How Doug Burgum and the GOP are Dismantling Public Lands Once Called Sacred

As Interior Secretary, the former North Dakota governor is overseeing a sweeping rollback of public land protections — including in the very Badlands and prairie wetlands he grew up championing.

MEDORA, N.D. — On a cold morning in the North Dakota Badlands, the canyon walls glow amber and rust as bison drift through the draws of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The wild horses that Doug Burgum once fought to protect still roam the South Unit. But beneath the park’s rugged rim, less than a mile from the Theodore Roosevelt Wilderness Area boundary, oil and gas development is now moving closer — parcel by parcel, lease sale by lease sale — because of the man who used to be the park’s most prominent defender.

Burgum, the former two-term governor of North Dakota, was confirmed as the 55th Secretary of the Interior in January 2025 by a bipartisan vote of 79 to 18. He took the oath invoking Teddy Roosevelt at nearly every opportunity, championing a presidential library in Roosevelt’s honor and calling North Dakota ‘the cradle of conservation.’ Within hours of assuming office, Burgum signed six Secretarial Orders designed to strip back a generation of public land protections across the American West.

Fourteen months later, the consequences are being felt from the Badlands to the boreal forests, from the prairie pothole wetlands that stretch into Minnesota and South Dakota to the glacier-carved mountains of western Montana. Conservation groups, former National Park Service directors, tribal nations, and hunters and anglers who depend on federal land are raising alarms about a systematic dismantling of protections — often without congressional approval, sometimes reversing decades of precedent, and, critics argue, doing so in ways that directly contradict the Rooseveltian legacy Burgum claims to uphold.

And, just like Trump’s tariffs destroying American budgets, Trump’s disastrous trade policies straining farmers, and Trump’s war with Iran further alienating our allies and needlessly driving up gas prices and killing American soldiers – North Dakota’s Congressional representatives – U.S. Rep. Julie Fedorchak, U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, and U.S. Sen. John Hoeven – continue to remain paralyzed and silent.

“Left to Burgum, our nation’s public lands will be an industrial park sold to billionaires to enhance their wealth. If he had any sense of shame, Burgum would recognize how wrong he is. Roosevelt would, and would protest.” — Mike McFeely, InForum columnist, May 2025

The Opening Salvo: Six Orders on Day One, and a Dose of Deception

On his first full day in office, Burgum signed six Secretarial Orders that, taken together, represent what the Wilderness Society called ‘the most significant shift in Interior Department direction’ in decades. The orders positioned drilling and mining interests as the favored users of America’s public lands, directed all bureaus to identify emergency authorities to accelerate energy development, and formally notified Interior that President Trump had revoked Biden-era protections on the Outer Continental Shelf for oil and gas leasing.

One order — SO 3418, subtitled ‘Unleashing American Energy’ — required a review of public land protections that conservation groups identified as a direct but veiled attack on national monuments. The order called for steps to ‘review and, as appropriate, revise’ land protections while carefully avoiding the phrase ‘national monuments.’ The Wilderness Society noted the omission was deliberate: the administration knew monument reviews were deeply unpopular with the public.

Another early directive, SO 3421, directed the Interior Department to eliminate at least 10 existing regulations for every new one introduced. And SO 3420 formally reopened vast areas of the Outer Continental Shelf — including Arctic waters — to potential oil and gas development, reversing Biden-era withdrawals.

“The Interior Department under Burgum appears inclined to shrink or sell off public lands to fossil fuel interests and mining companies, while making expansion of renewable energy more difficult. This isn’t technology-neutral ‘energy abundance’ — it’s a blatant giveaway to the fossil fuel interests who were generous benefactors to Trump’s campaign.” — Alan Zibel, Research Director, Public Citizen

Theodore Roosevelt National Park: Under Siege from Within

Perhaps no story illustrates the contradiction at the heart of Burgum’s tenure more starkly than what is happening to Theodore Roosevelt National Park — the crown jewel of his home state, and the park he invoked throughout his confirmation hearing.

The National Parks Conservation Association had warned before Burgum’s confirmation that Theodore Roosevelt is ‘one of the parks most threatened by oil and gas drilling.’ Those warnings proved prescient. Since taking office, Burgum’s Bureau of Land Management has pursued aggressive oil and gas lease sales on parcels directly adjacent to the park’s boundaries.

In April 2025, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks sent a formal letter to Burgum documenting a proposed September 2025 lease sale that would offer 29 parcels for oil and gas drilling in Montana and North Dakota — including three parcels in close proximity to the park. One parcel of 673 acres directly adjoins the southern boundary of the Theodore Roosevelt Wilderness Area in the park’s North Unit. A second 39-acre parcel sits only one mile from the wilderness boundary. A third 40-acre parcel lies less than eight miles from the Elkhorn Ranch Unit, the site Roosevelt called his spiritual home.

Conservation groups noted the BLM’s environmental analyses for these lease sales repeatedly ‘considered but did not analyze’ potential impacts to the park’s wilderness character — a significant legal and procedural omission. Three consecutive lease sale environmental assessments in 2025 failed to examine wilderness impacts. By early 2026, the BLM had proposed an April 2026 lease sale with 12 parcels near the Theodore Roosevelt Wilderness Area — the most concentrated encroachment yet, according to advocates who are urging deferral.

At the same time, staffing at the park has cratered. The National Park Service lost more than 24 percent of its permanent staff nationwide in the first year of the Trump-Burgum administration, according to data from the National Parks Conservation Association. The ‘Valentine’s Day massacre’ of February 14, 2025, saw 1,000 probationary NPS workers abruptly dismissed across the country. An additional 3,500 accepted voluntary buyouts, early retirements, or were otherwise pushed out over the following months.

Burgum directed NPS to keep parks open and accessible despite the staff reductions — a directive former park superintendents called impossible to implement safely. ‘These directions suggest, if not outright direct, park managers to ignore their park resource protection responsibilities,’ wrote a coalition of five former NPS directors in a letter to Burgum.

In June 2025, Burgum’s implementation of a Trump executive order titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’ added a new dimension to the park’s crisis. Signs went up in all three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park — the North Unit, South Unit, and Elkhorn Ranch — asking tourists to scan a QR code and report exhibits they consider ‘negative about either past or living Americans.’ Interpretive rangers were ordered to audit all exhibits, films, and public-facing content for materials deemed to insufficiently highlight ‘the beauty, grandeur and abundance’ of the American landscape.

The North Dakota Land Plan Reversal: Opening the Missouri to Risk

In October 2025, Congress used the Congressional Review Act — at the urging of North Dakota’s Republican congressional delegation and with Burgum’s blessing — to overturn the Bureau of Land Management’s 2025 North Dakota Resource Management Plan. The Biden-era plan, years in development with extensive public and tribal consultation, had attempted to modernize the management of roughly 58,500 surface acres and 4.1 million acres of mineral estate in the state.

Overturning the plan meant reverting management to a framework adopted in 1988 — including erasing a half-mile ‘no surface occupancy’ buffer that had protected the Missouri River, Lake Oahe, and Lake Sakakawea from oil, gas, and coal leasing. That buffer had been designed to safeguard drinking water for communities along some of the largest reservoirs in the United States. The Dakota Resource Council warned that eliminating the buffer makes these water bodies vulnerable to contamination unless Congress acts to restore the protection separately.

As governor, Burgum had filed multiple protests and appeals against the same plan he now helped to dismantle as Interior Secretary — arguing it was too restrictive on energy development and effectively blocked state and private mineral development because of North Dakota’s unique ‘checkerboard’ land ownership pattern, in which federal mineral estate is interspersed with state and private land.

Critics noted the Congressional Review Act provision means that a substantially similar resource management plan can never be created again — meaning the 1988 framework, which predates modern environmental science and climate research, may govern North Dakota’s federal lands for generations.

Montana: Glacier National Park and the DOGE Cuts

In northwest Montana, Glacier National Park set a record for May visitors in 2025, welcoming tourists to the Going-to-the-Sun Road and the turquoise waters of Lake McDonald. But behind the scenes, the park was operating on a skeleton crew.

Glacier, like major parks nationwide, lost an estimated 25 percent of its permanent staff due to DOGE cuts, buyouts, and the administration’s hiring freeze in the early months of 2025. Former Superintendent Jeff Mow, who led Glacier from 2013 to 2022, warned that his former colleagues across the park system told him: ‘We made it through this summer, but next summer might not be so easy.’

Zak Anderson, executive director of Explore Whitefish and the Whitefish Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the ripple effects were already being felt on the local economy. According to NPS data, Glacier National Park generated more than $656 million for northwest Montana’s economy and supported 5,190 jobs from 3.2 million visitors in 2024. That economic engine depends on a functioning, staffed national park.

The threat to Montana’s public lands extends beyond Glacier. Congress is weighing legislation using the Congressional Review Act to overturn a recently updated BLM resource management plan for Montana as well — potentially reverting that state’s land management framework to older plans that include designations of ‘land available for disposal,’ opening acreage to potential sale or transfer. Outdoor Life reported that CRA language means anything overturned can never be recreated the same way, and those older plans may list lands for disposal that today are among the most heavily used for hunting and fishing in the region.

South Dakota and Minnesota: The Prairie Pothole Crisis

Stretching across North Dakota, South Dakota, and into Minnesota, the Prairie Pothole Region is known as North America’s ‘duck factory.’ The 64-million-acre expanse of glacially carved wetlands and native grasslands provides breeding grounds for more than 60 percent of the continent’s migratory waterfowl and supports more than 300 bird species. Ducks produced in the region are harvested in 49 of 50 states, and in Canada, Mexico, and beyond.

The region was already under stress. More than half of its historic wetlands are gone. Nearly 70 percent of original grasslands have been converted to cropland. Current grassland loss rates are occurring five times faster than land can be protected. Only 20 percent of the grassland in the U.S. portion of the Prairie Pothole Region is protected.

Now conservationists fear the Burgum Interior Department is accelerating those losses through a combination of policy changes, staff cuts, and reduced conservation investment. In March 2025, reports emerged that the Trump-Burgum-DOGE administration was moving to close the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s office in Bismarck, North Dakota — the agency that oversees management of more than 500,000 acres of wildlife refuges and waterfowl production areas in the state, including 63 National Wildlife Refuges, more than any other state in the country.

North Dakota’s network of refuges — including Audubon, Lostwood, J. Clark Salyer, Upper Souris, and Chase Lake — represents a conservation legacy built over nearly a century. Many originated from WPA dam-building projects during the Dirty Thirties, when FDR’s administration purchased easements from farmers to create wildlife habitat that simultaneously saved struggling farms. These refuges, combined with Wetland Management Districts containing hundreds of Waterfowl Production Areas, form the backbone of waterfowl conservation across the central flyway.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund — the bipartisan program that has funded critical conservation land acquisitions for 60 years without a dime of taxpayer money, relying instead on offshore oil and gas royalties — was also significantly restricted under Burgum’s Secretarial Order 3442 in September 2025. The order requires a state governor’s and local leaders’ approval before any federal LWCF acquisitions can proceed, blocks Bureau of Land Management purchases, limits the ability of nonprofits to participate, and creates what critics call a backdoor pathway to selling federal lands by allowing states to use LWCF grant funds to purchase currently protected federal conservation lands.

“It is rather stunning to see Secretary Burgum come in and, for no reason at all, really try to kneecap this conservation program.” — Aaron Weiss, Deputy Director, Center for Western Priorities

Amy Lindholm of the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition called the order ‘severely restrictive,’ adding: ‘It’s not just a policy mistake — it’s a betrayal of the values that [the Great American Outdoors Act] represents.’ Notably, Burgum’s own president, Donald Trump, signed the Great American Outdoors Act into law in 2020, permanently and fully funding LWCF — a legacy now being undermined by his own Interior Secretary.

In Minnesota, the implications are acute. The state sits at the southern and eastern edge of the Prairie Pothole Region, and its 5,000 shallow lakes provide critical migration stopover habitat along the Mississippi Flyway for hundreds of thousands of waterfowl each spring and fall. Without adequate LWCF funding and FWS staffing to protect, restore, and manage wetlands in the region, conservation groups warn that decades of progress could unravel in years.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act: Weakening a Century of Protection

In his first-day orders, Burgum also took steps to weaken protections for migratory birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — protections that are foundational to the conservation of the Prairie Pothole ecosystem across all four states.

North American bird populations have fallen by 3 billion since 1970, according to federal data. The populations of many of the 1,093 species protected under the MBTA are in decline. Burgum’s orders revisited a Trump first-term rollback that had limited the MBTA to prohibit only deliberate killings of migratory birds, not incidental takes — killings that are unintentional but foreseeable — from industrial activities like oil pit exposure, power line collisions, and habitat destruction associated with energy development.

For a region whose economy, culture, and ecological identity are built around waterfowl — where duck hunting is a rite of passage, where communities celebrate the return of geese each spring, where native prairie provides the nesting cover that sustains continental populations — weakening incidental take protections represents a quiet but consequential threat.

The Historical Verdict: Failing the Roosevelt Standard

On the wall of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library — the $80 million legacy project in Medora, North Dakota, to which Doug Burgum contributed at least $1 million of his own money — is a quote from the president for whom it is named: ‘Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.’

It is a quote Burgum has cited repeatedly — at the Republican National Convention, in his confirmation hearing, in speeches across North Dakota and the West. It is also a standard against which his tenure as Interior Secretary is increasingly being measured, and found wanting.

The National Parks Conservation Association, in an open letter to Burgum published in late 2025, catalogued the record: more than a quarter of the National Park Service’s permanent staff gone, parks across the country operating at dangerous understaffing levels, proposed budget cuts that would shutter more than 350 of the nation’s 433 park units, national monuments under review for potential reduction, cultural and historical exhibits being censored or removed, oil and gas leasing encroaching on park boundaries from the Badlands to the Colorado Plateau.

‘Secretary Burgum’s actions are making it impossible for the Park Service to protect the very places and resources Americans hold dear,’ said Theresa Pierno, President and CEO of NPCA.

For the communities of the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest — where public lands are not abstract symbols but the practical terrain on which people hunt, fish, hike, graze livestock, and draw drinking water — the stakes are not philosophical. They are immediate.

The Missouri River, threatened by the loss of its protective buffer, supplies drinking water to tribal nations and rural communities across the Dakotas. The prairie potholes of Minnesota and the Dakotas supply the continent’s duck hunters with their quarry. Glacier National Park generates hundreds of millions in economic activity for northwest Montana. Theodore Roosevelt National Park anchors tourism and identity across western North Dakota.

And all of it, conservationists warn, is being quietly and systematically placed at risk by the man who grew up promising to protect it — the man who now signs the orders that open it, lease by lease, parcel by parcel, to the highest bidder.