This week’s Wild Line opens with the October 1 government shutdown, which left thousands of federal workers in limbo and forced Interior to furlough half its staff, straining National Parks, gateway communities, and local economies. We cover Interior’s cancellation of conservation grants, new oil and gas leasing in Louisiana, a rollback of Utah off-highway vehicle closures, and weakened species protections under the Endangered Species Act. From DOE and EPA come massive new fossil fuel projects in Alaska and across public lands. Plus: new Forest Service dashboards, stalled action on Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court’s Fall docket, and good news from Oregon, Alaska, and South Carolina.

Federal Shutdown – Washington, DC

At midnight on October 1, the federal government shut down. White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt announced plans to fire thousands of federal workers, including civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy responsible for permitting, compliance, enforcement, and regulatory work. These job losses could cause long-term harm to resources and habitat.

At the Department of Interior, about half of its 58,600 employees will be furloughed. National Parks are already running on skeleton crews, raising concerns about access, recreation, and visitor safety.

The ripple effects extend beyond government workers. The consequences for access and outdoor recreation mean that communities and small businesses will suffer, and that visitor safety will be negatively impacted. We talked to Chris Hill, CEO of the Conservation Lands Foundation, about what this shutdown could mean for our public lands:

“We call upon Congress to uphold its responsibilities under the Constitution and pass a budget that keeps our public land management agencies intact and ensures that the administration executes the funding appropriated by Congress for public land management agencies accordingly. Anything less is a betrayal of our Constitution and the nation’s commitment to public lands, public service, and future generations. What we have seen over the past nine months is a blatant effort to undermine and weaken the very institutions that safeguard our country’s remaining natural and wild places–our precious public lands and water sources that tell the story of America’s culture, help mitigate the climate crisis, prevent wildfires, protect wildlife corridors, and provide for outdoor recreation experiences that are supporting local economies. Elected leaders behind this effort don’t care about the businesses and local communities that depend on access to these places to pay their bills. They don’t care about the wildlife that will be harmed after oil and gas companies desecrate this land. They don’t care about the families who hunt, fish, camp and recreate on this land, or the Indigenous communities for whom access to their ancestral lands is vital. In short, they’re showing us very clearly that they only care about the corporations who will benefit from privatizing public lands. Roughly 200 million of the 245 million acres of nature and wildlife beyond and between the national parks and overseen by the Bureau of Land Management are not protected from mining, drilling, or other development, and both the government shutdown, Sec. Burgum’s plan to designate oil permitting as “essential”, and reported reductions in workforce set the stage for the administration to make good on its promise to sell off America’s remaining natural resources. Congress must ensure that the integrity of the federal budget process is maintained, and that the Executive Branch spends what the Congress appropriates. Any other outcome is a threat to the integrity of our public lands and the agencies that manage them, and a clear effort by elected leaders who are hell bent on privatizing the country’s remaining public lands.

National Park Economics – Washington, DC

The National Park Service recently released an assessment showing that visitors to National Parks in 2024 spent $29 billion in gateway communities. Tourists drove spending on lodging, food, and other services. As a Department of Interior spokesperson put it, those dollars “deliver a clear economic return – supporting communities and strengthening local economies in every state.”

Interior Department Announcements

The Department of Interior rolled out a series of controversial decisions in the past week:

• Grant Cancellations: The Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management cancelled 37 grants to California Trout and the Institute for Applied Ecology. No explanation was offered beyond a vague statement about “fiscal responsibility.”
• Louisiana Leasing: The BLM announced an auction for oil and gas leasing on 2,000 acres beneath Barksdale Air Force Base, home to a large number of B-52 bombers. Leases would allow up to 10 years of drilling on the base’s 12,000 acres of forested land using horizontal drilling.
• Utah OHV Routes: The BLM opened a 30-day comment period, running through October 24, to reconsider closures of more than 300 miles of off-highway vehicle routes in the Labyrinth Rims/Gemini Bridges travel management plan. That plan went through its own public process in 2023.
• Species Protections: The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a rare “amend or remove” procedure to scale back protections under the Endangered Species Act for species such as pumas and the desert tortoise.

Energy and EPA – Alaska and Washington, DC

Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that the Administration will likely offer credit to U.S. and international companies interested in building a massive liquefied natural gas pipeline across Alaska. The pipeline would stretch 800 miles from the North Slope, with an estimated cost of $44 billion. Environmental impacts include threats to permafrost wetlands and critical habitat for endangered marine mammals, caribou, and migratory birds.

DOE, joined by the EPA, also unveiled policies that together would open more than 13 million acres of public land to coal mining. At the same time, coal royalties would be reduced from 12.5 percent to 7 percent. Officials tied these moves to the President’s “energy dominance” agenda and even to the goal of “winning the AI arms race.”

Forest Service Dashboards – USDA

The Forest Service has quietly launched a series of new online dashboards. These tools provide detailed information on currently advertised timber sales, drilling down by location and product type. They also track outcomes and economic impacts of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, which encourages collaborative, science-based restoration of priority forest landscapes.

Capitol Hill – Washington, DC

The massive bipartisan public lands hearing that was scheduled for October 1 has been postponed. It was expected to cover four wilderness designation bills and legislation codifying the Roadless Rule, which the Trump Administration has targeted for rescission. No new date has been announced.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have asked the Administration why $246 million in NOAA funding has not reached critical programs that improve public safety during extreme weather and protect coastal resources.

On the other side of the aisle, Senate Republican Leader John Thune of South Dakota moved more than 100 Trump Administration nominees through the chamber. The package included appointees to FERC, NOAA, DOE, EPA, and USDA, where Michael Boren was confirmed as Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment.

Supreme Court Fall Term – Washington, DC

The Court is eyeing a number of petitions with potential impacts for public lands, including:

• Climate Lawsuits: A case that will determine whether lawsuits against oil and gas companies must be heard in federal court, where they are more likely to be dismissed. 
• Pipeline Enforcement: A case involving state enforcement of violations tied to natural gas pipeline development. 
• Herbicide Warnings: A case over cancer warnings on herbicides. 
• Eminent Domain: A case regarding the seizing of ranchland under eminent domain to develop pipelines. 
• Corner-Crossing: A case testing the legality of “corner-crossing,” a practice lower courts have allowed in which hunters and other public land users move diagonally across private corners to access two adjacent tracts of public land. 

Also on the docket are broader questions about pocket rescissions, tariffs, and the major questions doctrine. Each of these stands to give the Administration broad and unprecedented power to ignore Congressional intent when making decisions at the agency level — including decisions that could directly impact wild places.

Good News

• Oregon: A federal judge in Oregon has sided with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Bird Alliance in Oregon that the Fish and Wildlife Service must take a closer look at protected the streaked horned lark, a threatened bird in the Pacific Northwest, after their initial assessment failed to consider the population’s small size before deciding whether or not to offer additional protections.
• Alaska: a new champion was crowned in this year’s Fat Bear Week Competition. Fat Bear Week, an annual tradition at Katmai National Park and Preserve, isn’t about body shaming, but about celebrating the healthy habitats and clean water necessary for bears to put on enough weight to survive the winter. So congrats to the winner: Chunk, who gained 1,200 pounds in six months and overcame a broken jaw on his way to denying a three-peat to his blood rival, Grazer.
• South Carolina: The 1,500 year old cypress-tupelos of the swamps of Francis Beidler Forest face a brighter future than they did last month. The Beidler Forest has been owned and stewarded by the Audubon Society for over 50 years, and is one of the world’s largest and most unique old-growth swamps. It was a site on the underground railroad and includes ancestral lands of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso tribe. It is as culturally relevant as it is ecologically irreplaceable.  

Next Week

The Wild Line returns October 10 with more headlines from our shared commons.

On Tuesday, The Wild Idea podcast features Joel Gill of Ferncliff to talk about Creation Care.

👉 Learn more and subscribe at thewildidea.com

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