Sportsmen Are Their Own Worst Enemies

“Wildlife management” Alaska style

The Trump administration has pursued an aggressive agenda to sell off or open public lands for resource extraction. In 2025, as part of a legislative package pushed by Trump, the House approved an amendment to hawk half a million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management. (After public outcry, the provision was cut from the final bill.)

While Trump’s efforts to unload such large blocks of public land have yet to move beyond the proposal phase, he has stripped protections for millions of acres and increased leases for logging, mining and fossil-fuel extraction, destroying fish and wildlife habitat in the process.

Examples:

1. Trump signed an executive order that established a task force to survey public lands for housing developments.

2. Trump emasculated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by issuing directives to fast-track oil, gas, and mining projects on public lands, allowing federal agencies to bypass key NEPA safeguards, including public participation and environmental review. Americans were muzzled from commenting on many projects that affect their lands and their resources, including fish and wildlife.

3. Trump rescinded the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) regulations, further weakening NEPA by allowing federal agencies instead of CEQ to okay categorical exclusions of NEPA requirements.

4. Trump weakened NEPA still further by imposing strict deadlines and page limits on environmental reviews.

5. The Roadless Rule protected 58.5 million acres of roadless areas in national forests -- only 30.3 percent of the 193 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service. On June 23, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Trump’s decision to abolish the rule. The Administrative Procedure Act requires a rulemaking process entailing notice in The Federal Register and a public comment period. And NEPA requires the Forest Service to review all comments and demonstrate that it has considered them in its final decision. The public comment period ended September 19, with 99 percent of the responses opposed. Ignoring the American public, Trump is pressing on with rescission. The Roadless Rule is supported by most sportsmen and most sportsmen’s groups.

6. Trump’s planned rescission of the Roadless Rule would remove protections from 58.5 million acres, opening them up for mining and fossil fuel extraction.

7. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order removing regulatory barriers that had protected the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) from oil and gas development, part of his broader “Unleashing American Energy” initiative.

8. Trump prevailed on Congress to pass a law that requires at least four leases for oil and gas sales in ANWR and creates spending cuts and tax incentives that encourage development.

Flip Flops

Sportsmen are expressing astonishment and outrage. But without their support, Trump would never have been elected president the first time.

If sportsmen had read newspapers instead of hook-and-bullet rags, they’d have understood that state seizure of public lands was a plank in the GOP platform and that state lands get sold off or reserved for extractive industry.

As a condition for entering the union, most Western states agreed to disclaim all rights to unappropriated public lands. In exchange, the federal government gave them “trust lands” with which to generate revenue through sale and development. So far, Utah has sold off 4.1 million acres of its trust lands, New Mexico 4 million, Montana 800,000, Idaho 1.5 million, Colorado 1.7 million, Arizona 1.8 million. Of the 4 million acres given to Nevada, only 2,914 acres remain.

In a Petersen’s Hunting piece entitled “Why Sportsmen Should Vote for Donald Trump,” the magazine’s editor revealed his euphoria on meeting Trump: “My heart started to pound, my breath coming in short gulps.”

A group calling itself “Sportsmen for Trump” offered this: “Mr. Trump is the only candidate that will represent our values.”

And this effusion from Outdoorhub on Trump’s first inauguration: “We as hunters, anglers and Americans can chalk this day up as a win for our sport.”

One might suppose that the state wildlife professionals who belong to the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies would work for the best interests of the hunters and anglers who pay their salaries. Instead, the Association led the successful charge against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s rule that reasserted federal management of the American public’s 73 million acres of national wildlife refuges in Alaska. Necessitating this rule was Alaska’s attempt to convert both federal and state lands to a vast Stop & Shop for moose and caribou meat by killing off bears and wolves.

Traditionally, the Fish and Wildlife Service has allowed states to manage most wildlife on national wildlife refuges, but things got so out of hand in Alaska that the Service had to protect the American public’s wildlife from the state’s 1920s-style predator jihad. As then Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe wrote in the Huffington Post: “The Alaska Board of Game has unleashed a withering attack on bears and wolves that is wholly at odds with America’s long tradition of ethical, sportsmanlike, fair-chase hunting. … There comes a time when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must stand up for the authorities and principles that underpin our work and say, ‘no.’”

That thinking doesn’t compute with Congress or Trump. Trump signed legislation repealing the Service’s Refuge Rule, thereby opening public lands in Alaska to shooting grizzly and brown bears over bait, shooting mother bears and their cubs, shooting bears and wolves from planes, and dispatching wolves and wolf pups in their dens. (These extreme predator control methods are currently under review and subject to litigation. But so far, they don’t happen on most national wildlife refuges in Alaska.)

When the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies attacked the Fish and Wildlife Service for standing up for Alaskan wildlife that belongs to all Americans, it was joined by the Pope and Young Club, Quail Forever, Orion the Hunters Institute, Pheasants Forever, Wild Sheep Foundation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Boone and Crockett Club, Ducks Unlimited, Quality Deer Management Association, Safari Club International, National Rifle Association, Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, National Shooting Sports Foundation and Mule Deer Foundation, to mention just a few.

The hypocrisy was mind-boggling. Each one of these outfits had previously and repeatedly issued strident, pious statements about why public lands should always remain in public hands.

More Self-Destruction

When Burt Carey was president of Western Outdoor Writers and editor of Rocky Mountain Game & Fish, California Game & Fish, and Washington-Oregon Game & Fish magazines, he excoriated the Roadless Rule, which had been implemented by the Clinton administration. He complained about what he called “the Clinton administration’s thirst for creating wilderness and de facto wilderness [roadless areas] during Slick Willy’s second term, and his zeal in repopulating the American West with wolves, lynx, grizzlies and other carnivores, and portions of the Southeast with wolves and panthers.”

According to Jim Shepherd, editor of The Outdoor Wire, the (now failed) effort to limit roads on public land was really a plot by the antis. “To keep hunting alive in America,” wrote Shepherd, “it’s critical that hunting become easier, rather than more challenging. Anti-hunting forces recognize that fact. They’ve already changed their tactics from their failed full-on assault on firearms to a ‘kinder, gentler’ approach to eliminating hunting: protecting the environment by increasing ‘protected’ wilderness areas. As more and more federal lands fall under the ever-broadening definitions of ‘protected’ areas, hunters and the hunting industry must recognize the fact that what some perceive to be diminished efforts to eliminate hunting is, in fact, a retrenching of the efforts to a more subtle but equally fatal outcome.”

When Trump liberalized catch limits on depleted fish stocks, overruling science-based decisions by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the Recreational Fishing Alliance declared: “The days of the environmental zealots running the show are, for the most part, over. We are excited about the Trump administration’s new attitude towards fishery management.” Translation: More dead fish for us now, and the hell with natural recruitment.

With “friends” like the organizations, publications and talking heads that “educate” hunters and anglers, we don’t need enemies.

Ted Williams, a lifelong hunter and angler, was an information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. He serves on the Circle of Chiefs of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.