The widely celebrated Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) looks a little different after the Department of Interior issued a new secretarial order on September 4. Titled S.O. 3442, the directive changes the structural makeup of the popular federal program and, according to sporting and conservation groups, undermines something that was once considered a huge conservation win for the first Trump presidency: the Great American Outdoors Act.
The LWCF was established in 1964 and draws on offshore oil and gas royalties to fund conservation projects and the purchase of new federal public lands. Since its inception, the LWCF has only been funded to capacity twice—that is, until President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA) into law in 2020, guaranteeing that the LWCF would remain fully funded to $900 million in perpetuity.
This move was highly popular across the outdoors community at the time. But since the GAOA passed, the scope and applicability of the LWCF has become something of a whittling stick for President Trump’s roster of Interior secretaries.
First, Secretary David Bernhardt attempted to restrict the use of funds through Secretarial Order 3388 just a few months after President Trump greenlit the GAOA. (Interior Secretary Scott de la Vega later reversed S.O. 3388 under the Biden administration.) Now, through a variety of mechanisms, Secretary Doug Burgum’s S.O. 3442 creates new boundaries for the use of LWCF funds once again.
As Backcountry Hunters and Anglers points out in a recent press release, the order will allow states to use LWCF dollars to purchase federal lands. In other words, states can now use federal funds, allocated via offshore oil and gas royalties, to transfer federal land to state ownership. “This Order does more than shut the door on good projects,” said Devin O’Dea, Western Policy & Conservation Manager at BHA. “It opens up a pathway to public-land transfers. Allowing LWCF dollars to be used by states to acquire so-called ‘surplus’ federal lands is a dangerous precedent that undermines the very purpose of this bipartisan program.”
The order also requires that new federal lands purchased with LWCF dollars go primarily to the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This would sideline LWCF-funded projects on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and prevent the agency from purchasing new parcels with LWCF dollars. That's notable for hunters and anglers because BLM lands often provide more expanded hunting and fishing access than US Fish and Wildlife lands—were hunting is tightly regulated—or NPS lands—where hunting is typically prohibited outright.
“For generations, LWCF has been the cornerstone of conservation and access, delivering projects that protect migration corridors, open up hunting and fishing opportunities, and strengthen local economies,” said Chris Borgatti, Eastern Policy & Conservation Manager at BHA. “This order undermines that legacy by substituting politics for sound policy. If allowed to stand, it will choke off high-priority projects across the country and could even pave the way for selling off federal lands. That’s not what LWCF was created for, and it’s not what Americans expect from our nation’s most successful conservation program.”
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BHA and other groups, like the LWCF Coalition, are calling Burgum's order an attack on the LWCF and are imploring the administration to reverse course. "[The Secretarial Order] does real damage," Amy Lindholm, a spokesperson for the LWCF Coalition, told Montana's Flathead Beacon. "It hinders critical conservation and public access by reviving previously rejected ideas [and] severely restricting Bureau of Land Management’s protection priorities for sportsmen and other outdoor recreationists... It’s not just a policy mistake—it’s a betrayal of the values that the Great American Outdoors Act represents."
