Jun. 23—Inside the Western Governors’ Association meeting, being held in Santa Fe this week at the invitation of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, the talk from the five Trump administration officials present was all about deregulation — from artificial intelligence to nuclear power to forest lands — and how it would not only solve the problem of climate change, but put America ahead of her competitors to dominate energy markets for years to come. But outside, over 1,000 protestors were drawn to the venue because of a Senate proposal to deregulate in another way — to sell millions of acres of public land managed by the Interior and Agriculture departments in Western states.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum focused on energy dominance and deregulation in his address to the Western Governors’ Association (WGA) in Santa Fe Monday. “We just eliminated a bunch of regulation in the nuclear industry. … In the four weeks since those (executive orders) got signed, over $1 billion of new capital has flown into startups and companies that have been working on advancements around fission and fusion,” Burgum said. “… The existential threat that we are facing is not 1 or 2 degrees of climate change in 2100, because we’ll solve all that, and we’ll solve all that in the next decade or two by the innovation that will be provided if we can cut the red tape and have enough energy to drive AI and have enough energy to sell to our friends and allies so they can stop buying from our adversaries.”
And Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced during the meeting her department plans to repeal a Clinton-era rule that bans building new roads in large swathes of national forest.
Protests
A few hours later, an estimated 1,500 people filled W. San Francisco Street in front of the Eldorado Hotel, chanting “Not for sale,” and brandishing signs with phrases like “Lose the wild, lose ourselves,” protesting a budget bill amendment from Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, that would require the sale of 2 to 3 million acres of federally owned public land. The proposal could make 6.4 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land and 7.8 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land eligible for sale in New Mexico. That includes places like Forest Service lands east of Sandia Crest, land between Santuario de Chimayó and Santa Cruz Lake or the La Queva Trail System in Eddy County.
“What really concerns me is the fact that this is not going to be the end,” said protestor Lauren Leib, a BLM employee and chapter president of National Treasurer Employees Union, chapter 340. “This is just the beginning of basically the wholesale privatization of our public lands.”
Burgum’s original speaking time was swapped with Education Secretary Linda McMahon, so protests of both officials occurred while the other was speaking. The schedule change was not related to the protests, according to WGA spokesperson Jack Spina.
During a Monday morning news conference before the official start of the Western Governors Association meeting, host Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham described the possible public land sales as “problematic.”
“We should have the opportunities to craft policies that are state-centric,” Lujan Grisham said, adding that legislation dealing with public lands could be included in the agenda for a possible legislative special session later this year.
Republican governors also expressed a preference for state-level decision making authority, though Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon said a checkerboard of land ownership can complicate land-use decisions.
Cutting environmental regulation
The rule Rollins announced a repeal of, the Roadless Rule, went into effect in 2001 and prohibits road construction, reconstruction and timber harvest on nearly 59 million acres of National Forest land.
“This misguided rule prohibits the Forest Service from thinning and cutting trees to prevent wildfires, and when fires start, the rule limits our firefighters’ access to quickly put them out,” Rollins said.
During his first term, President Donald Trump’s administration removed Roadless Rule protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, which the Biden administration subsequently restored. Tongass National Forest was also exempted from the Roadless Rule under former Republican President George W. Bush’s administration, but that was ruled illegal by a federal court.
“The roadless rule is one of the most significant and popular conservation achievements in the history of the United States,” Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited, said in a statement. “It protects drinking water supplies, fish and wildlife habitat, and hunting and angling opportunities.”
Rollins indicated that more environmental regulations could be the target for elimination.
“The Endangered Species Act has been, in many ways, a real problem for a lot of industries in America,” Rollins said, “… some real and significant reform needs to occur with the Endangered Species Act.”
Firefighting
Finally, rounding out a busy news day, in a question and answer session with governors Burgum said a plan to consolidate the federal wildland firefighting services into one entity will likely have a structure in place by the 2026 fire season. At present, Interior and Agriculture have separate wildfire firefighting teams that often work together. Firefighting resources will operate under the existing structure for the current fire season.
Regional and local teams and firefighting resources will still exist under the new centralized system, but the plan is to make management decisions more quickly with one firefighting entity in charge, according to Burgum.
Journal writers Dan Boyd and Kylee Howard contributed to this report.