As Conservation Groups Brace for LWCF ‘Raid,’ Daines and Zinke Pledge to Oppose Changes

On Nov. 9, 2020, less than 90 days after President Donald Trump signed the largest piece of land conservation legislation in a generation into law — a measure that guaranteed full and permanent funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) and included a strategy to clear the backlog of deferred maintenance in national parks and forests — former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt unilaterally imposed restrictions on the spending.

Bernhardt issued his directive under Secretarial Order 3388, hobbling the LWCF just months after the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA) turbocharged the conservation war-chest apparatus in perpetuity. But Bernhardt’s interference came after the president, as well as U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., the key architect of the landmark environmental legislation, enjoyed a groundswell of bipartisan support for their work carrying the GAOA across the finish line, earning plaudits that have reinforced their credibility as conservative conservationists in subsequent election cycles, including Daines’ 2020 defeat of Democratic challenger and former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.

Funded through offshore oil royalties and engineered to support the four main federal land programs (National Parks, National Forests, Fish and Wildlife, and Bureau of Land Management), as well as to provide grants to state and local governments to acquire land for recreation and conservation, LWCF can legally receive up to $900 million in appropriations. But since Congress established the LWCF in 1964, it had only received the full amount twice until 2020. The GAOA erased any question marks from the LWCF funding equation by guaranteeing $900 million per year in perpetuity. In doing so, the legislation seemed to permanently annex the flagship conservation program into America’s public lands legacy.

“The Great American Outdoors Act is a big win for conservation, it’s a big win for jobs, it’s a big win for our Montana way of life, it’s a big win for bipartisanship,” Daines said at the time of the GAOA’s passage. “It’s only fitting it took public lands to bring a divided government together.”

For evidence of the key role Daines played in ushering the GAOA to completion, one need not look further back than January 2020, when Trump in his first term released a budget plan calling for steep cuts to the LWCF and the National Park Service. Three months later, Daines stood on the Capitol lawn announcing the historic GAOA conservation measure dedicating more than $2 billion annually to public lands. He compared the long and arduous journey to secure full funding for LWCF to climbing Granite Peak, Montana’s highest mountain summit.

“As we stand here today the summit is in view and we are going to get on top of this mountain,” Daines said, adding that Trump had given his word that he’d sign off on the bill.

For his part, President Trump even tweeted his support for passing the legislation, calling on Congress to send him a bill that “fully and permanently funds the LWCF and restores our National Parks” while giving Daines and former U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., credit for negotiating the deal.

Still, the success of the GAOA signaled a dramatic change of course for President Trump’s earlier budget plan, revealing the enduring vulnerability of programs like LWCF, which has been targeted by leaders of the movement to winnow down the public lands portfolios in western states. Indeed, unsuccessful bipartisan efforts to permanently fund LWCF had been underway for years before Republicans drummed up support to pass the GAOA during Trump’s first term — including, notably, by former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. And the LWCF only exists in its current form today because of the move to block Bernhardt’s interference by the Biden administration — specifically, that of Secretarial Order 3396, which in February 2021, under newly elected President Joe Biden, reversed Bernhardt’s Secretarial Order 3388.

“These limitations were imposed immediately after Congress dramatically increased the annual funding level of the LWCF to in excess of $900 million,” Acting Secretary of the Interior Scott A. de la Vega wrote in SO 3396. “SO 3388 needlessly inhibits the availability of LWCF funds.”

Since then, the LWCF has been fully funded and uninhibited, and the GOP continues to capitalize on the GAOA’s success. But even though Bernhardt’s eleventh-hour initiative to bridle LWCF spending projects was short-lived, it betrayed a latent strategy to restrict LWCF spending that sportsmen and recreation groups warn may be about to resurface as recent reports suggest the Trump administration is preparing to meddle with the fund again, raising the hackles of the conservation community.

“Everyone’s on edge,” Amy Lindholm, spokesperson for the LWCF Coalition, said in an interview. “President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act into law in 2020 precisely to protect the LWCF funding stream; to ensure that it’s fully intact and also add a separate funding stream for deferred maintenance, which is another critical priority on our public lands. Having that promise of consistent funding has been a game-changer. And as a result of those landscape-level investments, some really amazing projects have been done in Montana.”

In recent years, for example, a fully funded LWCF has provided a critical piece of the funding puzzle for a conservation project to furnish permanent public access across 100,000 acres of private timberland in northwest Montana. Called the Lost Trail Conservation Easement, the project shares nearly seven miles of border with the 7,876-acre U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Lost Trail National Wildlife Refuge, and is the culmination of a partnership between the state and Southern Pine Plantations (SPP), a real estate and timberland investment firm that in late 2019 purchased 630,000 acres of land in northwest Montana from Weyerhaeuser Co., the timber giant that purchased the land from Plum Creek. Initially, news of the SPP acquisition raised concerns among public land users in the region about whether the new owner might subdivide the parcels and sell them off for private development.

In finalizing the conservation easement, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP), as well as SPP and the nonprofit Trust for Public Land (TPL), eased those concerns. With funding coming primarily from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program, which is funded by LWCF dollars, FWP secured the land’s development rights while SPP retained full ownership, harvesting millions of board feet of lumber per year while piping fiber into area mills.

The easement marked one of the most significant conservation achievements in the region in years, setting aside critical wildlife habitat and setting the stage for a series of other conservation easement opportunities on adjacent lands.

Those conservation achievements carried over into 2021 and 2022, when SPP sold 475,000 acres of newly minted Montana inventory to multiple interests, with Green Diamond Resource Company making the largest purchase at 291,000 acres. Those acres fall squarely in the footprint of the Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Easement, a two-phase project totaling 85,792 acres of timberland and fish and wildlife habitat between Kalispell and Libby.

As with the Lost Trail project, FWP would hold the proposed conservation easement, allowing Green Diamond to manage the land as a working forest while precluding development, protecting wildlife habitat, providing permanent free public access, and adding another piece of key landscape connectivity to the checkerboard.

With support from county commissioners in Flathead, Lincoln and Sanders counties, as well as the Montana Wood Products Associations and a diverse coalition of stakeholders, the project’s first phase is approved and underway. The second phase, meanwhile, has garnered a similar degree of support and recently received approval from the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission. The Montana Land Board will vote on final authorization of the project in October.

But ensuring that funding is available to purchase conservation easements is a lynchpin for Lost Trail and the Montana Great Outdoors projects, and with the specter of LWCF cutbacks again rearing its head, Lindholm and other allies are trying to showcase the program’s successes and recognize its champions, while also holding them accountable.

Lindholm said the conservation and recreation communities have been heartened by Daines’ support of public lands, as well as that of U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., who served as Interior Secretary during Trump’s first term. Most recently, Daines and Zinke, as well as U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., and Montana’s other Republican U.S. House Rep. Troy Downing, emerged as a prominent wing of GOP delegates aligned in their opposition to the sale of public lands in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Now, Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are reportedly preparing to shunt LWCF money away from conservation land purchases and toward routine upkeep of federal properties, effectively undermining the program without defunding it. Those renewed efforts to constrain the GAOA are underway just as the 5-year-old legislation’s Legacy Restoration Fund, which established a dedicated line of funding to address critical repair needs in national parks, forests and other public lands, is set to expire at the end of 2025.

The aggregate effect of those developments has put conservation advocates on high alert, and have prompted some groups to mount pressure campaigns on Montana’s delegates to mount another unified front in LWCF’s defense.

Meanwhile, Daines’ America The Beautiful Act, which he recently introduced with U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, as a measure to build on the GAOA’s success by reauthorizing the Legacy Restoration Fund while leveraging public donations to further reduce the maintenance backlog, hangs in the balance awaiting congressional approval.

“Senator Daines has been a great supporter of the [LWCF] program, but he can’t be doing this all day every day,” Lindholm said, describing the trend of some lawmakers defending their conservation successes against the administration’s dragnet efforts to undermine them as unsustainable. “It seems that Congress is having to assert itself constantly to get the administration to do what it wants and that gets tiring, and sooner than later people have to pick their battles.”

For Montana’s delegates, LWCF may be a battle worth picking — but only if the threats actually materializes. According to Lindholm, the rumor mill predicts that another secretarial order could drop at any moment, and there’s plenty of evidence proving the conservation community’s concerns aren’t unfounded.

In May, Trump’s Interior Department proposed that “instead of adding more land and infrastructure to the federal government’s already bloated real property portfolio,” hundreds of millions of dollars should be rerouted away from new land acquisition to cover current maintenance costs. That budget plan was rejected under bipartisan leadership in the House and Senate appropriations committees in recent legislative discussions, but Democrats warn that it underscores the administration’s appetite for testing of federal funding powers.

“The Trump Administration is now blatantly defying the law by failing to provide Congress with detailed spending plans or timelines on Land and Water Conservation Fund projects,” U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, said in a statement. “It should outrage all of us who care about protecting and preserving our public lands.”

Changes to funding public land acquisitions have some support in Congress, including from U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who argues the federal government is unable to maintain its current inventory of federal land and pushed this year to sell millions of acres of public lands to make way for necessary housing development.

But overall, the success of LWCF speaks for itself, and its bipartisan support remains intact. Critics of the changes say tinkering with LWCF’s funding streams amounts to a strategy that’s anathema to reining in government bloat.

“Ironically, it’s the most inefficient way to run government,” Lindholm said. “We already have a program that is efficient. Just let it work.”

But with LWCF funding in a holding pattern, conservationists like Lindholm worry that projects will falter as some private landholders — whose land the LWCF would purchase — may choose to sell to other buyers, including those who would commercially develop the land.

“When these parcels come on the market, which is a once in a generation opportunity, you have to be competitive with developers who want to build a McMansion on that property,” Lindholm said. “We thought that the GAOA was the perfect elegant solution to both of those problems, and it was and it is and it has worked spectacularly for the last five years. The conservation successes have been untold. Why would anyone want to change it?”

Not Daines, according to a spokesperson from his office, who noted that the Republican lawmaker has fought in support of LWCF for more than a decade, and its success has become a defining through-line to his political conservation legacy.

“Senator Daines strongly supports LWCF and fought hard for its permanent authorization and full funding,” according to the spokesperson. “He will oppose any changes that weaken the good work of the program to expand hunting, fishing and recreational access to our public lands.”

Nor Zinke, according to a spokesperson from his office, who emphasized that the congressman from Whitefish voted for and helped write the 2026 Interior Appropriations Funding Bill “that did not include the changes the Trump administration proposed.”

“Congressman Zinke’s record on LWCF and the Great American Outdoors Act has been crystal clear, and that of unwavering support,” according to the spokesperson. “In Montana, GAOA has helped Yellowstone recover from the historic 2022 flood and Glacier is rebuilding miles of roadways and bridges. LWCF has allowed Montanans to unlock isolated public lands and swap parcels to resolve checker-boarding. Zinke has long been an advocate of modernizing the program by diversifying the funding sources to include renewables and focusing acquisitions on improving access to high quality sportsmen and recreation areas.”

Still, with Secretary Burgum’s order diverting $387 million in LWCF funds away from projects to expand public access for hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation, the conservation community recently launched a campaign blitz in support of the program, as well as to expose what they call its flawed logic.

“This move would be a lose-lose for public lands in Montana and across the country that owe their existence to LWCF,” Marne Hayes, executive director of Business for Montana’s Outdoors, said. “Taking $300 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund won’t help fix a public land maintenance backlog that tops out over $40 billion, but it will jeopardize the public access that Montana’s economy depends on. Our public lands are a treasure that drives tourism, supports local businesses, and enriches our communities – we can’t afford to let this administration tear them down.” 

Aubrey Bertram, Wild Montana’s staff attorney and federal policy director, said the Burgum proposal amounts to “stealing money that Congress set aside to acquire new public lands for Americans to enjoy.”

“Here’s an idea: If Burgum and his buddies care about keeping national public lands accessible and maintained, they should restore the maintenance budgets they slashed and stop firing the people who take care of them,” Bertram said. “The administration’s reckless slash-and-burn policies have made the public lands maintenance crisis ten times worse.”

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