Congress largely rejected those cuts the last time around, but the administration is trying again, hoping to bully Congress into further weakening the management and protection of our public land.
A major part of Burgum’s strategy has been to continue the administration’s policy of driving out the people who do the work. Over the past year, Elon Musk’s DOGE-driven firings and buyouts gutted the Interior Department’s workforce. About a quarter of National Park Service employees have left since January 2025, including rangers, biologists, historians and maintenance workers, all pushed out through waves of terminations and early retirement offers. There’s also been the slow demoralization of being told your life’s work doesn’t matter.
This month, Interior announced yet another round of buyouts, the latest effort to thin the ranks of the people who keep trails open and fight wildfires.
What’s almost hard to believe is the policy of erasing history itself. Under orders from Secretary Burgum and President Trump, the National Park Service has removed or flagged for removal hundreds of interpretive signs and exhibits across the country.
At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia—the birthplace of the 250-year-old democracy that we’re about to celebrate—an exhibit about enslaved people at the President’s House has been removed. At the Grand Canyon, signs acknowledging that white settlers displaced Native American Tribes were taken down. At the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, some 80 items have been flagged for removal. At Stonewall National Monument, the Pride flag came down.
Climate science has been banished from Glacier National Park, and Grand Teton removed a sign about an army officer who bragged about the massacre of more than 170 Piegan Blackfeet people. The stories of Japanese American internment in the western states, of women’s suffrage, of labor rights—all deemed unpatriotic by an administration that believes you can only honor America’s 250th birthday by pretending half of its history never happened.
At the end of March, Burgum also convened the “God Squad,” officially known as the Endangered Species Committee, for the first time in more than three decades. Its meeting lasted less than 30 minutes, yet the committee voted unanimously to exempt all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act. The decision will almost certainly doom the Rice’s whale, a species found nowhere else on Earth, of which roughly 50 remain. It was the first time national security has been invoked to override the Endangered Species Act, and conservationists warn that it will not be the last.
As for the U.S. Forest Service, draconian cuts in its staff are planned along with wholesale closings of regional offices and dozens of research stations. The agency’s reorganization also includes moving its main headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah.
This administration has made its intent clear: Cut budgets, drive out the workforce, erase history, greenlight extinction. Energy extraction is paramount, while conservation, research, and preservation are all values that can be discarded.
These are not disconnected policy decisions. They are part of the coherent vision of a cabinet secretary who sees public lands as surplus inventory and history as a branding problem.
But this is what Doug Burgum will learn: Americans are not going along with it. Polling shows that nearly 80 percent of the public opposes removing factual history from national parks. More than 99 percent of public comments opposed rolling back roadless protections for national forests. Congress rejected the worst of last year’s budget cuts, and it will be pressed to do so again. When the administration, aided by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, tried to sell off public lands through the reconciliation bill, bipartisan outrage killed it.
Doug Burgum can propose all the budget cuts he wants, but he will face determined opposition from all of us who treasure our public lands.
Aaron Weiss, director of the Center for Western Priorities, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues.
