Rep. Pat Fallon. It went to the Judiciary Committee. It has three cosponsors.

The bill would let people carry firearms inside buildings on federal lands — visitor centers, ranger stations, and the other public facilities run by the National Park Service and other federal land agencies, plus U.S. Army Corps of Engineers facilities.

Yakym's case for it:

"Hoosiers who can lawfully carry shouldn't lose that right when they step into a federal park building."

Fallon's was broader: "Americans' Second Amendment rights are under assault, and we in Congress must do all we can to ensure that they retain their God given right to bear arms."

The bill is endorsed by the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the Second Amendment Foundation.

What the law actually is right now

It's worth being precise, because the framing of this bill depends on you not knowing the current rule.

You can already carry a gun in a national park. That changed in 2010. As the Park Service explains it, people who can lawfully possess firearms under federal and state law may possess them in the park. Trails, campgrounds, overlooks, roads — all of it.

The single remaining restriction is buildings. Under 18 U.S.C. § 930, a firearm can't be carried into a federal facility, and every one of those buildings is posted with the same sign:

"Federal law prohibits the possession of a firearm or other dangerous weapon in this Federal facility unless specifically authorized."

Within the park system, "federal facility" means the staffed buildings: government offices, visitor centers, ranger stations, fee collection buildings, maintenance facilities. Rooms with employees in them.

So the "right" Yakym describes as being lost isn't the right to carry in a national park. It's already there. What his bill changes is the last few hundred square feet — the room with the ranger behind the desk.

Who is in that room

This is where the bill stops being abstract.

A 2022 report by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, covered by E&E News, documented what has been happening to that workforce:

228 threats and assaults on NPS law enforcement personnel in 2019 — more than double the 94 recorded the year before
Violent crimes in the parks up from 60 in 2014 to 293 in 2019
Permanent law enforcement rangers down 15% between 2005 and 2021; seasonal rangers down 30%
U.S. Park Police at a nearly 50-year staffing low

PEER's director summed it up: "The thin green line of park law enforcement rangers is being stretched to the breaking point."

Those are the people Yakym's bill affects. Not hikers on a trail — hikers on a trail can already carry. The staff standing at a counter, in a building with no metal detector and no armed security, telling visitors that the campsite is full, that the permit is denied, that the fee is due, that they have to leave.

Fewer of them every year. More assaults on the ones who remain. And a bill to remove the one place their building is legally off-limits to a firearm.

The bill's real audience

The tell is who wrote the argument.

In March 2026, months before Yakym filed his bill, the Second Amendment Foundation — one of the three groups endorsing it — sued to strike down the very same statute, 18 U.S.C. § 930(a), as applied to Park Service facilities. Their complaint, filed with the Firearms Policy Coalition, argues it is unconstitutional to make someone disarm to walk into a visitor center and pick up a camping permit.

SAF's founder Alan Gottlieb was explicit about the broader target:

"These so-called 'sensitive places' restrictions across the country are nothing more than an attempt by idealogues to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling in Bruen."

Yakym's bill is the legislative version of that lawsuit. If the court won't do it, Congress does it instead — and the sponsor gets endorsements from all three of the groups pushing both tracks.

His record on this isn't new

This fits a pattern that predates the parks bill.

In September 2023, Yakym was an original cosponsor of H.R. 5561, a bill "to prohibit the President and the Secretary of Health and Human Services from declaring certain emergencies or disasters for the purpose of imposing gun control" — permanently barring a future public health emergency, a pandemic among them, from ever being used to restrict firearms.

Meanwhile, in the state he represents: Indiana has about 17.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 34% above the national average, roughly 1,200 Hoosiers a year.

Yakym has not introduced a bill about that number. He has introduced one about visitor center doors.

He's not alone in this session

The 119th Congress has produced a run of bills that take the last remaining restricted spaces and open them.

In Colorado, Jeff Crank wrote a bill to make it easier to bring personal guns onto military bases — the opposite of what the Pentagon's own suicide-prevention committee recommended, in a service where two-thirds of active-duty suicides involve a firearm. In North Carolina, Richard Hudson's national concealed carry bill drew a plea from the Fraternal Order of Police to kill it, because it strips officers of the power to check a permit. In Texas, Ken Paxton spent two years suing to put guns back into the State Fair after a shooting there injured three people, and lost to an all-Republican court.

Every one of these takes the same shape: find a place where guns are still restricted, and argue that the restriction is the anomaly.

The question nobody gets to ask him

If a constituent thought the ranger at the front desk of a visitor center should not have to wonder who's armed, there isn't much they can do about it.

Yakym has not held a public town hall. When hundreds of people rallied outside his Mishawaka office in March 2025 asking for one, he called them "individuals whose sole intention is to disrupt and create chaos." What he offers instead is staff-run "mobile office hours," and his own office says those "are not town halls."

The NRA got a say in this bill. Gun Owners of America got a say. The Second Amendment Foundation got a say.

The rangers didn't. Neither did we.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP lawmakers want to allow guns in federal park buildings — E&E News by POLITICO, July 2026, and Congressmen Yakym, Fallon introduce bill to end Federal Ban on Firearms in Federal Park Buildings — GIANT fm. Bill status from congress.gov. Ranger staffing and assault figures from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, as reported by E&E News. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Yosemite Scrapped Its Reservation System. When It Turned to 'Pure Chaos,' Tom McClintock Blamed the Visitors.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:14:00 +0000

Yosemite National Park sits in Tom McClintock's Sierra Nevada district. He has been in Congress since 2009, and for years he has been the park's loudest congressional critic of anything that limits how many cars can drive in.

In February 2026, he got what he wanted. The Interior Department scrapped Yosemite's timed vehicle reservation system for the 2026 season, along with the systems at Arches in Utah and Glacier in Montana.

Here is what happened next, and what he said about it.

What advocates warned would happen

The reservation system had run since 2020, after record visitation in 2019. Park advocates said scrapping it — with staffing already reduced — was a mistake.

Mark Rose, Sierra Nevada program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, warned of hours-long waits to get in and visitors turned away for lack of parking:

"The park experience that you're gonna get at Yosemite this summer is something that nobody should have to face."

He was most worried about the Fourth of July, which this year is also a free-entry day under the Trump administration's revised fee-free calendar — a calendar that, in the same revision, removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.

The National Parks Conservation Association called the decision a choice to ignore "Park Service leadership and expertise," and cited 25% forced cuts to park staff across the country. "Interior Department leadership chose chaos over conservation, at the expense of millions of visitors," said NPCA's Cassidy Jones.

What actually happened

It went the way they said.

The Fresno Bee's Joshua Tehee reported on July 2 that the National Park Service recorded a 45% jump in visitation in March alone. By May, the park had gridlock — long vehicle queues at the entrances and overflowing parking at El Capitan and Half Dome. Park advocates described it as "pure chaos for visitors."

Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and acting Park Service Director Jessica Bowron just before the Fourth of July, warning that increased visitation combined with reduced staff and resource constraints had created "critical gaps in park operations" touching wildfire management, visitor safety and resource conservation. They asked Interior to reinstate the reservation system if the peak season proved too much.

McClintock's response

On June 15, 2026 — after the Memorial Day gridlock, before the Fourth of July — McClintock spoke about the park and rejected calls to bring the reservations back.

His characterization of the people raising concerns:

"Those complaining of crowds during peak weekends, of course, envision that they should be able to enter the park, but not all of those 'pesky other people.'"

And his advice:

"If you don't like crowds, don't go to the beach on Memorial Day and don't go to Yosemite on Memorial Day."

That is a congressman telling constituents who can't get into their own national park that the problem is their attitude. His stated solution was "better management and more capacity, not restricting access" — digitized entry passes, more wifi, more parking, and signs pointing people toward Tuolumne Meadows and Glacier Point.

Not more rangers. More parking.

"Ten. Ten probationary employees."

This is the part that connects to everything else McClintock has been doing.

In February 2025, when Yosemite employees hung an upside-down American flag on El Capitan to protest federal layoffs, McClintock wrote a column dismissing the whole thing as a bureaucratic stunt — "the Washington Monument Strategy," he called it, in which agencies make cuts hurt on purpose so tourists complain.

"What is the actual number of layoffs at Yosemite National Park that will bring this beautiful Valley to rack and ruin? Ten. Ten probationary employees. Ten out of nearly 500 full-time winter employees. Twenty-five if you include early retirements. And no fire fighters."

That was March 6, 2025. Fifteen months later the park was in gridlock, two U.S. senators were writing to Interior about "critical gaps in park operations," and the advocacy group that tracks this for a living was pointing at a 25% national cut to park staff.

McClintock's enthusiasm for the cuts was never in doubt. Arguing for the budget resolution on the House floor, he said out loud: "But in DOGE we trust. I think we CAN achieve a trillion dollars in savings as a result of its work."

A pattern of not being in the room

There is a reason no constituent got to put any of this to him directly.

When constituents organized their own town hall in Modesto in March 2025, nearly 200 people showed up and McClintock declined the invitations. Speakers addressed their questions to a cardboard cutout of him. His office dismissed the event as "a nationally coordinated campaign by a group called Indivisible."

His record on the park's other threats runs the same direction. He has a 3% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters. He voted against the bipartisan infrastructure law, which delivered $5 billion for federal wildland fire management — in a district where the Caldor Fire burned 221,835 acres and destroyed most of Grizzly Flats.

And when the fee-free calendar dropped Juneteenth, it was worth remembering that McClintock was one of only 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth a federal holiday in the first place, on a bill that passed 415 to 14.

Yosemite belongs to the people, as his column title said. This summer, a lot of them sat in line for hours and then couldn't park.

Source

McClintock Praises Yosemite Changes, Pushes Back Against Overcrowding Concerns — B.J. Hansen, myMotherLode.com, June 15, 2026. Photo: Getty Images via KQED.

Frank Lucas Has Blocked Fort Reno's Return for 18 Years. His New Farm Bill Would Make It Permanent.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:28:19 +0000

There is a stretch of land west of Oklahoma City — about 6,700 acres of grass and hay bales and old brick buildings — that the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes have been trying to get back for more than 150 years.

It was part of their reservation. In 1883, President Chester A. Arthur carved 9,493 acres out of that reservation and made it a military post called Fort Reno. The Army bred cavalry horses there, then mules for two world wars. When the Army was done with it in 1948, Congress didn't give it back. It handed the land to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which turned it into a research station.

The tribes have never stopped asking for it. And for the last eighteen years, the thing standing in the way has been a single provision tucked inside the farm bill — the sprawling piece of farm and food legislation that Frank Lucas has spent his career writing.

In March 2026, the House Agriculture Committee released its new farm bill. Buried inside the 800-plus pages was a change to that provision. Not a repeal. The opposite.

It deletes the expiration date.

What the provision actually does

Since the 2008 farm bill, federal law has barred the USDA from declaring the Fort Reno research facility "excess property" or transferring it to anyone else. Congress has renewed that ban over and over — through farm bills, through spending bills, through a disaster relief package.

Every one of those versions came with a sunset. The most recent extension, attached to the American Relief Act of 2025, ran the prohibition through September 30, 2025. That sunset is why the question kept coming back: every few years, Congress had to look at Fort Reno again and decide.

The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 removes the end date. If the language survives, the ban on transferring Fort Reno becomes a permanent feature of federal law — in place indefinitely unless some future Congress votes to take it out.

Lucas represents Oklahoma's 3rd District, which includes Fort Reno. He chairs the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Research and Biotechnology. And as NonDoc reported, he has been the most visible federal lawmaker attached to this language for years.

His spokesman's answer is that prior federal settlements already resolved the tribes' claim, and that Congress needs to keep acting to protect the research at the site.

The committee approved the bill 34-17 in the early hours of March 4, after a markup that ran more than 20 hours. The full House passed it 224-200 on April 30.

"They say that we were paid for it. We haven't been paid for it."

That's Reggie Wassana, governor of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, in an interview with NonDoc.

The "we already paid you" argument is the whole federal case, and it rests on two payments. One came from treaty-era agreements over reservation land the tribes gave up in the late 1800s. The other came in 1965, when the government settled with the tribes for $15 million over lands ceded in 1891.

Here is the problem with using the 1965 settlement to close the book on Fort Reno. That settlement came through the Indian Claims Commission — and the Commission's authority only covered claims through 1946. Fort Reno wasn't transferred to the USDA until 1948.

The tribes aren't the only ones who noticed. The U.S. Department of the Interior looked at this and concluded the tribes hold a "credible, equitable claim" to land that wasn't included in the earlier settlements.

Wassana submitted written testimony to a House subcommittee in March 2026 — he was scheduled to appear in person but got caught by travel problems, so his statement went into the record instead. In it, he wrote that Fort Reno "sits on land taken from the Cheyenne and Arapaho by federal action," and that returning it would "acknowledge and remedy that dispossession."

"Returning Fort Reno to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes is a concrete, lawful and moral step Congress can take to repair historical wrongs, restore tribal stewardship of ancestral lands and strengthen cultural and economic ties across Oklahoma," Wassana wrote.

This isn't a new idea, either. In 1949, Oklahoma Congressman Toby Morris introduced a bill to return roughly 6,900 acres to the tribes once the Army left. It passed the House in 1952 and died in the Senate. At the hearings, a 93-year-old Cheyenne man testified that tribal members had always believed the land would come back when the military no longer needed it.

That was 74 years ago. The land still hasn't come back.

Nobody is trying to take the research station away

The defense of the provision is that the science at the Oklahoma and Central Plains Agricultural Research Center is irreplaceable. A House Agriculture Committee aide said the center's work "cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world."

Maybe so. But that's an argument for keeping the research going — not for keeping the deed.

Wassana has said publicly that he's offered exactly that trade: the USDA keeps doing its research, the tribes get ownership, and the two work together — including on bison studies. In a September 2025 interview, he described the sticking point differently:

"We've offered everything and tried to do everything and bend as much as we can, but nothing is ever good enough for him to say, 'Yeah, let's work the deal together, we can be partners.'"

And this is the part that should bother anyone in Oklahoma's 3rd District, tribal member or not. As NonDoc laid out, there is no bill pending to transfer Fort Reno to the tribes. There is no legislation Lucas is defending the research station against. The only recurring legislative action on Fort Reno for eighteen years has run in one direction — inserting language to stop the USDA from ever letting the land go.

You don't need a permanent, no-expiration ban to stop something nobody has introduced.

What the tribes say it would be worth

Wassana has pointed to what the land could do if it ever came back. Leasing. Cattle. Crops. Energy development — there's oil and gas production in the surrounding area, and he told NonDoc it's "more than likely" there are reserves under Fort Reno, though he was careful to say that would need real evaluation before anyone counted on it.

Meanwhile, Lucas has been asking Washington to spend more on the facility. He requested $16.6 million from the House Appropriations Committee for renovations at the research center in 2025 — up from roughly $1.3 million in each of the two prior years. The tribes read that jump as one more way to lock the status quo in place.

"Keeping some type of research going, to me, it's more of a control issue than it is doing what's right for the general public," Wassana said.

Lucas's office did not respond to that reporter's requests for comment.

Thirty-two years, one answer

Lucas has been in Congress since 1994. He has led farm bills for years, and he sits on both the Agriculture Committee and the Financial Services Committee — the two committees whose industries make up almost his entire donor list.

When a member of Congress has exactly one recurring piece of legislative business with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, and that business is an eighteen-year-old provision keeping their land out of reach, that's a choice he keeps making.

The 2026 farm bill now sits with the Senate. The Fort Reno language can still be pulled out. As NonDoc put it, what happens next is "less a single decision point than a recurring legislative loop" — and Lucas has controlled which way that loop turns for a very long time.

He has never had to explain it at a town hall, either. His congressional website's Town Halls page still tells visitors that "The 2024 Town Hall schedule will be posted after the New Year."

We deserve better.

Source

Farm bill draft would permanently block return of Fort Reno to Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes — Stephen A. Martin, NonDoc, March 20, 2026. Photo: Fort Reno, Oklahoma, 1891, via Tribal Business News.

Paul Gosar Named a Bill the "Enhancing Safety for Animals Act." It Delists an Endangered Wolf.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:04 +0000

Bill titles are written by the sponsor. Nobody checks them. There is no truth-in-labeling rule in Congress, which is how you get a bill called the Enhancing Safety for Animals Act whose entire operative text removes a critically endangered animal from the endangered species list.

That is a real bill. Paul Gosar wrote it. And it is one of three.

Exhibit A: two "Protection Acts" that abolish protections

In September 2025, Gosar introduced two bills to wipe out two Arizona national monuments.

The first is the Northern Arizona Protection Act. It would nullify the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, roughly a million acres designated in 2023, on lands culturally significant to the Havasupai, Navajo and Hopi. The National Parks Conservation Association notes that 14 tribal nations had called for the protection.

The second is the Southern Arizona Protection Act. It would nullify Ironwood Forest National Monument — 189,600 acres northwest of Tucson, designated in 2000.

Neither bill protects anything. Both remove protection. The titles are the opposite of the text.

What the monuments actually block is specific. Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni bars new uranium mining claims across the Grand Canyon watershed — existing operations like the Pinyon Plain Mine keep running. Ironwood Forest is being eyed for copper mining. Strip the designations and both open up.

Gosar was clear about why. "The Antiquities Act was never intended to be a tool for radical environmentalists and their political cronies in Washington, D.C. to block access to America's abundant and much-needed resources," he said. He told KJZZ that federal lands "belong to the American people, not unelected bureaucrats or woke presidents who abuse executive authority to shut them off from productive use."

The Havasupai and Hopi, represented by the Native American Rights Fund, answered with four words: "the tribe is still there."

Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity put it more bluntly: "Gosar's bills mark a new low in his career of servicing industry's interests over the public's."

Exhibit B: the animal safety act that endangers an animal

H.R. 4255 is titled the Enhancing Safety for Animals Act of 2025.

You do not have to take anyone's characterization of it. Here is the bill's own description of itself, printed at the top of the first page:

"To remove the Mexican wolf from the lists of threatened species and endangered species published pursuant to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and for other purposes."

Gosar introduced it on June 30, 2025. Section 2(b) does the work: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) is removed from the lists of threatened species and endangered species." Section 2(c) voids two Fish and Wildlife Service rules outright — the 2015 rule listing the wolf as endangered and the 2022 rule governing its recovery population.

It goes further than that. If the wolf is ever listed again, the bill forbids the Interior Secretary from even considering the wolf's status in Mexico when writing a recovery plan or deciding whether to change its status. Congress would be telling the biologists which facts they are allowed to look at.

How many Mexican gray wolves are there? The Arizona and New Mexico game and fish departments counted 319 in the wild in 2025, up from 286 the year before. The Fish and Wildlife Service's own recovery plan requires an average of at least 320 wolves over four years before downlisting is even on the table.

So: 319 animals, one short of the threshold for a partial downgrade, and Gosar's bill jumps straight to full removal — and does it by statute rather than through the agency. Earthjustice attorney Aaron Bloom said the bill shows "utter disregard for science, and the normal process that invites public engagement and allows for judicial review."

The bill's own findings section argues the wolf population "is thriving and will meet its recovery goals." Will. Future tense. The bill delists it now.

The House Natural Resources Committee advanced it on January 22, 2026. Sierra Club's Bradley Williams: "Mexican gray wolves are only here today because of the Endangered Species Act protections."

Delisting doesn't just remove a label. It stops the captive releases that keep the gene pool viable, ends federal investigation of livestock kills, cuts the funding that compensates ranchers for those losses, shuts down monitoring, and lifts the federal ban on killing them.

Why the titles matter

There is a reason a member of Congress spends effort on a name.

The name is what goes in the press release, the constituent newsletter, the local news chyron. Most people will never read past it. A voter in Bullhead City who hears their congressman introduced the "Northern Arizona Protection Act" has been told something specific and false, using their own tax-funded communications office to tell it.

And Gosar is not a bystander to these bills. He sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, per the House Clerk's official member roster — the committee that marked up his wolf bill and would handle his monument bills. He writes the label and he sits on the panel that stamps it.

This is the same maneuver Utah's House Republicans defended when Trump stripped protection from nearly 3 million acres and they called it "a return to an appropriate application of the Antiquities Act as Congress intended." Take away the protection, then describe the taking as the protection.

What is actually at stake

Gosar has been in Congress since 2011. Fifteen years. In that time the record shows what he consistently spends that seniority on.

A million acres above the Grand Canyon that 14 tribal nations asked to be protected from new uranium claims. A hundred and ninety thousand acres of Sonoran desert with copper under it. And 319 wolves — a subspecies down to seven animals when the captive breeding program was established, and one that has grown every year for a decade under the law Gosar wants Congress to switch off for it.

He calls all three of those bills protection and safety.

Read the text. The text does not lie; only the cover does.

Source

Groups Denounce Gosar Bills to Nullify Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni National and Ironwood Forest National Monuments — Earthjustice, September 2025
Earthjustice Strongly Opposed to Rep. Gosar Legislation to Delist Mexican Gray Wolf — Earthjustice, January 21, 2026
Photo: Amy S. Martin, via KNAU

Paul Gosar's Plan to Save Social Security: Drill, Mine, Graze and Log Your Public Lands

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:03 +0000

On the very first day of this Congress, Paul Gosar introduced a bill numbered H.R. 34. He called it the Land And Social Security Optimization Act. LASSO.

The pitch is simple enough that it fits on a bumper sticker: take 10% of the money the federal government earns off public lands and put it into Social Security.

The problem is what has to happen for that to mean anything.

What the bill actually says

Per the nonpartisan summary from the Congressional Research Service, the bill "requires 10% of revenue generated by public lands, including submerged lands on the Outer Continental Shelf, under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service to be deposited into the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund."

That revenue does not appear from nowhere. It comes from leases and royalties — oil and gas drilling, mining claims, timber sales, grazing permits, offshore energy.

Gosar is not shy about this. It is the point. Here is his own announcement, in his own words:

"This legislation is a win-win. The LASSO Act shores up the component of the Social Security trust funds that pays Social Security benefits to retired workers... It also unlocks domestic energy potential by encouraging activities that generate revenue on public land, including onshore and offshore energy development, livestock grazing, and timber harvesting. This maintains the federal government's obligation to promote the highest use of public lands. Despite this obligation, our public lands are underperforming, and more than 1.6 million acres of public lands were locked up under the Biden Administration."

"Underperforming." "Locked up." Those are the words of someone who looks at a canyon and sees an unmet quarterly target.

The math does not work, and a conservative said so first

Gosar put a number on it. If the LASSO Act had been law in fiscal 2023, he said, "nearly $2 billion would have been deposited into the OASI Trust Fund, reducing the Trust Fund's FY 2023 shortfall of $70.4 billion by 3%."

That claim got checked — not by an environmental group, but by Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia, who write the fiscal-policy newsletter The Debt Dispatch. Boccia is the Cato Institute's director of budget and entitlement policy, and before that ran the federal budget center at the Heritage Foundation. She is about as far from a critic of spending cuts as it is possible to get.

Their finding, in February 2025:

Gosar understated the shortfall by half. "The real annual shortfall was $133.4 billion — double Gosar's estimate."
He did it by counting money that isn't there. Gosar's smaller number treats the trust fund's interest income as revenue. But that "figure represents interest on trust fund assets that exist only on paper" — when Treasury pays interest to Social Security, it borrows to do it.
So the bill covers a rounding error. "The $2 billion in land revenues would cover just 1.5 percent of the annual gap."

They also flagged the bigger risk: Social Security's long-term funding gap "exceeds $25 trillion," and bolting on a general-fund revenue stream normalizes the idea that the program gets bailed out from elsewhere rather than fixed.

One and a half percent. That is the whole bill.

What 1.5% buys you

If the LASSO Act did nothing, it would just be a wasted bill number. But it does something, and the something is the part worth paying attention to.

It permanently ties Social Security's funding to how aggressively we extract from public land.

Once that link exists, every fight about a drilling lease, a mine, a timber sale, or a grazing allotment gets a new argument attached to it: this is for seniors. Every acre protected becomes, on paper, money taken from retirees. Gosar has already written that framing into his own press release — 1.6 million acres "locked up," public lands "underperforming."

That is not a side effect. It is the mechanism. You cannot generate more revenue from federal land without more drilling, more mining, more logging, and more grazing on it. The bill's own sponsor lists all four.

He is on the committee, and he wants the hearing

This is not idle messaging. Gosar sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, per the House Clerk's official member roster — the committee with jurisdiction over exactly these lands and exactly this revenue.

On February 10, 2026, the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands held a hearing on the LASSO Act. The National Association of Counties, which tracks these revenue formulas closely because counties depend on them, noted that the bill is written so no state or county payment gets reduced — the 10% comes off the federal share.

So the counties are held harmless. Seniors get 1.5% of one year's gap. And the public lands get a permanent new reason to be opened up.

Naming it after Social Security is the tell

Read Gosar's own statement again and count the sentences. One is about retirees. Three are about energy, grazing, timber, "highest use," and acres locked up.

The LASSO Act is a public lands bill wearing a Social Security nametag. It moves a small amount of money and a large amount of political cover: any future vote to open protected acreage can now be described as protecting your grandmother's check.

Arizona seniors who are worried about Social Security are worried about a real thing. The answer their congressman offers covers one and a half percent of a single year's gap, according to a conservative budget analyst who ran the numbers and found Gosar's own figure was off by a factor of two.

The other 98.5% is still there. So is the argument he has now attached to every acre in the state.

Source

H.R. 34, the LASSO Act — Rep. Paul Gosar's announcement, January 3, 2025
LASSO Act preserves county revenue sharing, directs public lands funds to Social Security — National Association of Counties. Photo: Getty Images via NACo.

Bruce Westerman Scheduled His Endangered Species Bill for a Vote on Earth Day. His Own Party Pulled It.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:43:06 +0000

Someone in the House Republican leadership looked at the calendar and decided that the right day to vote on rewriting the Endangered Species Act was Earth Day.

The bill was H.R. 1897. Its author is Bruce Westerman, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee — the committee with jurisdiction over America's public lands, wildlife, forests, minerals and waters.

On April 22, 2026, the vote didn't happen. Leadership pulled the bill off the floor because they didn't have the votes.

Not because Democrats blocked it. Democrats couldn't have. Republicans control the House. The bill came off the calendar because Republicans and Democrats both objected — the Washington Examiner's account of the day noted that some Florida Republicans had problems with the text — and because more than 58,000 emails and hundreds of phone calls came in from constituents telling them not to do it.

Stephanie Kurose of the Center for Biological Diversity, the group that has taken to calling H.R. 1897 the "Extinction Act," said it plainly: "This should be a wake-up call to Rep. Westerman that not even his own colleagues support his extreme attacks on wildlife."

Westerman's response was that it was a scheduling matter. "We just have a few provisions we've got to work through on it," he said, "and hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we'll be able to vote on it."

What's actually in it

Westerman calls the bill a reform. Here is what the Washington Examiner listed as its contents:

Eliminate the 12-month deadline for federal agencies to act on a proposal to list a species as endangered, replacing it with a five-year schedule.
Limit which land can be designated as critical habitat, and weaken protections for species listed as threatened.
Hand states more authority over species recovery plans.
Loosen the environmental review required for permits that allow a business to "take" — that is, kill or harm — protected animals.
Bar courts from reviewing a decision to delist a species during a five-year monitoring period.
Rename the statute the "Endangered Species Recovery Act."

That fifth item deserves a second look, because it sits oddly next to Westerman's own case for the bill.

His argument is that there's too much litigation. His fix is to ban the lawsuit.

In an op-ed published June 30, 2026 under the headline "Republicans are restoring the Endangered Species Act," Westerman laid out his complaint. The law, he argues, has been captured by litigation. He cites a Government Accountability Office study finding 141 lawsuits involving 1,441 species filed against the federal government between 2005 and 2015, with two advocacy groups responsible for nearly a third of all Endangered Species Act litigation.

He has made the harsher version of the point too: the ESA "has consistently failed to achieve its intended goals and has been warped by decades of radical environmental litigation into a weapon instead of a tool."

Set aside whether that's a fair reading of the case law. Look at what his solution does.

If the Fish and Wildlife Service decides tomorrow that a species no longer needs protection and strips it, Westerman's bill would make that decision unreviewable by a court for five years. Not harder to challenge. Not subject to a higher standard. Off-limits.

That is not a reform aimed at frivolous suits. It's a rule that a citizen who believes the government broke the law cannot ask a judge to look at it — even if the government did break the law, and even if the species goes extinct in the meantime. The complaint is "people sue too much." The remedy is "you may not sue."

He's measuring the law by the wrong number

The other pillar of Westerman's argument is a statistic: only about 3% of listed species have ever been delisted because they recovered. He offers that as proof the law doesn't work.

Here is the number he leaves out. Since 1973, the Endangered Species Act has kept more than 99% of the species it protects from going extinct.

Both numbers are true, and they describe the same law. Bringing a species all the way back from the brink takes decades, so a low delisting rate over fifty years tells you the work is slow — not that it failed. The 99% figure tells you what would have happened without it.

Judging the ESA by delistings is like judging a hospital by how many patients get discharged fully cured and ignoring how many are alive.

Susan Holmes of the Endangered Species Coalition put the stakes in one sentence: "Once a species is gone, it is gone forever." And the public isn't confused about this — 84% of Americans support the law.

Who benefits

Westerman chairs the committee that decides who gets to log, mine and drill on public land. The industries that do those things are among his largest donors.

According to OpenSecrets, his funders include the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association ($40,000 from the mining industry his committee regulates), the timber giant Weyerhaeuser ($37,500) and the National Alliance of Forest Owners ($33,750), and oil and gas money from Mewbourne Oil, Arena Energy and Flywheel Energy.

As chairman, he takes nearly nine times what the average House member takes from energy and natural resources — $392,000 against an average of $45,647. Just 2% of his money comes from small grassroots donors.

Every provision on that list above — narrower critical habitat, easier "take" permits, looser environmental review, faster delisting with no court to check it — makes it cheaper and quicker to put a mine, a well pad, or a clear-cut somewhere a protected animal lives.

He also has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 3% lifetime score across his entire career.

The other half of the pincer

Westerman's bill is one of two tracks running at the same time.

While Congress considered H.R. 1897, the Trump administration was rewriting the Endangered Species Act by regulation. It changed the definition of "harm" so that destroying the place a species lives no longer counts as harming it — the single idea the whole law rests on. Then it finished the job on habitat protection outright, opening forests, wetlands and streams to logging, mining and drilling.

Those regulatory changes can be undone by a future administration or struck down in court. A statute can't. That is what makes Westerman's bill the more permanent threat — and it's why he keeps bringing it back.

He'll try again

Westerman said he'd return with the bill after working through "a few provisions." He is the chairman. He controls the committee, the hearings and the markup calendar. He does not need to persuade the public; he needs to find four or five more Republicans.

The people of Arkansas's 4th District did not send him to Washington to make it legal to bulldoze the last places on earth where certain animals live. Most of them, if the polling holds, are part of the 84%.

He has never, as far as we can find, held an in-person town hall where anyone could ask him about it.

We deserve better.

Sources

In 'Major Earth Day Win,' House GOP Cancels Vote on Gutting Endangered Species Act — Common Dreams, April 22, 2026.

House of Representatives Pulls Bill To Gut Endangered Species Act — Sierra Club, April 22, 2026. Photo: AP.

It's Official: Trump's Utah Land Grab Is the Biggest in American History — and Utah's Republicans Called It 'Appropriate'

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:19:18 +0000

When President Trump signed away protections for nearly 3 million acres of Utah in July, Utah's Republicans in Congress told everyone to calm down. It was normal. It was legal. It was, in their words, "a return to an appropriate application of the Antiquities Act as Congress intended."

Now we know exactly how normal it was.

A new investigation by The Emancipator went through every single time a president has pulled land out of national monument protection since the Antiquities Act passed in 1906. The reporters checked the National Park Service database, cross-checked it against the actual presidential proclamations and historical acreage records, and even found a pair of exclusions the government had miscoded.

The finding: Trump just removed more than five times as much protected land as every other president in American history combined.

Not five times more than the previous record-holder. Five times more than all of them, added together, across 120 years.

What "all of them combined" actually means

Here's the scale, from the investigation's numbers.

Only seven other presidents have ever done this — Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. Put every one of their cuts in a pile and you get a little more than 550,000 acres. And while they were cutting, those same presidents added almost 10,000 acres of new land to the monuments they were trimming.

Trump took nearly 3 million acres and added nothing.

The old record was set in 1915, when Woodrow Wilson pulled a little more than 300,000 acres out of Olympic National Monument — land that later became Olympic National Park. That stood as the largest for 111 years.

And before Trump came along, the last president to touch this power was John F. Kennedy, in 1963. He cut about 4,000 acres from Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico — and then handed back almost 3,000 acres of different land, so the monument shrank by only about a thousand acres, net.

That's the company Utah's delegation is describing as "appropriate." Six decades of presidents in both parties leaving this power alone, and the largest cut in all of American history before this one coming in at one-tenth its size.

The statement Utah's delegation signed

On the day it happened, the Utah federal delegation put out a joint press release welcoming the move. Three of the people quoted in it represent Utah in the House: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, and Mike Kennedy.

The release makes a specific factual promise. Read it carefully:

"The lands outside the modified monument boundaries remain federal public lands and continue to be protected under existing federal laws. Today's action does not remove those protections."

That is not true, and the White House said so itself.

The administration's own fact sheet on the same proclamations says the excluded land becomes "available for multiple-use, sustained-yield management," and then lists what that means: "grazing, timber harvest, fishing, hunting, resource development, infrastructure upgrades, and motorized recreation."

"Resource development" is the phrase to watch. Trump's own executive order is blunter about the point of the whole exercise, saying the Bears Ears region holds "critical minerals such as silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc."

So the delegation told Utahns nothing was being taken away, on the same day the White House published a list of the extraction activities that are now allowed there. Both documents came out July 13. They cannot both be right.

"The smallest area possible"

Moore's own quote in that release is the one that ages worst:

"If the Antiquities Act is going to be used, it needs to be on the smallest area possible—that's what we're doing here."

What they were doing there was the largest monument clawback ever recorded. You don't have to take a critic's word for the size of it — the administration published the numbers itself. Bears Ears went from about 1.36 million acres to about 121,100. Grand Staircase-Escalante went from about 1.87 million acres to about 181,500. That's a cut of roughly 91% and 90%. Calling what's left "the smallest area possible" is true only in the sense that almost nothing is left. The Grand Canyon Trust, which has worked on this land for decades, called the move an attempt "to gut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments for a second time."

Kennedy's quote leaned on local control: "The people of Utah understand these lands better than any distant bureaucracy ever could." Four months earlier, Kennedy had introduced a bill with a name that says the quiet part out loud — the License to Drill Act, which passed the House in 2026.

Maloy said the action "honors that goal while following the law Congress passed." She had also spent the spring trying to get there without the president's help: in March 2026 she introduced a resolution to overturn the Bureau of Land Management's management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante outright. That was four months before Trump signed. We've written before about how hard Maloy has worked to make these cuts permanent, including sponsoring a bill to gut the Antiquities Act itself.

There's also a real legal problem underneath all the confident talk about "following the law." The Antiquities Act lets a president create a monument. It never says a president can shrink or erase one. The administration is relying on a 2025 Justice Department memo asserting that power — a memo that contradicts the conclusion a previous U.S. Attorney General reached on the same question. Courts have not settled this.

Who was actually on that land

Bears Ears is not empty ground. Five tribal nations — the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni — came together to protect it. The Native American Rights Fund says all of them "hold the region as sacred," and that the tribes "continue to rely on Bears Ears for subsistence, hunting, and collecting plants and medicines found throughout the entire region."

Rebecca Nagle, a writer and member of the Cherokee Nation, pointed out that the area holds "over 100,000 archaeological and cultural sites — some dating back 10,000 to 13,000 years," and drew a comparison worth sitting with:

"The reverence for places like Mount Rushmore alongside the disregard for places like Bears Ears shows the racist double standard of what kind of history the current administration is willing to celebrate and protect."

That contrast isn't hypothetical. One Republican member of Congress thought Mount Rushmore was so important she filed a bill to carve Trump's face into it eight days into his second term. Utah's delegation spent that same period cheering on the removal of protection from most of the land that holds those 100,000 sites.

Georgie Pongyesva of the Hopi Tribe answered the administration's argument that these sites are just "ruins":

"These places are not abandoned, nor are they ruined. These are living landscapes for which Tribes are the original stewards."

The record behind the statement

None of this is out of character for these three. Their environmental voting records are close to a straight line.

Mike Kennedy — 0% from the League of Conservation Voters in 2025, and a 0% lifetime score. Every single vote against the environment.
Blake Moore — 0% in 2025, 7% lifetime.
Celeste Maloy — 3% in 2025, 5% lifetime.

It also fits a pattern that runs well past Utah. In Minnesota, Pete Stauber pushed through a resolution reopening mining near the Boundary Waters that legal experts warned could throw hundreds of forest plans into jeopardy. The playbook is the same: call the giveaway a restoration of balance, and hope nobody counts the acres.

Somebody counted. Utah's three House Republicans represent a state that ranks 10th out of 50 on the measures we track — a state that is doing well in large part because of what hasn't been sold. They had a chance to say something honest about the biggest land protection rollback in the country's history. Instead they signed a statement saying nothing had been lost, while the White House published the list of what could now be dug out of it.

The Emancipator asked the White House to comment on its findings. It didn't respond.

Source

This post was reported from The Emancipator's investigation by Kate Amistoso and Daniel Mollenkamp, published August 6, 2026, along with the Utah delegation's own press release and the White House fact sheet. Photo: Bears Ears National Monument welcome sign, G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons.

Anna Paulina Luna's Big Idea for Florida: Carve Trump's Face Into a Mountain

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:45:00 +0000

Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2025. Eight days later, one of Florida's members of Congress used her power to introduce legislation — the actual job we send people to Washington to do — on this:

A bill ordering the federal government to carve Trump's face into Mount Rushmore.

Anna Paulina Luna filed it on January 28, 2025. She announced it on X with two words:

"Let's get carving!"

In her own press release, Luna said the monument "deserves to reflect his towering legacy — a legacy further solidified by the powerful start to his second term." Trump had been president again for eight days. That was the "legacy" she wanted permanently blasted into a mountain.

What happened to the bill

Nothing. That's not an exaggeration — here is the complete life story of H.R. 792, according to the official congressional record:

January 28, 2025 — Introduced in House
January 28, 2025 — Referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources

That's it. Two lines. Eighteen months later, there is no third line.

And here's the part that says the most: the bill has zero cosponsors. In eighteen months, not one other member of Congress — not a single fellow Republican — put their name on it. Luna stood completely alone.

She still got what she was actually after. The headlines ran. The X post went out. The press release went up on her taxpayer-funded House website. The bill was never really meant to become law. It was meant to be seen by one person.

It was never physically possible

Set aside the politics for a second. The bill couldn't work.

You cannot add a fifth face to Mount Rushmore, because there isn't enough good rock. This isn't a new discovery or a partisan talking point. The mountain's own lead sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, wrote it down in May 1936 — before the carving was even finished:

"stone limitations are so serious, that I doubt if it would be possible to change the composition, which is fixed, in any way to include a fifth head."

Ninety years later, the people who actually know the mountain say the same thing. Paul Nelson, the retired engineer who ran the rock monitoring system at Mount Rushmore, told NBC News: "It comes down to the geology, the engineering. It just can't be done."

Dan Wenk, who was superintendent of the monument for more than a decade, explained why the empty-looking space beside Lincoln and Washington is a mirage. The rock there is "not suitable for carving," he said — it's "very fractured, it's very soft." Cutting into it risks cracking what's already there. His bottom line:

"It doesn't matter how worthy someone is — if the rock is not there, you can't carve them."

So Luna wrote a bill instructing the Secretary of the Interior to do something the government's own experts say is impossible. She didn't check first. Checking would have ruined the news cycle.

She is not alone in this — that's the problem

Luna's mountain bill wasn't a one-off stunt by one strange member. It's a genre. Newsweek counted up the efforts by Republicans in Congress to stick Trump's name or face on things, including bills to:

Put Trump's face on the $100 bill (Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas)
Create a brand-new $250 bill with his portrait (Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina)
Print $500 bills with his face (Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona)
Make June 14, his birthday, a national holiday (Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York)
Rename Dulles airport after him (Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania)
Rename the D.C. Metro and rebrand the trains the "Trump Train" (Rep. Greg Steube of Florida)
Rename all U.S. coastal waters the "Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone" (Steube again)

Think about what that list actually is. It's a group of adults, elected to write the laws of the United States, competing to see who can flatter one man the most creatively. Congress has one real job — represent the people who sent them and hold the president accountable. This is the opposite of that. It's the branch of government that's supposed to check the president auditioning to decorate him.

Meanwhile, back in Pinellas County

Here's what makes it worse than silly.

Luna represents Florida's 13th District — Pinellas County. When she filed her Mount Rushmore bill, her district was in the middle of the worst recovery in its recent history. Hurricanes Helene and Milton had hit nearly 47,000 homes and more than 1,200 businesses in Pinellas County. The aftermath of those storms "defined much of the county's priorities" through all of the following year — more than 34,000 permits pulled, roughly 85,000 inspections, and $813.8 million in federal housing recovery money that county officials had to go out and secure.

Notice who did that work. County commissioners. County staff. Local officials chasing down HUD dollars for people whose houses flooded.

While that was going on, their congresswoman's marquee legislative move was a monument carving.

And when Pinellas residents wanted to ask her about any of it in person, they couldn't. Luna wouldn't hold a town hall — constituents say they called, emailed and rallied outside her office asking for one, were told no, and finally held a "People's Town Hall" without her and recorded it to send to her office. National Democrats put up billboards across the district reading "Rep. Luna = Coward."

She has time to carve a mountain. She does not have time to stand in a room in St. Petersburg and answer questions from the people who pay her salary.

The rest of the pattern

The Mount Rushmore bill isn't an outlier in her record. It's the record.

In April 2025, Luna introduced legislation to write DOGE's cuts permanently into law — locking in the chainsaw so it couldn't easily be undone. Her verdict: "The American people deserve no less!"

On tariffs — the thing driving up prices at the register for every family in her district — she went on television and called it "genius," claiming the tariffs "have actually lowered costs."

And in August 2025, chairing a task force on declassifying federal secrets, she went on a podcast and told the country that lawmakers had seen evidence of "interdimensional beings" that "can actually operate through the time spaces that we currently have."

Groceries. Insurance. Rebuilding after two hurricanes. Interdimensional beings.

He got his mountain moment anyway

The punchline arrived this month. Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore and gave a speech there on Friday, July 3, 2026 to usher in the country's 250th anniversary. He opened with soaring lines about American exceptionalism, then veered somewhere darker: "Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty," he said from the monument. "It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11." Beforehand, he posted a video showing a gold Mount Rushmore with his own face added next to Lincoln.

So he got the picture. He didn't need Luna's bill, and he was never going to get the carving. What her bill actually accomplished was to spend a piece of the legislative power of the United States House of Representatives on flattery — at a moment when 47,000 households in her own county were trying to get their homes back.

That's the choice, and she made it in her first week. Not a bill on insurance costs. Not a bill on storm recovery. Not a bill on the price of food. A bill about a face on a mountain.

We deserve a representative who works for us.

Source

Ashleigh Fields, "Florida Republican introduces bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore," The Hill, January 29, 2025. Photo: AP Photo/David Zalubowski.

His District Is On Fire. Pete Stauber Blamed Canada.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:30:56 +0000

There is a 36-mile gravel road in northern Minnesota called the Echo Trail. It runs north of Ely, between two halves of the Boundary Waters. For years, the people who manage the Superior National Forest wanted to clear the dead spruce and balsam fir piled up along that road — to turn it into a firebreak, a line a wildfire couldn't easily cross.

They had the plan. They had the money. They were, in the words of one of the men who ran the project, "shovel-ready."

Then DOGE froze it.

On July 25, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration held up a $10 million wildfire-prevention grant meant to thin about 4,000 acres of dry, dead-choked forest in northeastern Minnesota. Most of that work never got started. And this month, some of those exact acres caught fire.

That forest sits in Minnesota's 8th Congressional District, represented since 2019 by Pete Stauber — a Republican who joined the congressional DOGE Caucus and defended the cuts when people back home asked him to fight them.

What was supposed to happen

In 2024, the Superior National Forest won $10 million as part of a $100 million national wildfire initiative. The money would have paid to strip out decades of dead trees and undergrowth, build fuel breaks around remote homes, and treat the corridor along the Echo Trail.

Aaron Kania, a retired U.S. Forest Service district ranger who helped lead the project, told the Post the team moved fast. They applied, won the money, cleared their environmental review and contracting in a matter of months.

"We were shovel-ready. Had that work been implemented, it would have been effective in stopping or slowing down these fires."

Then, at the start of 2025, the U.S. DOGE Service paused or canceled federal grants across the government to check whether they touched diversity or climate programs. That swept up nearly all of the Forest Service's grants. Over the following months the agency lost roughly a third of its workforce — including the people who processed timber reviews and administered grants, the exact staff you need to get a project like this out the door.

The money did eventually come back, at the end of 2025, after Minnesota officials flew to Washington twice to plead the case. But it came back with strings: the team had to rewrite the plan so more of the trees they cut would go to timber mills. As Kania put it, "When you focus on marketable timber sales, it undermines the concept of strategic fuel reduction."

The Star Tribune confirmed the project got its green light — and still hasn't started.

Total damage, in Kania's words: "It's the totality of all these things that set us back about a year and a half."

Then the lightning came

Around July 7, a storm dropped lightning on a tinder-dry forest and started roughly 15 fires. They have since burned nearly 64,000 acres of northeastern Minnesota. About 1,000 firefighters have been flown in from Alaska, California and Florida. The Boundary Waters was fully closed and evacuated, and Minnesotans breathed some of the worst air quality in the world.

One of those fires, the Sioux Fire, jumped the Echo Trail. The same road the grant was supposed to harden.

Fire crews are now out there doing that thinning work along the Echo Trail, while the woods burn around them. Kania's assessment of that arrangement is worth reading twice:

"They are doing it under emergency conditions … and that is the most expensive way to do this work imaginable."

During a fast-moving fire, agencies hire loggers and machine operators at premium rates and pay for 16-hour days. DOGE was sold to the country as a way to save money. In the Superior National Forest, it turned a planned $10 million job into an emergency one.

Stauber's answer: it's Canada's fault

Here is where it stops being a story about a federal agency and starts being a story about a congressman.

On July 20 — five days before the Post published — Stauber and 18 other House Republicans sent a letter to the EPA blaming Canada for the smoke and accusing its government of violating a 1991 air-quality treaty. Their central complaint? That Canada hasn't done enough controlled burns.

"Responsible wildfire management, such as controlled burns, is critical to reducing the frequency and severity of wildfires and protect families from harm," the lawmakers wrote.

Read that again, and then remember what the $10 million grant in Stauber's own district was for: "mechanical and prescribed fire treatments, creating strategic fuel breaks."

The other 18

Stauber didn't sign alone. The letter carries 19 signatures, and every one of them belongs to a Republican who has a page on this site:

Minnesota: Pete Stauber (MN-08), Brad Finstad (MN-01)
Wisconsin: Bryan Steil (WI-01), Derrick Van Orden (WI-03), Glenn Grothman (WI-06), Tony Wied (WI-08)
Ohio: Mike Carey (OH-15), David Joyce (OH-14), Michael Rulli (OH-06)
Pennsylvania: Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01), Mike Kelly (PA-16), Rob Bresnahan (PA-08), Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07)
New Jersey: Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07), Jeff Van Drew (NJ-02)
New York: Nick Langworthy (NY-23), Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11)
Florida: Carlos Gimenez (FL-28)
Virginia: John McGuire (VA-05)

Dave Joyce, whose office posted the letter, described it as urging the EPA "to use the authorities available under the U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement to work with Canada to address the causes of ongoing wildfire smoke."

Three days earlier, a partly overlapping group had made the same argument on a narrower footing: Steil, Van Orden, Grothman, Wied, Scott Fitzgerald (WI-05) and Tom Tiffany (WI-07) wrote Zeldin a Wisconsin-specific version of the letter, closing with the line that Canada "must meet its clean air promise and prevent future wildfires from impacting Wisconsin families."

The argument all 19 signed onto is that prescribed burns and fuel reduction are the answer, and that a government failing to do enough of them is failing its people. That is a defensible position. It is also, precisely, the case against what happened in Stauber's district.

Asked to defend the letter, Stauber told the Star Tribune:

"Regarding the ongoing fires in the Boundary Waters, I'm fully aware they were sparked by lightning strikes. As I have said for years, we need to do better here in the United States to get rid of the overgrowth that has turned our forests into tinderboxes."

He is right that we need to get rid of the overgrowth. That is precisely what the frozen grant was going to do. He didn't mention it.

A University of British Columbia ecologist quoted in the same story said the Republicans cherry-picked their evidence from one agency that manages a sliver of Canada's 1.3 billion acres of forest, and criticized the lawmakers for scrutinizing Canada but not themselves. A Minnesota state legislator called the letter what it looks like: "This letter feels more like an attempt to deflect blame rather than responsibly govern."

He was warned, and he had an answer ready

This isn't hindsight. Stauber was told in real time.

In February 2025, when the Trump administration fired thousands of probationary Forest Service employees, state Sen. Grant Hauschild wrote directly to Trump and to Stauber, urging them to reverse the cuts to Superior National Forest staff. Hauschild's argument was that these workers keep people safe: "Without adequate staffing, the ability to manage these resources sustainably and safely is compromised, risking environmental degradation and economic loss."

As of the paper's reporting a week later, neither Trump nor Stauber had responded, a Hauschild spokesperson told the Duluth News Tribune.

He did give the paper a statement about the firings, though:

"However, the American people elected President Trump to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent serving the public rather than expanding government. I am thankful to those of my constituents who have pursued a path in public service, and I know they understand that the taxpayers' needs can and do change over time."

That was his position while the Forest Service lost a third of its people and the grant for his own district sat frozen.

Stauber had already announced he was joining the congressional DOGE Caucus. And when Trump froze federal grants in January 2025, Stauber went on NPR to defend the freeze, repeating a claim about $50 million headed to Gaza for condoms — a claim fact-checkers found no evidence for.

That was the same stretch of weeks when the grant money for his own forest stopped moving.

What we can and can't say

We should be straight about the limits here, because the people closest to it are.

Nobody can prove these specific fires would have been smaller. Kania says so himself. So does Dale MacDougall, whose nonprofit partnered on the grant and did some thinning in the area in May: "Had that made a big difference, we can't say. That we will never know." Kania is also a Democrat now running for the Minnesota House, and his Republican opponent, Roger Skraba, told the Star Tribune he blames the Forest Service rather than DOGE.

But the Post didn't take one man's word for it. It built the story on five people familiar with the situation plus a Forest Service document from October 2025 that showed the grant's targets pushed out roughly a year.

And the thing that isn't in dispute is the sequence. The money was awarded. The plan was ready. DOGE froze it. The staff who would have run it were fired. The work didn't happen. The forest burned. The work is happening now, at emergency prices, with fire on the other side of the road.

The bill came due

Stauber has represented this district for seven years. The Superior National Forest is one of the reasons people live there and one of the reasons people visit. He joined the caucus that cheered the cuts, defended the grant freeze on national radio, left a letter warning him about his own forest unanswered, and then — with parts of the Echo Trail under evacuation orders and smoke hanging over Duluth — signed a letter telling Canada it needed to do more controlled burns.

He was right about one thing. Somebody should have cleared the overgrowth.

The money to do it was sitting right there.

Sources

Brianna Sacks, The Washington Post: "'We were shovel ready': A Minnesota forest hit by DOGE cuts is now ablaze" (July 25, 2026). Photo: Scott Bauer/AP.

Kristoffer Tigue, The Minnesota Star Tribune: "Republican lawmakers are blaming Canada for wildfire smoke, but cause is complicated" (July 25, 2026).

Letter from 19 House Republicans to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, July 20, 2026.

What Utah's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:17:08 +0000

Utah ranks 10th out of 50 on the measures we track — health, crime, food security, education, life expectancy, and more. That's one of the best scores in the country, and it isn't an accident. It's insured families, funded hospitals, kids who eat, a university that does real research, and land nobody sold.

Most of that was built here. A lot of it is paid for in Washington. And the three Utahns who represent this state in the House have spent the past two years voting to spend it down.

Blake Moore, the House Republican Conference Vice Chair and a senior member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Celeste Maloy, who sits on Appropriations and Natural Resources. Mike Kennedy, a practicing family physician who serves as Vice Chair of the Federal Lands Subcommittee.

All three voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 3, 2025 — the law that cuts health coverage and food aid to pay for tax breaks. All three voted twice to lock DOGE's cuts into permanent law, in June 2025 and again in July. And on February 11, 2026, when the House actually passed a resolution to end the tariff emergency, 219–211, all three voted no.

Here's what those votes cost.

80,000 Utahns lose their health insurance — and a doctor cast one of the votes

An estimated 80,000 Utahns are projected to lose their health insurance under Trump's budget bill — working families, people with disabilities, and rural communities that already drive furthest for care.

Utah's strong health ranking is exactly the thing 80,000 lost policies eats into. High rankings are built out of people having a doctor.

Mike Kennedy is a family physician. He voted for the bill anyway, and then defended the Medicaid cuts in a published op-ed, writing that they "cut waste while preserving resources for the people it was intended to serve." He has eight children. Presumably he'd want them to be able to see a doctor.

Utah's Republicans celebrated the bill's passage while health advocates in the state said plainly what it would do.

One in five Utah kids is hungry

Here in Utah, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every day. About 176,200 Utahns — roughly 5% of the state — receive SNAP benefits every month to put food on the table.

Utah's SNAP enrollment is one of the lowest rates in the country. That is not a program running wild. It's a thin program in a state that already leans hard on churches, food banks, and neighbors — and the megabill the delegation voted for tightens who qualifies on top of it.

One in five kids goes hungry in a state that ranks 10th overall. Voting to make the food line shorter doesn't make the hunger smaller.

DOGE claimed $157 million. The University of Utah paid part of the bill.

DOGE says it "saved" Utah more than $157 million. Some of what that bought:

DOGE canceled 77 research grants at the University of Utah, costing $28.4 million in lost funding for medical and scientific research. That's not an abstraction in a state whose health ranking runs partly through its own research hospital.

Blake Moore isn't a bystander here — he co-chairs the House DOGE Caucus, which he helped launch in December 2024 alongside Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. But by his own account his northern Utah district ranks in the top 5% of all 435 congressional districts for federal workforce size — Hill Air Force Base, the IRS processing facility in Ogden, the veterans hospital, air traffic control, TSA, BLM, the Forest Service. When the cuts hit those workers, Moore told a February 2025 tele-town hall that "the communication that's come out from the DOGE world has been antagonistic" and that "I've been very, very frustrated at this alongside you." He helped build the bulldozer, then complained about the damage.

Celeste Maloy is a DOGE Caucus member too, and told Utahns she'd "like to see agencies do less with less" — advising them to ignore "the hysteria" as the cuts hit national parks, the IRS, and federal workers across the state. For someone crusading against government waste, she has her own history with public money: before Congress, she personally lobbied Utah lawmakers in 2019 to hand $300,000 in state funds to a public-lands nonprofit she had helped launch and later led. Watchdog reporting found "scant evidence" of what it accomplished. It dissolved in 2023 when she ran for Congress.

Meanwhile there were 267,000 layoffs in Utah in 2025. Utah's delegation spent that year voting to add to the pile.

They tried to sell 10,000 acres of Utah to pay for the tax cuts

This is the one that's specific to us.

Celeste Maloy pushed to sell more than 10,000 acres of Utah public land — parcels across Washington County near St. George — as an amendment to Trump's budget bill. The proposal drew bipartisan opposition and was stripped from the final bill. It failed because Utahns and others objected, not because she stopped pushing.

She also sponsored the Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act, which would require Congress to sign off on every new national monument — gutting the century-old law that protected millions of acres of American wilderness, a lot of it here.

Maloy is the cousin of Ammon Bundy and niece of Cliven Bundy, the family behind the 2014 armed standoff with federal agents over public land. Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, put it this way: "Leave it to a member of the Bundy family to lead an egregious attack on America's public lands, this time from within the halls of Congress."

On the environment generally, none of the three is close to a defender. Moore holds a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters in 2025 and 7% lifetime. Maloy is at 3% in 2025, 5% lifetime. Kennedy is at 0% in 2025 with a 0% lifetime score — every single vote against the environment.

450 Utahns a year, and ICE arrests doubled

Utah has about 13.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 4% above the national average, with about 450 Utahns dying from gun violence every year. That's one of the places a top-10 state is not doing well, and there's no bill from this delegation to fix it.

And ICE arrests in Utah more than doubled in 2025 — over 4,000 people, about 17% of them with no criminal history at all. One Utah father applying for a green card was arrested at his own immigration interview and shipped to a detention center in Las Vegas.

Mike Kennedy went further than a vote. In April 2025 he toured El Salvador's notorious CECOT maximum-security prison, where deportees — including wrongly deported Americans — are held in brutal conditions. He called the visit "sobering" and praised El Salvador for putting "the safety of their citizens first." He did not meet with or speak up for any of the wrongly deported Americans held there.

Utahns already told them

In March 2025, Maloy and Kennedy held a joint town hall at the University of Utah. Roughly 300 people showed up and heckled and shouted them down over DOGE cuts, federal layoffs, and health care. Kennedy suggested police remove a man he dubbed "Mr. Outburst." When Maloy insisted "I'm here to answer questions," the crowd shouted back "no you're not!"

By 2026, Maloy had moved to tightly managed events. At an Americans for Prosperity–sponsored town hall in St. George on January 28, 2026, more than two dozen residents protested outside, saying they'd spent months trying to get a real town hall with a congresswoman who was "always unavailable."

Who voted for this

These are the three members of Congress representing Utah in the House who voted for the budget law behind the health and food cuts, voted twice to codify DOGE's cuts, and voted to keep the tariffs:

Blake Moore — House Republican Conference Vice Chair, Ways and Means Committee, DOGE Caucus co-chair
Celeste Maloy — Appropriations and Natural Resources Committees
Mike Kennedy — family physician, Vice Chair of the Federal Lands Subcommittee

Utah sits at 10th because generations of people here paid for hospitals, schools, universities, and land they never put up for sale. A high ranking is the most expensive thing a state owns and the easiest to spend: 80,000 people off insurance, $28.4 million out of the U, 267,000 layoffs, and 10,000 acres nearly auctioned off is what spending it looks like.

In 2026, Utahns decide whether the three people who cast those votes get to keep casting them.

Compare Utah to Other States →

In a Phone Town Hall, Russ Fulcher Pushed to Sell Off Idaho's Public Lands and Pass the SAVE Act

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:50:00 +0000

On Wednesday night, Idaho Rep. Russ Fulcher held one of his telephone town halls — the kind where staff screen the questions and constituents can't push back. The Lewiston Tribune reported on what he told callers. Two things stand out, because both would take something away from Idahoans: their public lands, and their easy access to the ballot.

Handing Idaho's public lands to the state — and maybe to the highest bidder

Idaho is a public-lands state. About 62% of the land inside its borders is federal — national forests, rangeland, and wild country that every Idahoan can hunt, fish, camp, and hike on today, no matter how much money they have.

Fulcher wants to change that. As a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, he has advocated transferring federal public lands to state control. In 2025 he voted to approve a provision to sell off thousands of acres of federal land in Nevada and Utah — an amendment that ultimately didn't make it into the final law. And in December, he released a letter pushing to assemble stakeholder groups to examine how Idaho could take control of the federal lands within the state, arguing it would "open up timber, grazing and mining opportunities."

Conservation groups saw exactly where that leads. The Idaho Conservation League, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, and the Wilderness Society responded that Fulcher's plan would "pave the way for the privatization" of these lands. Their reasoning is simple math: maintaining those lands costs an estimated $500 million, and a state suddenly stuck with that bill would likely have to sell off a big chunk of it just to balance its budget.

That's the danger. "Transfer to the state" sounds harmless. But once land is off federal hands and the upkeep bills come due, the pressure to sell to developers, mining companies, and private buyers is enormous. The land that belongs to all of us today could end up behind a fence.

Championing the SAVE Act — a solution to a problem that doesn't exist

Fulcher also used the town hall to push the SAVE Act, the Trump-backed voting bill that would require people to show proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote. It's sold as a way to stop noncitizen voting — which, as the Lewiston Tribune notes, is already illegal in the United States.

Here's how Fulcher framed his opponents:

"I do understand why the Democrat side doesn't want to pass it. They don't want to require citizenship to vote."

That's a smear, not an argument. Nobody is fighting to let noncitizens vote — they already can't. What the SAVE Act actually does is put up new paperwork hurdles for eligible American citizens. It demands documents like a passport or birth certificate that match your current legal name — something millions of citizens don't have on hand, including married people whose names have changed, rural voters far from a passport office, and older Americans without an easy-to-find birth certificate.

Fulcher isn't shy about wanting it passed by any means necessary. He said he expects the bill to move through the reconciliation process, which would let the Senate pass it with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes it has failed to reach. He noted the House had just adopted a spending package that included $10 billion tied to the SAVE Act, and told callers: "I think we have a pathway for it, and I think we're going to get it done."

So the man who screens his town hall questions and won't take live pushback is working hard to make it harder for his own constituents to vote.

Two takeaways, one pattern

Public lands and voting rights aren't obviously connected — until you notice the pattern. On both, Fulcher is on the side of the powerful and against the ordinary Idahoan. He'd move public land toward private hands, and move the ballot further out of reach for regular citizens. Neither of those helps the people who called into his town hall. Both help the interests that fund campaigns and want fewer voters and more privatized land.

Idahoans deserve a representative who protects their access to the outdoors and to the ballot box — not one who quietly works to shrink both.

Source

Lewiston Tribune: Fulcher discusses public lands, SAVE Act in telephone town hall (reporting by Royce McCandless)

Trump Just Made It Legal to Bulldoze the Places Endangered Animals Live

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:40:10 +0000

For fifty years, one simple idea kept America's rarest animals from going extinct: if you want to save a species, you have to save the place it lives. The Trump administration just threw that idea out.

On July 10, the departments of the Interior and Commerce finalized a rule that rewrites what "harm" means under the Endangered Species Act. Under the old rule, wrecking the forests, wetlands, and streams that endangered animals depend on counted as harming them. Under the new rule, it doesn't. Only directly injuring or killing an animal counts now.

In plain terms: you can destroy the woods where an owl nests or drain the river where salmon spawn — and as long as you don't club the animal on the spot, the law no longer stops you.

Why this guts the law

A wildlife official can't protect a species if a developer is allowed to pave over its home.

The numbers make the point. A 2019 study of species added to the endangered list between 1975 and 2017 found that only 17% were threatened by direct killing — while 81% were threatened by habitat loss. So the new rule zeroes in on the smallest part of the problem and ignores the biggest one.

Karrigan Börk, a law professor at UC Davis, put it bluntly: "If you drain a salmon river during the summer when the salmon aren't in it, ultimately it has the same impact of killing off that whole species."

The new rule opens up forests, wetlands, and deserts to logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. Jane Davenport, an attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, called it "an attempted death blow to the Endangered Species Act."

"Let the states do it" — but they can't

The administration's excuse is that it's giving states the "freedom" to protect habitat themselves. That sounds reasonable until you learn it isn't true.

Almost no states have laws that let them protect habitat the way the federal government did. Most state wildlife laws only stop poaching and the direct killing of animals — the exact thing the new federal rule still covers, and nothing more. According to a 2024 analysis, only eight states plus Puerto Rico even require protecting critical habitat under their own laws. California appears to be the only one with a real system to make developers offset the damage they do.

And state wildlife agencies are already broke. Chris Servheen, who spent 35 years running grizzly bear recovery for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, didn't mince words:

"It's really disingenuous to say if states want to protect habitat, they can do so. That's not their role, that's not what they do… The federal agencies manage the land base."

There's another catch: states can't enforce anything on federal land. Across the West, huge stretches of public land are the last refuge for many species. If the U.S. Forest Service greenlights logging old-growth forest under the new rule, state officials can't do a thing about it.

Even red-state wildlife officials objected

This wasn't a partisan fight among the people who actually manage wildlife. When the rule was proposed, wildlife agency leaders from both conservative and liberal states warned against it — Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wyoming among them.

North Dakota's Bruce Kreft warned the change would have "dire consequences" and "lead to further population declines." Of all the state wildlife agencies whose comments were reviewed, only Alaska's fully backed the change.

So who did want this? Oil and gas groups. The American Petroleum Institute and other drilling interests told the administration they supported limiting habitat protections. That tells you who this rule is really for.

What happens now

The administration says it's just restoring the "original intent" of the law and ending what it called "years of federal overreach." But the change was published in the Federal Register and takes effect in September, and a coalition of environmental groups and Native tribes have already filed lawsuits to stop it. One tribal suit argues the rollback threatens fisheries the federal government is required to protect under treaty.

There's a real danger in those court fights: if the case reaches the conservative Supreme Court and it sides with the administration, a future president might not be able to undo the damage without Congress rewriting the law.

Endangered species can't vote, hire lobbyists, or file public comments. The people who spent their careers protecting them said this rule will push more of them toward extinction. The administration did it anyway — because the industries that want to drill, log, and build asked for it.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Alex Brown for Stateline, published in the Florida Phoenix, the Interior Department's announcement, and the final rule in the Federal Register. Photo by Tom Kogut/U.S. Forest Service.

Pete Stauber Opened the Boundary Waters to a Chilean Mining Giant — and May Have Blown a Hole in Public Lands Law

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:11:00 +0000

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is one of the most beautiful, untouched places in America — a million acres of clean lakes and forest in northern Minnesota that draw families, hunters, anglers, and paddlers from all over the country. Keeping it clean isn't a partisan idea. It's common sense.

Minnesota Congressman Pete Stauber just spent his energy in Washington doing the opposite: tearing down the protections that keep mining pollution out of it — and handing the prize to a mining company owned by a Chilean conglomerate.

What happened

On April 16, 2026, the U.S. Senate voted 50-49 to reverse a Biden-era protection for the land around the Boundary Waters. The measure was House Joint Resolution 140, a resolution Stauber sponsored and had already pushed through the House.

The protection they killed wasn't small. In 2023, the Biden administration had withdrawn about 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest — the watershed that drains straight into the Boundary Waters — from mining leases for 20 years. Stauber's resolution wiped that out.

He was thrilled. "A major victory for America and for Minnesota's families and workers was secured today," Stauber said, adding that "never again can any Democrat President or administration unilaterally ban mining in this vital portion of the Superior National Forest."

Who actually wins

Stauber talks about "Minnesota's families and workers." But the company standing to cash in is Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Antofagasta — a Chilean mining conglomerate. The proposed sulfide-ore copper-nickel mine would sit right in the watershed above the Boundary Waters.

That kind of mining is exactly the kind that worries scientists and locals. Sulfide-ore mines have a long, documented history of pollution, and critics warn that any leak would flow downstream and permanently contaminate the wilderness. Meanwhile, the tourism and recreation economy the Boundary Waters supports — the jobs that already exist there — depends on that water staying clean.

This isn't a case of Democrats vs. Republicans, either. Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voted against Stauber's resolution, warning of irreversible harm. Stauber pushed it through anyway.

The part that should worry everyone who uses public land

Here's the twist that reaches far beyond Minnesota. To kill the mining ban, Stauber used the Congressional Review Act — a tool that lets Congress cancel executive branch "rules" with a simple majority.

The problem is what counts as a "rule." As Stateline reported, public-lands experts say the way this resolution was written could reclassify more than 100 forest management plans as rules that were never properly sent to Congress. That interpretation could throw permits and plans into legal limbo across hundreds of millions of acres of federal land — logging, grazing, recreation, and wildlife habitat included.

In other words: to do a favor for one foreign-owned mine, Stauber may have handed lawyers a crowbar to pry open the management of public lands all over the country. That's a reckless way to treat land that belongs to all of us.

This is who Stauber works for

None of this is out of character. Stauber chairs the House Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee — meaning he writes the rules for the very industries that fund his campaigns. His top donors include Koch Inc, Nippon Steel, and mining interests. He has a 3% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and an 8% lifetime score. When it comes to protecting Minnesota's environment, that record speaks for itself.

And on the things that make life more expensive for the people back home, Stauber has been just as unhelpful. He voted for Trump's budget bill that will strip health coverage from 17,000 people in his own district, and he cheered on Trump's tariffs even as they raised costs for Minnesota farmers and families. In seven years, he has never held a single in-person town hall in Duluth to answer for any of it.

The bottom line

The Boundary Waters can't be un-polluted once it's ruined. Pete Stauber traded a permanent risk to a priceless Minnesota treasure for a foreign mining company's payday — and may have weakened public-lands protections everywhere in the process. The people of Minnesota's 8th District deserve a representative who protects what makes their home special, not one who auctions it off.

Source

This post is based on Stateline's report on the fallout from the Boundary Waters mining vote and KAXE's coverage of the Senate vote.

The Trump Administration Just Rewrote the Rule That Kept Endangered Animals Alive

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:56:39 +0000

For half a century, the Endangered Species Act did something simple. It didn't just say you can't shoot a bald eagle. It said you can't bulldoze the tree the eagle nests in.

That second part is gone now.

On July 10, 2026, the Trump administration announced it had finalized a rule that erases the longstanding definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act. The rule was published in the Federal Register on July 14 and takes effect in mid-September. It means the government will no longer treat the destruction of an endangered animal's habitat as breaking the law.

What actually changed

For decades, "harm" to an endangered species included wrecking the places it needs to survive — cutting down old-growth forests where owls nest, or draining the streams where salmon spawn. The federal government scrutinized logging, mining, and water projects to make sure they didn't wipe out the last homes of vanishing wildlife.

Under the new rule, only actions that directly injure or kill an animal count as "harm." Destroying its habitat no longer does — as long as the animal isn't physically standing there when you do it.

A law professor put it bluntly. "You can destroy the resources a species requires as long as you don't do it when the species is at home," said Karrigan Börk, who directs the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. "If you drain a salmon river during the summer when the salmon aren't in it, ultimately it has the same impact of killing off that whole species."

The practical result: many forests, wetlands, deserts, and other critical habitats are now open to development, logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. A lot of that land is federal public land that belongs to all of us.

Why habitat is the whole ballgame

This isn't a small technical tweak. Habitat loss is the reason most species end up endangered in the first place.

A 2019 study in the journal Conservation Science and Practice looked at every species added to the endangered list from 1975 to 2017. Only 17% were threatened by direct killing. 81% were threatened by habitat loss. In other words, the rule the administration just deleted covered the danger that actually drives species to extinction.

Chris Servheen spent 35 years as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's grizzly bear recovery coordinator. His verdict, to Montana Free Press: "We wouldn't have grizzly bears today if we didn't have the harm definition for habitat."

Conservation groups called it what it is. "It's common sense that we can't save a species unless we save the places that they live," said Jane Davenport, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. "This is an attempted death blow to the Endangered Species Act."

There's also a legal irony here. Back in 1995, the Supreme Court looked at this exact question and sided with habitat protection. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home, a 6-3 majority upheld the government's definition of "harm" as including habitat destruction that kills or injures wildlife. The administration is now throwing out a reading of the law that the highest court in the country blessed 30 years ago.

The "let the states handle it" excuse

The administration is selling this as freedom. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the change "restores common sense, respects private property...and follows the statute Congress actually passed." Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick framed it as lifting "overly broad and burdensome regulations that have restrained our fishermen for too long." The message: don't worry, states can protect habitat if they want to.

The people who actually run state wildlife programs say that's not true.

When the rule was first proposed, wildlife agency leaders from both red and blue states warned it would gut their conservation work. Officials in Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, New Jersey, Vermont, North Dakota, and Wyoming all raised concerns, along with the national association that represents state wildlife managers. Of all the state wildlife agencies whose comments Stateline reviewed, only Alaska's fully backed the change.

Here's why the states can't simply pick up the slack:

State laws weren't built for this. Most state endangered species laws only stop poaching and the direct killing of animals. Protecting nesting trees and spawning streams has been the federal government's job since the 1970s.
Almost no state requires habitat protection. A 2024 analysis by the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators found only eight states plus Puerto Rico even require critical-habitat designations. California is essentially the only state with a real system to make developers offset the habitat they destroy.
State agencies are broke. State wildlife programs are already underfunded. Taking over a massive federal regulatory system overnight is not something they have the staff or money to do.
States can't touch federal land anyway. Across the West, huge areas of critical habitat sit on federal public land. If the U.S. Forest Service greenlights logging in an old-growth forest, no state official can stop it.

"It's really disingenuous to say if states want to protect habitat, they can do so," said Servheen. "That's not their role, that's not what they do... The federal agencies manage the land base."

And the political reality makes it worse. "Most state legislatures are pretty strongly captured by development and real estate interests," said Kate Groetzinger of the Center for Western Priorities. The states most likely to have their wild places carved up are the least likely to pass new laws stopping it.

Who wins

Follow the money and the answer is obvious. The American Petroleum Institute and other oil and gas groups filed comments supporting the rollback. They wanted fewer limits on where they can drill. The change hands the extractive industries exactly what they asked for — the freedom to develop land that used to be off-limits because an endangered animal lived there.

A coalition of environmental groups has already filed suit to block the rule. Two tribes in Washington state filed their own lawsuit, arguing the change will destroy tribal fisheries the federal government is legally bound by treaty to protect.

But there's a long-game danger even in fighting back. If one of those cases reaches the current Supreme Court, a conservative majority could lock in a gutted reading of the Endangered Species Act for good — leaving even a future president unable to restore habitat protections without an act of Congress.

The bottom line

The Endangered Species Act has been one of the most successful conservation laws in American history. It's why we still have bald eagles, grizzly bears, and salmon runs. The one thing that made it work was simple: you can't save an animal if you destroy the only place it can live.

The Trump administration just decided that destroying those places is fine — as long as you time it for when nobody's home.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Alex Brown for Stateline, republished by the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Photo: Tom Kogut / U.S. Forest Service via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Trump Just Gutted Utah's National Monuments by 90% — and Celeste Maloy Wants to Make It Permanent

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:29:04 +0000

On July 13, 2026, President Trump signed two proclamations that stripped protections from nearly 3 million acres of public land in Utah. Standing near him as he did it was Utah Congresswoman Celeste Maloy.

Trump shrank Bears Ears National Monument from about 1.36 million acres down to roughly 121,100 acres — a cut of about 91%. He shrank Grand Staircase-Escalante from about 1.87 million acres to roughly 181,500 acres — another 90% cut. Groups that track public lands called it the largest rollback of land protections in U.S. history.

This is land that belongs to all of us. And Maloy didn't just watch it happen. She wants to make sure it can never be undone.

What just happened to your public land

Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante aren't empty desert. They hold ancient cliff dwellings, rock art, fossils, and sacred sites. Five tribes — the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni — came together as the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to protect that ground.

Now most of it loses its shield. According to the White House's own fact sheet, the land pulled out of the monuments becomes open again to grazing, timber cutting, "resource development," road building, and motorized vehicles. In plain English, that means the door reopens to mining and drilling — including the coal buried under the Kaiparowits Plateau that the Grand Staircase monument was created to shield in the first place.

Tribes, conservation groups, archaeologists, and outdoor businesses all pushed back. Many of them point to the same legal problem: the Antiquities Act of 1906 lets a president create a national monument, but it does not clearly give a president the power to erase or gut one. That power, they argue, belongs to Congress. A court fight is expected.

This has happened before. Trump shrank both monuments during his first term. President Biden restored them. Now Trump has cut them again — and this time, Maloy and her fellow Utah Republicans want to slam the door shut for good.

Maloy was in the room — and wants Congress to lock it in

Maloy was there for the signing alongside Gov. Spencer Cox, Sen. Mike Lee, and Sen. John Curtis. And she made clear she doesn't want this to be something a future president can reverse. She said she'd like to "take the instability out of this process and make it something Congress has to do."

She waved off the people alarmed by a 90% cut, chalking their worry up to "misunderstandings of how federal land management works."

That's a remarkable thing to tell the tribes who consider this land sacred and the Utahns who hike, hunt, and camp there. Their concern isn't a misunderstanding. They understand exactly what happens when protections vanish and the bulldozers and drill rigs are allowed back in.

This is the whole reason Maloy is in Congress

None of this is a surprise if you know Maloy's record. Attacking public land protections isn't a side project for her — it's her signature issue.

She already sponsored the Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act, which would require an act of Congress to create any new national monument — gutting the same century-old law that protected Bears Ears and Grand Staircase in the first place.
She pushed to sell off more than 10,000 acres of Utah public land — parcels near St. George — as an add-on to Trump's budget bill. The idea drew bipartisan opposition and was stripped out.
She sits on the House Natural Resources Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior and Environment — the exact panels that write the rules for public lands. She's not on the sidelines. She's holding the pen.

Maloy is also the cousin of Ammon Bundy and the niece of Cliven Bundy — the family behind the 2014 armed standoff against federal agents over grazing on public land. The anti-public-lands fight that once played out at gunpoint in the Nevada desert now plays out with Maloy's vote in Washington.

Her environmental record backs it up. The League of Conservation Voters gives Maloy a 3% score for 2025 and a 5% lifetime score. That's not a lawmaker who occasionally sides with polluters. That's a near-perfect record of voting against clean air, clean water, and public land — over and over.

Who wins, and who loses

Ask who actually benefits when 3 million acres of protected land is handed back to "resource development." It isn't the family that camps in Grand Staircase. It isn't the tribes whose ancestors are buried there. It isn't the small towns whose economies run on hikers, hunters, and tourists.

It's the mining and drilling companies who've eyed that coal and mineral country for decades. Maloy has spent her short time in Congress trying to sell public land, kill the monument law, and now permanently shrink two of Utah's crown jewels. When she says the worried public just doesn't "understand" land management, what she really means is that they understand it too well.

Utah's public lands belong to every American — including the ones who won't be born for a hundred years. Celeste Maloy is fighting to make sure that when the drills and bulldozers move in, no future president can ever protect them again.

Source

This post was reported from the Missouri Independent / States Newsroom coverage of Trump's July 2026 monument proclamations, plus the White House fact sheet, Deseret News, and Salt Lake Tribune.