Secretary Burgum’s Order Weakens Land and Water Conservation Fund
Washington, DC — In 2020, President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA), which funded the hugely popular and bipartisan Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). LWCF invests in public lands across the country — improving access points, expanding trails and services, and creating new parks and outdoor spaces — at no cost to the American taxpayer. Unfortunately, today, a month after publicly celebrating GAOA’s fifth anniversary, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum issued a new Secretarial Order that imposes unnecessary, top-down requirements that will impede the National Park Service from addressing its backlog of land acquisition needs.
Secretarial Order 3442 revives policies that Congress has rejected previously, limiting the ability of the federal government to acquire new parcels through LWCF, creating procedural roadblocks that will delay critical acquisition projects, and facilitating the removal of public lands from public hands by allowing states to use LWCF grants to purchase currently protected federal lands, establishing a dangerous pathway for the sort of public land sell-offs that the public overwhelmingly rejected during the reconciliation process.
In reaction to this, Emily Thompson, Executive Director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, issued the following statement:
“In Donald Trump’s first term, Congress passed, with a large bipartisan vote, the Great American Outdoors Act and fully and permanently funded the very popular Land and Water Conservation Fund. LWCF helps protect our access to national parks and public lands, and has specifically made many parks more complete through acquisition from willing private land owners of parcels within parks.
President Trump should be proud of this achievement. He signed it into law. And yet, now his Secretary of the Interior is trying to undermine the program.
The unnecessary, counterproductive changes in this order were rejected by Congress when former Secretary David Bernhardt proposed them, just as they should be rejected now.”
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The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks represents over 4,600 current, former, and retired employees and volunteers of the National Park Service, with over 50,000 collective years of stewardship of America’s most precious natural and cultural resources. Recognized as the Voices of Experience, the Coalition educates, speaks, and acts for the preservation and protection of the National Park System, and mission-related programs of the National Park Service. More information can be found at https://protectnps.org