This week, the U.S. Senate voted 50–49 to overturn a 20-year mining ban on 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest – upstream from Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
That protection, finalized in January 2023 after years of review and roughly 675,000 public comments, was erased with a single vote under the Congressional Review Act.
The same law is being used to undo land management plans across the West. Protections at Chaco Canyon face renewed pressure. The Roadless Rule is at risk of repeal.
At the same time, the administration is advancing a restructuring of the U.S. Forest Service – closing regional offices and research centers and moving functions to Salt Lake City, Sen. Mike Lee’s backyard. Lee has long advocated selling or transferring federal public lands.
We’ve seen it before: the Bureau of Land Management’s move to Grand Junction led to attrition and lost expertise.
These changes are not about proximity. About 97% of BLM staff already worked outside Washington, D.C., and most Forest Service lands and staff are in the West. Closing regional offices and research centers removes where forest plans are developed, wildfire and watershed science is conducted, and local knowledge is developed. It pushes decisions away from the ground – and that is the intent.
Cuts are already hitting. Since early 2025, more than 5,000 National Park Service, Forest Service and BLM employees have been laid off, including about 1,000 at the Park Service – with more proposed, including a roughly $736 million cut in the 2027 budget that would further reduce scientists, maintenance and resource protection staff.
Steve Pearce, awaiting confirmation to lead the BLM, has backed efforts to transfer or sell federal lands.
A 2025 federal housing initiative would redefine “multiple use” to include development near communities – potentially including areas around Durango such as Animas Mountain, Sailing Hawks, Horse Gulch and Twin Buttes.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has described public lands as a national “balance sheet” expected to generate returns – a view shared by this administration that treats them as assets to be liquidated, not stewarded.
The direction is clear: weaken protections, sideline public input, strip expertise and open public lands to development.
Public lands belong to all Americans and require stewardship – not this.
