The Midterm Elections Show Whether the Trump Plan for Public Lands Is Succeeding

Whether public-lands policy becomes an issue in 2026 political races in states with goodly amounts of those lands will say a great deal about their future, because it will tell us whether President Trump’s vigorous assault on them is working.  

This assault takes two forms. One is to industrialize many of these lands through aggressive leasing of their timber and minerals, including fossil fuels. The other is to decimate the budgets and staff of the agencies that manage these lands (the Park Service, Forest Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management) in order to undermine public support for keeping these lands in national ownership, open to all.  

For example, when the strong across-the-political-spectrum opposition mounted last June to Utah Senator Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off a few million acres of public lands attracted an enormous amount of attention, the public lands provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill that President Trump signed into law on July 4 went largely under the radar—even though they require the U.S. to offer fossil fuel leases and logging contracts on many, many more millions of acres of public lands than the Lee proposal would have sold.  

Defenders of public lands will likely try to make protecting them an issue in many races in this election cycle. If their efforts fail to gain much political traction, it is likely a signal that the Trump assault is succeeding.