Budget Cuts for Public Lands and Waters

Image: Patrick Hendry

Appropriations, the process of funding the government agencies including the Department of Interior, the Forest Service, and other public land managers, is a reasonable metric for how functional Congress is. We’ve written before about the way appropriations is “supposed” to go, which is a year-long process that includes hearings, a “symbolic” budget from the President, and then wraps up in September with a vote on funding levels for the government for the following year.

This March—halfway through the current fiscal year—Congress just passed appropriations bills, so late that the process is already intersecting with the process for next year.

Before diving in further, we acknowledge that while appropriations is not always the most exciting topic, it does have a huge impact on our public lands and waters, and our experiences outside. Adequate funding is crucial for things like staffing, processing permits and reservations, opening trailheads and other access points, trail maintenance, restoration, climate resilience, and more. As outdoor recreation participation increases, land managers need more resources—not less—to sustainably care for our public lands.

Congress just passed half of the spending bills for FY24, including the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies bill that funds public lands and waters (Congress appears poised to pass the remainder of the spending bills before their March 22nd deadline, but at the time of this writing we aren't fully out of the woods on a possible partial government shutdown). These bills include significant cuts for most of the public lands programs, in part due to spending caps agreed to last summer in the negotiations over the debt limit. They also include a $94 million recission from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. At the Forest Service, non-fire accounts will see a $157.22 million cut, with significant cuts for recreation and forest planning, flat funding for trails; on the positive side, they will maintain a firefighter pay increase that’s very important. The BLM got an overall $81M reduction to its budget, including cuts for their Recreation Resources Management Program and to National Conservation Lands. The Park Service has a $150M cut, including in overall operations and for National Recreation and Preservation.

Despite these significant budget cuts, the process could have gone far worse. Last summer, the House proposed even bigger cuts and a slew of bad policy riders, including a bad mining bill, reversing progress on climate change, and undoing protections for public lands. The earlier attempts to pass appropriations bills resulted in repeated threats of government shutdowns, unacceptable policy riders, and the ousting of then-House Speaker McCarthy. So while the cuts for FY24 aren’t great, the outcome could have been much worse.

Meanwhile, the President has just released his budget for FY25, which proposes investments in outdoor recreation and conservation funding that would move public lands spending in the right direction. We expect that once the FY24 process is done, the House and Senate appropriations committees will move directly into FY25 and will be releasing draft bills and holding hearings over the next several months. We will be tracking this process, advocating for outdoor recreation, climate, and conservation for FY25 appropriations, and will be asking you to reach out to your lawmakers to ask them to fund public lands and waters.

This post was co-written by Jamie Ervin and Tania Lown-Hecht.