The Administration Is Expanding Hunting and Fishing Access While Gutting the Agency That Makes It Work

A Eulogy with a Hunting and Fishing License Attached

The Department of the Interior just announced the most generous fishing access expansion in history. Too bad they’re also burning down the house.

The Department of the Interior wants you to know it loves hunters and anglers. It loves them so much. The agency announced this week what it’s calling “the largest proposed expansion of hunting and sport fishing opportunities in the history of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service”, more than 1,450 new opportunities across 111 stations in 32 states. Over 92 million acres, or 95% of the National Wildlife Refuge System, are open to hunting. First-ever access at 14 refuges and three hatcheries. Secretary Doug Burgum was practically misty-eyed about the next generation experiencing the outdoors “the same way so many of us did growing up.”

It would be moving if the same administration weren’t simultaneously doing everything in its power to make sure that the future won’t exist.

Let’s do a little accounting.

While Interior was drafting its glowing press release about expanded access, nearly 1,800 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees had already left or been forced out of the agency, an 18% reduction in staff, largely the result of DOGE-driven cuts and Trump administration policies to purge federal workers. The people who manage the refuges you’re now being invited to hunt. The biologists who monitor the populations you’ll be pursuing. The law enforcement officers who keep the whole system honest. Gone, or leaving fast.

“The structures and mechanics to deliver conservation in America took a century to build, and they’re being torn down in a month or two,” said Steve Williams, former USFWS director under George W. Bush, not exactly a man prone to radical environmentalism. What’s being built in their place, apparently, is a very nice press release.

The proposal also rolls back several planned nonlead ammunition and tackle rules. The FWS is proposing to rescind previously finalized nonlead ammo, shot shell, and tackle requirements at nine national wildlife refuges. Those rules were set to take effect Sept. 1, 2026.

And it’s not just the people. The Department of the Interior has repealed the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, eliminating the regulatory requirement that conservation be weighed alongside mining, drilling, timber, and grazing across 245 million acres of public lands. More than 90% of public commenters supported that rule. One in ten westerners gets their drinking water from BLM lands. Irrelevant. Gone.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s Coastal Plain has been reopened to oil and gas leasing. NEPA environmental reviews have been circumvented for energy projects. The Trump administration issued its first proposed rollbacks to Endangered Species Act protections. The administration has also signaled reductions to monuments at Bears Ears, Escalante, and other protected landscapes. Reversing the Western Arctic Special Areas Rule would open more than 13 million acres of intact landscapes to oil and gas leasing and drilling.

So, the offer, laid out plainly, is this: you may fish in the refuge. We are also drilling adjacent to the refuge. The scientists who would tell you whether the fish are okay have been laid off. The regulations that required someone to care about the watershed have been repealed. But please, enjoy your complimentary cast.

This is the conservation equivalent of a restaurant that seats you at a beautiful table, hands you a lovely menu, then informs you the kitchen has been shut down, the health inspector defunded, and the building is being converted to condominiums, but the breadbasket is on the house.

The press release dutifully notes that hunters and anglers contribute more than $144 billion annually to the U.S. economy, that 39.9 million Americans fish, and 14.4 million hunt. These numbers are meant to signal that the administration is for these people, speaking their language, defending their heritage. What the numbers demonstrate is how catastrophically much is at stake, and how reckless it is to expand access to a system you are actively dismantling from the inside.

“What we’re seeing is the start of a trophic cascade for the conservation institution,” said John Organ, retired chief of the USGS Cooperative Research Unit Program. A trophic cascade: when you remove a keystone, everything downstream collapses. The prey species boom without predators. The ecosystem unravels in ways that take decades to repair, if they can be repaired at all.

You can open every acre of every refuge to every angler in America. You can eliminate every regulatory burden between a hunter and the game they’re after. But if the habitat is gone, if the science is gone, if the staff is gone, if the water is fouled and the spawning gravel is choked, and the species that sustained all of this for generations has been quietly delisted on its way out the door, then what you’ve offered isn’t access.

It’s a eulogy with a hunting and fishing license attached.