The Great Outdoors are what make Michigan special. Our state is home to more than eight million acres of publicly owned land, 103 state parks, six national parks, and thousands of local parks and recreation areas — but our public lands in Michigan and across the country are at risk.
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress attempted to include a public lands sale in the reconciliation bill they coined the “Big Beautiful Bill.” While that attempt to sell off public lands was thwarted, the reconciliation bill was still one of the biggest attacks on public lands in history because of the wide expansions for drilling, mining, and logging on public lands across the country.
Through the Big Ugly Bill, other legislation, and executive orders, the Trump administration has:
- Opened up large areas of land to oil and gas leasing on federal lands
- Ramped up offshore drilling and deep-sea mining (this is major — no deep-sea mining is happening anywhere else in the world)
- Expanded logging in millions of acres of forests and rolled back the Roadless Rule, which protects forests from logging and roadbuilding
- Weakened protections for National Monuments
- Gutted the National Park Service and other land management agencies — firing over 2,000 career staff at the Department of Interior, major reorganization of the Department of Agriculture (including U.S. Forest Service), proposing a 2026 budget that cuts funding to land management agencies by more than a third, and advancing a bill that cuts funding to land management agencies ($213 million cut from National Park Service and $61 million cut from Department of Interior)
- And the attacks continue to roll in
For the sake of our environment, our health, affordable access to outdoor recreation, and to preserve the beautiful natural spaces in our state and across the country — we must band together to keep public lands in public hands.
