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In the latter part of the 19th century, prospectors flocked to the Red Mountain Mining District in southwestern Colorado, staking hundreds of 10-acre claims alongside streambeds, on aspen-covered slopes and just about anywhere else in the “public domain” they thought might hold gold or silver. After five years, federal mining laws would allow them to patent, or take title to, the claims they wanted.
A century and a half later, the only visible remnants of that hardrock mining boom are a handful of abandoned houses and mining structures, the faint line of a railroad bed and dozens of orange waste rock piles. But land ownership maps show another legacy: Thousands of acres of private land in the form of long rectangular mining claims scattered haphazardly across U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land. Any of these properties could be developed with vacation cabins, trophy homes or even small resorts, fragmenting wildlife habitat, sullying views from the “Million Dollar Highway,” and hampering or completely blocking access to the surrounding public lands.
In response, volunteers from the nearby towns of Ouray and Silverton worked with historic preservationists, local and federal land managers and representatives of the Trust for Public Land to buy more than 10,000 acres of parcels and return them to the public domain from which they were carved. It took nearly a decade, but by 2007, some 9,000 acres had been acquired and returned to federal ownership with about $14 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Red Mountain Project, as it came to be known, was just one of tens of thousands of projects — from land acquisitions to outdoor recreation facilities — made possible by the LWCF in the last six decades.
The Trump administration, however, is poised to divert hundreds of millions of dollars away from LWCF land purchases and spend it instead on routine maintenance at national parks and other federal lands. Essentially, the administration wants to use money intended for enduring conservation projects to cover up the most obvious consequences of its arbitrary budget and staff cuts at the National Park Service and other agencies. It’s an especially cynical tactic in Republicans’ long-running campaign to defund, and ultimately eliminate, the public lands.
Congress established the LWCF in 1964 to further conservation and enhance recreation by using offshore oil and gas drilling revenues to acquire private land in or near national parks, wilderness areas and forests, and then making it public. One could say that it was designed to clean up the mess and fill in the gaps in the public domain created by land-disposal policies, ranging from the Homestead Act to the General Mining Law to the Pacific Railroad Act.
During its first couple of decades, the program was wildly popular across the political spectrum. In 1981, James Watt, who later became the Reagan administration’s notoriously pro-mining, logging and drilling Interior Secretary, called the LWCF “one of the most effective preservation and conservation programs in America.”
Congress and presidential administrations regularly appropriate far less than the $900 million annually that was originally allocated, meaning the LWCF has been shorted about $22 billion since its inception. Regardless, it has funded the acquisition of over 8.5 million acres, all now accessible to the public, and constructed outdoor recreation facilities in nearly every county in U.S. The program acquired a checkerboard of private railroad grant lands within El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico; eliminated inholdings in Zion National Park; helped the BLM purchase tens of thousands of acres of former timberland near Missoula, Montana; and acquired private inholdings in Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients National Monument that were chock-full of important cultural sites.
Late last year, the fund supplied $62.4 million toward the purchase of the 640-acre state-owned Kelly parcel in northwestern Wyoming, thereby expanding Grand Teton National Park and keeping an important wildlife migratory corridor out of the hands of developers and/or oligarchs. The purchase was remarkable not only for its size, cost and conservation significance, but for its bipartisan support during a time when the state’s Republican lawmakers are determined to shrink the public domain, not expand it.
Opposition to LWCF-funded projects and acquisitions is unusual, in fact. Even though they typically enlarge the federal estate and remove land from county property tax rolls, they rarely incite accusations of land-grabs or government overreach and instead receive widespread local support. That’s because Westerners almost universally value undeveloped, publicly accessible lands for their economic, ecological and recreational benefits. The folks behind the Red Mountain Project, for example, were not a bunch of tree-huggers. To the contrary, many of them were prone to pushing back against federal overreach, especially when it came to environmental regulation of mining. But the opportunity to expand and preserve nearby natural and cultural resources overrode other ideological concerns.
Even Donald Trump had a soft spot for the program, at least momentarily. In 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act with bipartisan support, permanently funding the LWCF to the tune of $900 million annually and creating a separate account for national park and public lands maintenance. After the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., showed Trump a photo of a spectacular parcel acquired by the fund in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the president agreed to sign the bill into law.
But apparently Trump has forgotten that episode, as he and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are furtively attempting to undermine what may be the president’s biggest, and perhaps only, conservation accomplishment — and a popular one at that.
It fits the pattern of Trump’s second term. While the administration has directly attacked environmental protections by rolling back pollution rules and fast-tracking permitting for public-land mining and drilling, it has taken a less brazen approach to diminishing more popular programs, quietly starving them of funding instead of launching a frontal assault.
Rather than openly shrinking or eliminating national monuments, for example, congressional Republicans are looking to freeze funding for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s new management plan, forcing the relevant agencies to revert to a plan that applied only to the reduced monument boundaries established during Trump’s first term — an under-the-radar, de facto shrinkage of a national monument. Similarly, the GOP’s proposed 2026 budget would zero out funding for the BLM’s Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, the Biden administration’s oil and gas leasing reforms and methane fees, regulations on coal combustion waste and environmental protections for Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. And the GOP wants to significantly slash the budgets for the BLM, the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The primary purpose of this is to free up cash to offset tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people. But it will also starve federal land management agencies and initiatives of vital resources and drive them to fail, giving lawmakers an excuse to privatize either their functions or the land itself. It’s an underhanded way to accomplish unpopular initiatives — such as selling off public lands or killing popular programs — while suffering minimal political repercussions. So long as they can keep it under wraps, that is.
If Trump goes through with the diversion of LWCF monies, hundreds of proposed projects will likely remain unrealized, among them an effort to establish a conservation easement on 130,000 acres in northwestern Montana; the acquisition of a private parcel near Tucson that would provide a bridge of protected wildlife habitat and open space between Saguaro National Park and a county preserve; and various initiatives aimed at building up an outdoor recreation economy in the oil and gas-dominated community of Farmington, New Mexico.
Sixty years ago, Republicans and Democrats in Congress created the LWCF to foster conservation and recreation. Since then, its mission has gained broad public and political support. Trump likely does not care: If he follows his usual playbook, he’ll unilaterally gut the LWCF, without public input, and dodge the consequences. Western congressional Republicans, however, may have a harder time explaining to their public-land-loving constituents why they stood by as their president eviscerated such a popular program. Maybe it’s time for congressional delegation from Montana or Wyoming to sit down with Trump and explain the political ramifications. While they’re at it, they might show Trump another picture of a spectacular place the fund has helped preserve. There are thousands to choose from.
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