The Wrong Direction for Public Lands
Not since James G. Watt served as Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s has the Department of the Interior (DOI) faced cuts of this magnitude. The Trump administration’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget would reduce DOI spending by 13% overall, with deep staffing and program cuts across nearly every major bureau.
The National Park Service would lose nearly 3,000 full-time employees and face a 25% reduction in operations funding, totaling roughly $3.2 billion. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would lose 2,000 positions, while the U.S. Geological Survey would see more than 4,000 staff eliminated alongside major reductions to scientific research, environmental monitoring, and data collection. Tribal programs would also be cut by 24%, or approximately $911 million. Together, these cuts represent more than routine budget reductions; they signal a major shift away from conservation, scientific stewardship, and long-term public land management.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum oversees roughly 500 million acres of public land and the agencies responsible for managing them. The Department of the Interior’s mission includes protecting the nation’s natural resources and cultural heritage while providing scientific information to support multiple uses of public lands, including recreation, grazing, and energy development. While every administration places different emphasis on these uses, the Department’s long-term responsibility is to ensure public lands and wildlife are protected for future generations.
That responsibility makes Burgum’s recent testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee especially significant. During an April 29 hearing, Burgum defended the proposed budget and staffing cuts as necessary to support national security, energy dominance, and public safety. He also described federal lands and mineral holdings as a “significant position on America’s balance sheet,” arguing that expanded development of public lands and offshore resources would strengthen the economy, create jobs, reduce dependence on foreign energy, and help address the national deficit.
What was notably absent from much of his testimony, however, was discussion of conservation, wildlife protection, and the long-term stewardship of public lands. That omission raises a larger question: if DOI increasingly prioritizes extraction and development, what does the broader economic evidence suggest about the long-term value of public lands?
The answer is more complex than an extraction-first approach suggests.
Before James Watt’s tenure in the early 1980s, recreational use of public lands was not consistently tracked. Even so, National Park visitation reached roughly 220 million visits in 1980. By 1985, that number had climbed to 263 million. In 2024, National Parks welcomed 331 million visits. Today, the National Park system generates approximately $55.6 billion in annual economic output and supports more than 415,000 jobs.
The economic impact extends beyond National Parks. In 2024, BLM lands generated an estimated $245.4 billion in economic output and supported roughly 884,000 jobs through a combination of recreation, grazing, energy production, and other uses. Wildlife-related recreation such as hunting and fishing contributed an additional $156 billion to the U.S. economy, according to federal data.
These numbers demonstrate that public lands are not a single-purpose asset. They support multiple sectors simultaneously, including tourism, recreation, wildlife conservation, agriculture, and energy production. The central policy question is not whether public lands should be used, but which uses provide the strongest and most sustainable long-term return.
Burgum’s approach emphasizes expanded leasing, faster permitting, and fewer regulatory barriers to energy and mineral extraction. Resource development can create substantial short-term economic output and provide high-paying jobs, particularly in regions dependent on those industries. However, extraction industries are also highly volatile. Employment and revenue fluctuate with commodity prices, global demand, and production cycles, often producing boom-and-bust economies.
A recreation- and conservation-centered approach offers a different model. Investment in staffing, maintenance, habitat protection, and visitor infrastructure can increase visitation, strengthen nearby communities, and support stable local employment in sectors such as lodging, food service, guiding, and outdoor recreation. Recreation-based economies tend to generate more broadly distributed local spending and are supported by steadier long-term trends such as population growth, travel demand, and increasing interest in outdoor experiences.
While extraction industries often produce higher wages, they generally create fewer jobs per dollar spent and less sustained local economic activity over time. Recreation and tourism, by contrast, support a larger service economy and more consistent employment. The steady growth in public land visitation over the past four decades suggests that recreation and conservation provide a more predictable long-term economic foundation for surrounding communities.
Public lands were never intended to function solely as extraction zones. They are shared national assets that support wildlife habitat, recreation, tourism, clean water, rural economies, and cultural heritage. If the Department of the Interior is meant to serve the public interest over the long term, its priorities should reflect not only what can be extracted from public lands, but also what can be preserved, experienced, and sustained through them.
The proposed cuts to the Department of the Interior represent a significant departure from that broader mission. While energy development will always remain an important part of public land management, the long-term evidence suggests that conservation, recreation, and scientific stewardship provide more stable, widely shared, and sustainable benefits for both communities and the nation as a whole.