Before the Forest Service logs a drainage or the Bureau of Land Management leases a parcel to a driller, the agency must publish what it intends to do, allow the public to respond, and answer the objections. That arrangement is 56 years old and 640 million acres of federal land run on it.
But on July 3 of last year, five federal departments filed rules in the Federal Register that gutted their own environmental review regulations. Agriculture. Interior. Energy. Transportation. Defense filed twice. All six took effect the day they were published, with public comment invited afterward, if at all.
It wasn’t a secret. An executive order signed the previous January had given every federal agency 12 months to revise its environmental procedures, and July 3 was the deadline. The rules shrinking public comment didn’t themselves go out for public comment.
Why would a government work this hard to stop hearing from people?
In April 2024, at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, an oil executive complained that his industry had spent $400 million lobbying the previous administration and rules still hadn’t been changed. Trump’s answer to the 20 or so executives in the room was that they raise him a billion dollars. He was specific about the return — more oil and gas leases auctioned on federal land. He called it a deal.
The Washington Post and The New York Times reported the “deal” within a month, and two congressional committees opened inquiries, but nobody in the administration disputed it.
Trump’s Forest Service chief came from a vice presidency at one of the largest lumber producers in the country.
Interior’s third-ranking official holds grazing permits on a quarter-million acres managed by the BLM and got an ethics waiver this March to work on ranching and grazing issues. The agency’s grazing overhaul covers 155 million acres while narrowing who’s allowed to object.
The BLM’s director made his fortune in oil and gas. The BLM gave the public seven days to weigh in on stripping protection from the country around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, which the Park Service describes as a “sacred and deeply personal place for many Indigenous peoples.” Comments were accepted online only and public participation cut from 90 days to 10.
The Forest Service wants to slash comment on a timber project from 30 days to 10, delete the meeting where objections used to get worked out in a room, and hand review of your objection to the official who made the decision to which you’re objecting.
The 2001 Roadless Rule protected 58 million acres of national forest land from development and took 430 public meetings and 1.6 million comments to write. The Agriculture Department recently erased the rule with 21 days of public comment and not a single public meeting.
I’ve heard talk about whether it’s time for a march on Washington. Meanwhile, here’s what works.
Last summer a proposed bill in Congress would have forced the sale of 3.3 million acres and put 250 million more acres on the table, but hunters and anglers and hikers and Westerners who would sooner eat their hat than call themselves environmentalists made so much noise that Republican senators went after it in public.
Backcountry Hunters and Anglers alone logged nearly 115,000 calls and emails. The bill died. Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee says he’ll be back for it — and I believe him — but it died.
Comments still matter even when they lose, because they go into the administrative record, and the record is what a federal judge reads two years later. When the Agriculture Department collected 46,845 comments on dismantling the Forest Service, it found 82 percent opposed yet answered none of the objections. That silence became a claim in a lawsuit this January.
Every comment filed and every phone call puts one more name on a list of people paying attention, and that list is the only thing that has ever stopped this internal destruction. It isn’t foolproof. Erasing the Roadless Rule drew 625,737 comments and the rescission is proceeding anyway. What the public land sell-off had that the Roadless Rule didn’t was a vote that a member of Congress had to cast with their name on it.
The pendulum swings, as it always has, and when it turns, how much of the damage gets undone might come down to how many of us showed up on the day it happened.
Will Pattiz is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is co-founder of More Than Just Parks, a public lands advocacy and media organization.
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