For Immediate Release

April 23, 2025

Contact:

• Josh Osher, Western Watersheds Project, (406) 830-3099, josh@westernwatersheds.org
• Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project, (307) 399-7910, emolvar@westernwatersheds.org

Greens blast Interior blueprint as “sellout of western public lands”

WASHINGTON – Conservationists today blasted the Department of Interior’s Strategic Plan, leaked to a reporter at Public Domain on Earth Day, which focuses on ramping up commercial exploitation, dismantling environmental protections, and turning over federal public lands – either by management or by ownership – to state and local governments. Unsurprisingly, the blueprint offers a heavy dose of mineral extraction and “energy dominance,” but it also directs land management agencies to tailor their policies to the preferences of local and state governments – which have been heavily weighted across the rural West toward industrial exploitation with an upwelling of “land seizure” sentiment.

The Strategic Plan signals an expansion of commercial livestock grazing on public lands, a practice that results in major ecological damage, and costs the taxpayers millions to subsidize. The Strategic Plan directs agencies to “[r]educe the cost for grazing,” “[i]ncrease revenues from grazing,” and “[o]pen new lands for use, portending planned expansions of commercial livestock operations and further subsidies of a land-use insignificant to western state economies.

“Livestock grazing is already authorized at such heavy levels that it destroys native grasses, promotes the invasion of flammable weeds like cheatgrass, and outcompetes native wildlife like mule deer and elk for forage, radically reducing their numbers,” said Josh Osher, Policy Director of Western Watersheds Project. “The last thing the Department of Interior should be doing is pushing cattle and sheep into lands that have been protected from livestock for decades, where native perennial grasses are recovering and wildlife populations have been rebounding.”

Interior’s Strategic Plan also supports the “land seizure” agenda long pursued by extractive industries and anti-conservation states, specifying that agencies should “[r]reduce Federal holdings to allow state and local communities to reduce costs (housing)” and “return heritage lands and sites to the states.”

“It is now widely recognized that state governments lack the staffing and infrastructure to manage federal public lands, so a large-scale transfer of public lands to state or county governments would amount to a sellout of public lands and a transfer to private ownership,” said Erik Molvar, Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project. “All Americans have a strong interest in keeping public land in public hands, and allowing commercial and extractive uses only to the extent that they are compatible with maintaining healthy lands and abundant wildlife.”

The draft plan also directs agencies to delegate management of federal lands to local and state governments, including direction to “[s]upport co-management with local stakeholders”, “[p]artner with stakeholders for best use of lands,” and “[e]mpower states and local communities in decision-making.”

“Every American has an equal stake in our western public lands, and they need to be managed for the public interest as a whole, not just to line the pockets of powerful local interests,” said Osher. “For far too long, local governments have used inside influence to bend federal land management to suit their anti-environmental agendas, to kill wildlife, ramp up drilling, and overgraze the public lands. This new Strategic Plan directs agencies to put anti-conservation local and state governments in charge of public lands.”

The Strategic Plan also telegraphs a covert attack on the Endangered Species Act, making species delisting one of the major policy objectives.

“Federal law requires that endangered species decisions be made solely on the basis of science, and this new Interior focus on delisting rare and imperiled plants and wildlife appears to illegally prescribe a political agenda to remove protections into the process,” said Molvar.

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