Welcome to the landscape, your show about America's parks and public lands. I'm Erin Weiss with the Center for Western Priorities in Denver. And I'm Kate Gretzinger in Salt Lake City. Today on the pod, we've got two discussions about recent executive orders that affect public lands. The first covers Trump's recent EO aimed at increasing mining on BLM lands, and the second is about an EO aimed at ramping up logging in our national forests. We'll get to those in a sec, but first, the news.
Well, the big news today is that lawmakers in Congress are talking openly about selling off America's public lands to try to pay for a massive budget reconciliation bill that would advance president Trump's massive spending and tax cut plan. Now this isn't necessarily new. Earlier this year, the House Ways and Means Committee Republicans released a list of possible cuts and revenue raisers for reconciliation.
Their aim is to both cut taxes and ramp up border security by throwing more money at the border, so federal land sales were on that list. The house rules package that was adopted in January waived budget offset requirements for selling or giving away public lands. In other words, it wouldn't count as a loss of revenue even if taxpayers got ripped off.
Now Bruce Westerman, who is the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, told E and E News this week that the land they are considering selling off would, quote, just be in areas where you can't get affordable housing like gateway communities. Now it's unclear how selling land at market rates, presumably in those expensive gateway communities, could in any way address affordable housing.
This basically just sounds like Mike Lee's houses act, which as we've talked out before on this podcast, proposes selling off lands for trophy homes with no guardrails anywhere for affordability. Now this is exposing some rifts within the Republican party. That includes senator Steve Daines and representative Brian Zinke, both from Montana, who are saying they will not support a bill that includes a public lands sell off.
Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico also emphatic about his opposition to including public land sales in any reconciliation bill. Of course, senator Heinrich somewhat less relevant to that conversation since the whole point of a reconciliation bill is that you can pass it with just 50 votes. Democrats don't need to be involved. We will, of course, track all of this closely and keep you updated.
Our guest today is Mitch Friedman. He's the founder and executive director of Conservation Northwest. His group works to connect and restore wildlands and wildlife from the Washington Coast to the British Columbia Rockies. Mitch, thank you very much for being on the pod. Thanks for having me here.
So there is a lot going on with our national forests right now from potentially illegal forest service personnel cuts that may be getting uncut to executive and legislative efforts to fast track logging and clear cuts in our national forests. We're gonna try and touch on all of this. Hopefully, you can connect some of the dots for us. I wanna start with president Trump's executive order from March 1. It calls for, quote, immediate expansion of American timber production. What is in that order?
Well, it's a clear indication of the president's intentions. It directs the agencies, the departments to come back in certain timelines starting within a month and and drawing out over the next several months with proposals for new rulemaking to shortcut federal process. So the executive order itself doesn't do anything except kick start these potential future process tweaks. So we know what the president wants to do. The question is how does he get there?
Since it sounds like there's not much using executive authority alone, he can use to speed up logging. Is that that fair summary of where we're at right now? A fair summary, there are only two buckets touched on in the executive order. One is environmental policy, so environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. The other is the endangered species act, but there's no mention in the executive order about the National Forest Management Act.
So the president may intend to generate more logs, but how he's gonna get there from here is altogether unclear. I wanna go back to something we've touched on this podcast a couple times last year, which was the Northwest Forest Plan. Amending that plan, that is something that the Biden administration was working on. They released an environmental review
last November, but then never finalized it. So what is going on with the Northwest Forest Plan, and how does that fit in to the extent we know with what president Trump and his cabinet are doing now? The Northwest Forest Plan was adopted under president Clinton in the mid nineties whose reaction to the spotted owl and the ancient forest wars, and it's unique. The Northwest forest plan is the only plan in the country that aggregates a bunch of different national forests.
So it's a regional plan, and it's it's a remarkable you know, it's probably the most and best science driven land management plan in the world. So the Biden administration set up a process to update it, to amend it. We don't know what the Trump administration will do in terms of that amendment process. So I'll take these comments, and I guess we'll be hearing from them in the months ahead.
Alright. So a lot of unknowns on the agency front and on the on, I guess, the the administrative front and and the White House. At the same time, you have Congress and a bill called the Fix Our Forests Act. It's moving through Congress with some amount of bipartisan support. It looks like it may pass. What what's the deal with that bill? How does it align with what president Trump is trying to do or not align? Well, president Trump, his executive orders bump up against statutory limitations.
Executive orders cannot roll back what Congress has passed in statute, but Congress can. And the fix our forests act is an attempt by congressional leaders to well, I would I would say to generate more logging that directs the agencies to organize fire vulnerable national forest by fire sheds. And within priority fire sheds, there would be less environmental process and more, oh, I guess, support agency support to try to get up to large scale projects to reduce wildfire risk.
For instance, within a designated fire shed, you could use a categorical exclusion, which is a short form for environmental analysis on a project of up to 10,000 acres. And that's massive. 10,000 acres, that's what about 15 square miles within which you could do prescribed burning. You could remove trees. There aren't even sideboards for whether you could remove old trees or snags. You could put in so called fuel breaks or fire breaks, which are controversial. So it's a it's a big deal, the
Fix Our Force Act. It's passed the house. It's in the senate now. It almost certainly will pass. There's a bipartisan team of four senators working on it. Conservation groups are giving input through the democratic side to try to, you know, at at least make some improvements.
I'll get subjective here for a second. You know, I've been doing this for a long time, and I remember when, you know, George w Bush was president and his the guy who ran his forest service from Department of Agriculture was an old timber industry lobbyist who was our nemesis, Mark Ray. That guy was brilliant, and he knew the law inside and out. And he got a statute passed by Congress that we were all freaked out about at the time. But in the end, it didn't really change
all that much. And I suspect that everything we're talking about here, Aaron, the executive orders, the the act in congress, all of these things are not going to change as much on the ground as some of the staffing or funding issues that we might talk about. So yeah. So so why is that? Is that truly you need more people to do these timber sales and these management? Or or is it that without all those things, you can't follow the law that still exists, whether it's NEPA or the
Endangered Species Act? Yeah. Where what's the gap between what's what Trump is trying to do or what previous secretaries or foresters have tried to do in terms of more logging versus what actually happens on the ground? I think that there is a secret answer to that question that's hidden inside a golden ring that's buried under the ocean. You know, as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law that passed three years ago, Congress gave the Forest Service literally billions of dollars.
You know, 3,200,000,000.0 for this and that plus another couple. I mean, through a ton of money at the agency. Last fall, so still under the Biden administration, the forest service found that they were a half billion dollars in the hole and laid off a ton of seasonal workers. You know, so this a a process we're in now of the forest service being gutted of personnel and capacity started even before Trump. And that's because the forest service is a mess.
Alright. I'm gonna I'm gonna lay some cards on the table. I'm not a process guy. I don't believe that rigid NEPA, rigid environmental analysis is the way to get great environmental decisions or great government action. And I am an active management guy. You know, I started out as I'm one of the first tree climbers in the nineteen
eighties. I was an Earth First organizer. I'm I'm a pro wild guy, but I've come to very much believe that good science based biodiversity driven outcomes on our federal lands and our forests requires active management in a lot of areas. So I want a lot more prescribed burning. I want good thoughtful forest management restoration projects that thin out small trees. I want rural communities to engage in these things and have jobs and the mills to be vibrant and the forest to be healthy.
I cannot tell you how to get there from here. I want the forest service to be a great functional successful agency. We need it to be. But it is a mess, and pumping money in at what end does not mean logs or biodiversity or any other predictable outcome other than gridlock pops up the other. But I do think one can say that gutting the agency isn't gonna fix any of that. So it's not firing 7,000 foresters. It's not just throwing
money at the agency without a plan. So if if you had a magic wand, what would what would you waive it at to get to more prescribed burns, to get to thinning of the small stuff and not the old growth? How how do you do that? There are two poles in management. There's prescription and there's discretion. I think I used to be a prescription guy that congress and and people like me through the courts or whatever should tie the hands of the agencies so that they should never do anything bad.
And the outcome of that is that they just don't do very much good either. They become demoralized and ineffectual and process driven. On the other end is discretion.
You know, in the early days of the forest service and through, I'd say, until about the mid nineteen eighties when, you know, the battle over ancient forest really changed things, each national forest, each ranger district, the subunits of each national forest, each district ranger had a lot of authority and discretion, and these were people who who could get stuff done on the
ground. They knew their valleys, their districts, and they were in touch with their communities, and there was an efficiency to that. But they got taken over by the timber industry. They made a mess. They cut too much, and we whacked them back. And now the forest service lacks for an identity or a clear mandate. They're demoralized. If I were in charge, if I were the chief, I would boy. There would be a lot to do. But what you aspire to
is good government. It cannot be our goal as activists to have bad dysfunctional government. So we want an agency that that has high morale and high capacity and high functionality, but we wanted to have those things for biodiversity, for quality management, not for industry driven get the cutout. I wanna get back to the Trump administration and the Trump EOs, because this does tie into the fights over the ancient forests or the timber wars or whatever you wanna call it.
And these executive orders and secretary Doug Burgum's secretary of the orders talk about regularly convening something called the God Squad. What is this committee? Why haven't we generally heard of it? And what could it potentially do here in light of the Endangered Species Act, in light of the these struggling, if not failing management policies? The Endangered Species Act is one of the clear and strongest and most remarkable laws perhaps in the in
the world. Right? When it's working, it puts the needs of a rare species first. What the god squad allows, it's one section in in in the Endangered Species Act that gives a president the option of pulling together this committee to consider overriding the prohibitions where there's a public interest that should or may overwhelm the public interest in this protected species.
And the god squad has only been convened three times in the, what, fifty years or so of that the Endangered Species Act has been around. And so what president Trump has proposed in this executive order is novel. It's more of a proactive convening of the god squad. In the statute, the god squad is reactive. You know, when when things are so held up by the needs of a species and it's a it's a real problem, the president can pull these folks together, and they can figure out what to do about
it. The executive order takes the opposite approach. It says, let's get the grad squad together to figure out how to screw species. I tend to think that whatever they would come up with would not pass muster of judicial review. I think the courts would block it, but I'm not a lawyer. I mean, would would that be potentially just saying, okay. We've tried to save this the northern spotted owl. We've failed. Therefore, we're gonna just let the spotted owl go
extinct. I mean, is that the the lengths to which they could go potentially? What drives the Northwest Forest Plan isn't the Endangered Species Act, but the National Forest Management Act. The endangered species act says spotted owl shouldn't go extinct, and it describes what should happen for that. The National Forest Management Act requires that the agency manage for all native and desired non native vertebrates to have viable populations.
So you could the god squad could not toss the Northwest forest plan because it still hangs by a National Forest Management Act frame. Also, spotted owls are not the only listed species in the landscape. There's a lot of listed salmon and steelhead stocks and and other organisms. So I tend to think that that was a political move. You know, it's a sop to the timber industry. I don't think it's gonna have a lot of impact. I'm trying to think about how all of this
comes together. Obviously, a lot of question marks here over these orders, a lot of question marks over the courts, a lot of question marks over how many people there are going to be working for the forest service. What's the path forward? Well, I've never seen anything like this. You know, when I came into activism under Reagan, and I lived through Bush and Trump won. And I know all of those situations, we always thought that there were people we could go talk to. I had a good
relationship with Mark Ray. I met with him a a fair amount. And when Doug Burgum was appointed, you know, I talked to friends in the Dakotas. He had a good reputation. You know? Yeah. He's an oil and gas guy, but seem to like wildlife. I don't think any of that matters. I think the way that we used to look at these appointments has kind of been thrown out by this more performative and polarized and legally highly questionable approach of Doge.
I mean, we're starting to get towards a core question of what happens if you got the federal government. If there's nobody there to do the work, what work gets done? Whether that work is cutting trees or putting out fires or fixing trails and cleaning latrines at trailheads. I see I see big problems,
and maybe that's the plan. I mean, there are people that take a conspiracy theory approach to this that, you know, if you've if you reduce the workforce of, say, the forest service to such a degree that they can't maintain the trails and can't answer their phones and they can't clear brush and small trees and they can't respond effectively to wildfire, then, you know, the public outcry you you break government, and then the public says, oh, government government's broken.
Let's get rid of government. Okay. Let's sell the public lands. There are some people that draw those connections. I don't believe that. I don't think there's a master plan here. You think it's just chaos at this point? Yes. Well, I'm afraid this is one of those episodes where we're gonna leave with not many answers and a lot more questions.
So I'll just say, Mitch, I hope we can get you back on here in in six months or nine months, and we will check back to see where things are at with our forests and what has happened with the God Squad and with these forest ranger cuts and everything else. Mitch Friedman is the founder and executive director of Conservation Northwest. Mitch, really appreciate your perspective as it's important for folks to hear. Thank you, Aaron. Appreciate being on.
Our next guest today is Rachel Hamby. Rachel is our policy director here at the Center for Western Priorities. She's going to break down Trump's executive order on mining and critical minerals. Rachel, welcome back to the pod. Thanks. Always great to be on. So Trump issued this order back in mid March that's essentially an effort to ramp up mining on public lands. Can you summarize the different provisions in the order? I know it was sort of a grab bag, before we get into the details.
Yeah. And even before we talk about this executive order specifically, let's talk about executive orders or EOs in general. The thing to remember about these is that they do not overwrite existing law. These are the president directing agencies to do different things. But if the president is directing an agency to do something that is illegal or unlawful, they're gonna run into problems, whether it's with congress or by getting sued and having to
deal with it in the courts. So I think it's important to remember that these are, I've seen them described variously as glorified press releases or memos but on fancy stationery. So it's important to keep in mind that these are not writing new laws. However, we have also learned that whenever the Trump administration says that they're gonna try something, they're serious. So we can't just dismiss this or any other EO.
We have to take them seriously. These are real threats because they are saying clearly what they want to do. So with all of that in mind, let's look at this executive order specifically. It is immediate measures to increase American mineral production.
A big thing that this EO does at the outset is issue a new, very broad, very generous definition of minerals to include not only minerals that are already on the official critical minerals list, but also, as you said, a grab bag of other materials like uranium and gold and other stuff. And it also gives Doug Burgum the authority under this EO to add other stuff to that list as he sees fit, whether it's at his own discretion or at Trump's direction.
So what everything else that follows from this EO is following that very generous definition of minerals. The EO then goes on to lay out a number of actions that Trump wants the interior department to take to prioritize mining and mineral production on federal lands. And I think that that distinction is important because we all kind of have an idea of what mining is. It's a giant pit in the ground. There's a lot of construction materials.
But the EO also provides for a number of other types of mineral production, and that could be a facility where they're taking materials and processing them into different products or refining them in some way. So there's a lot more activities that this EO is seeking to promote than just mining.
The other thing about this EO is that the pretext for all of this is national security, which is being used to create a sense of fear and urgency to disguise what is really a giveaway of our national public lands to private industry. So you mentioned that this creates sort of a new list of minerals. We already had a list called the critical minerals list that essentially was defined as minerals that are important for national security and have a threatened supply chain.
Why create this new list instead of just adding minerals to the old list? Yeah. That's a great point. So we do have an official critical minerals list, which is required by a law that congress passed, and it lays out a number of very specific criteria that a mineral has to meet in order to be added to the list, a process for minerals to be evaluated for inclusion,
people who have to weigh in. So it's a whole process to make sure that we're not just adding stuff willy nilly at someone's whim to the list. So that already exists, and there's a process. And then I think it just to make sure that people know, there's the Department of Interior's list, which is managed by the US Geological Survey, And then there's also a separate critical materials list, which is maintained by the Department of
Energy. And they are related, but similar in that there are specific criteria and there's a process to put things on those lists and they come out at certain time frames.
So by creating a whole another definition of minerals, this seems to be president Trump trying to get around the law that was passed by congress to define the minerals, the process that is laid out to add minerals to that list, and just pretend all of that doesn't exist and ignore it and try to get the interior department to do what he wants on our public lands.
The fact that there are not defined criteria gives Trump and Burgum and whoever a lot of latitude to add minerals and other materials at their convenience for whatever what for whatever purpose they want, and they don't have to meet any specific goals that are in the national interest in order to do that. So I think that I mean, it's obviously a theme across this administration here. We're gonna ignore congress, do whatever the heck Trump wants.
And in doing so, ironically or maybe not, we're going to create entirely new levels of federal bureaucracy and more committees that did not exist before, all in the name of government efficiency or something. So that brings up this National Energy Dominance Council, and interior secretary Doug Burgum is now the head of this new thing. What the heck is it? So that's another thing that was created by another Trump executive order. And like you
said, it's growing the government. It's creating another council that's gonna hold meetings and do various bureaucratic stuff.
I think part of the thinking here is to more closely integrate the interior department, public lands, and natural resources with national security and global trade type of issues because that helps give them more of a pretext, more of a justification for exploiting and abusing our public lands and our natural resources under the guise of things like national security and defense.
So the EO also directs Burgum as chair of the National Energy Dominance Council to develop a proposal for congress to clarify the treatment of waste rock tailings and mine waste disposal under the Mining Act of 1872. That sounds confusing, but it's pointing to something, kind of obvious. Right? Can you tell us about that and, like, what the what that's all about? Sure. I will give you guys sort of the short version of what is a long story. So for the longest time
actually, okay. Let me I'm gonna go back even further. Let me give you guys the short version of what is a pretty long story. So in The United States, under the mining law of 1872, which still governs mining to this day, anyone can go out and stake a mining claim on national public lands. There's an additional step, though, that you have to do, which is
prove that your claim is valid. You have to show that there are minerals on that claim that are economically recoverable, that it makes sense to actually mine them, and you have to do that in order for your claim to be valid. So for the longest time, mining companies would stake a mining claim and prove that it was valid, but then they would stake more claims and use those to dump the waste from their mining operations on public lands without being forced to show that those other
claims were valid. So they were getting away with something by dumping mine waste on our public lands. There was recently a court decision, which, again, long story short, found that, no. You can't do that anymore. You have to follow what the law says, which is that you have to show that you have a valid mining claim even on lands where you want to dump your mine waste. And it also says that the federal land management agency has to verify that. You can't just take
the company's word for it. So the company has to demonstrate that it's a valid mining claim, and the land manager has to verify that on their own before a company can just use our public lands to dump their mine waste. So and that is referred to as the Rosemont decision as a shorthand. So mining companies don't love this because they don't wanna have to go through all that.
So they are hoping that either the president or congress will come in with a fix for the Rosemont decision that puts them back to the situation they were in before where they can freely dump their mind waste on public lands. And this element of the executive order seems intended to try to do that. And, I mean, this is me possibly being Pollyanna ish, but is this the year then finally with Rosemont that you end up with something resembling 1872 mining reform?
And could it be something that is actually good in some way, puts a a a royalty on hard rock minerals, things like that? Or is that just no chance that congress does this or something along these lines tries to get, like, snuck into reconciliation in a way that would not require bipartisan support? You know, it is just so difficult to speculate now, but we have seen we've seen, for years and years efforts to reform the Mayan law of 1872.
That that's always been an uphill battle. We have seen, as you mentioned, efforts to sneak fixes to Rosemont into things like the National Defense Authorization Act. You must pass legislation where people are trying to offer amendments to sneak things like this through. And so far, those have not been successful. And we have seen standalone just normal legislation to try and address this situation. There was the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, last congress.
So I wouldn't be surprised if we see any number of those types of efforts again. I do think it's interesting that you bring up the opportunity to add a royalty or a leasing system to hard rock minerals similar to that that we already have for oil and gas leasing with the efforts to find ways to get more revenue from our public lands and all of the, DOGE efforts to eliminate waste.
If we were to have a royalty on minerals, that would be a significant new revenue source for the federal government at a time when they are looking around for that and trumpeting their various efforts to profit more off of our national public lands. And I suppose that gets into $33,000,000,000,000 in selling off public lands to eliminate the national debt, but we will, you know, get there in some some other episode.
Back to this mining executive order, it gave secretary Burgum, a whopping ten days to compile a list of all federal lands known to hold mineral deposits and reserves, that was over ten days ago. Do you think we're ever going to see this list? Does it already exist from the USGS? Or, I mean, why put something like that into an executive order? Well, I'm not exactly holding my breath over here that it is gonna be released publicly.
So we've seen other executive orders directing the interior department to come up with other action plans and recommendations and lists, and we have not seen those released publicly. So I'm not holding out hope for this one either. I think what we would see is all of a sudden, there are actions
being taken. Like, you know, one day you wake up and someone has got construction equipment because they're suddenly building their new mine on your public lands where you used to go out and hike on the weekends. That's how we're gonna know what their plans are.
So, finally, the EO directs the secretaries of all federal land management agencies to identify as many sites as possible that may be suitable for mineral production and to enter into extended use leases with private companies for mineral production. That to me sounds like it's saying put mining ahead of all other uses on these on as many sites as possible. Of course, we have the federal land and Management Policy Act, which established the concept of multiple use.
Does this EO essentially, like, run counter to that law that is, in fact, that was passed by Congress that manages our public lands? Well, it certainly tries to, and they say that explicitly. The EO says that where the interior department has identified reserves of minerals under national public lands, that mineral production be made the primary use of those lands.
And you're exactly right. Under enabling legislation like the Federal Land Policy Management Act, which governs use of Bureau of Land Management lands, Congress specifically said that those lands should be managed for multiple use and sustained yield. And as we were saying at the beginning, this this is just an executive order. It's directing agencies to to do stuff, but it is not overriding laws, although they they certainly seem to be wanting to try that.
But they are gonna run into problems when agencies are trying to do things that are against the law. So once again, back to the courts for the Trump administration. Well, I guess we will leave it there today. Rachel Hamby, Center for Western Priorities policy director, thank you as always for being with us. Thanks for having me on. In good news this week, lawmakers in Montana are pushing back against public land sell off bills in their state legislature.
The Montana house killed a resolution that expressed support for Utah's land grab lawsuit, which aimed to force the federal government to give national public lands to the state. While the supreme court refused to hear that lawsuit, the state of Utah could still refile it in federal court. The Montana house also amended a bill to disallow the sale of state trust land after public outcry.
Meanwhile, the Montana senate voted to table a bill that would ask congress to remove protections for all wilderness study areas in Montana. Between these actions and Montana's federal lawmakers standing strong against public land sell off, it's looking like Montana may be emerging as a leader in the fight against privatizing public lands in the West. All the credit to lawmakers from both parties there in Montana for recognizing and listening to voters in their state.
That will do it for us today. As always, you can reach us podcast at westernpriorities.org, and if you haven't already, go subscribe to Look West. That is our daily public lands newsletter. We get up early and read everything, so you don't have to. You get just the highlights, the most important, best, and these days often worse news, about our public lands, and if that's too much for you every day, we also have a monthly newsletter.
We will drop the link to subscribe to all of that in the show notes. Thanks again to Mitch and Rachel for their time, and thank you for listening to The Landscape.