Inside the Long and Deliberate Collapse of America’s Public-Land Funding

It’s no secret that our federal public-land agencies have been chronically underfunded for decades. But the combined strain of slashed budgets, inflation, and major staffing cuts have been weakening agencies like never before.

Many conservation organizations and public-land watchdogs have been tracking budgets and staff cuts for years at the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service. They warn that cost-cutting measures have only intensified. 

An analysis of federal documents from the last two decades digs into this funding crisis, and begins to illustrate the sharp staff declines during the second Trump administration. This began with DOGE cuts and has continued with major restructuring efforts of the key federal agencies in charge of America’s public lands.

Federal Agency Budgets & Staff Over Time

Here’s a quick look at the numbers, broken down by agency.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Department of Interior)

U.S. Forest Service (Department of Agriculture)

Bureau of Land Management (DOI)

National Park Service (DOI)

Agency Budgets

FY2002 figures are not actual but adjusted against FY2026 to account for inflation. Fire allocation has been separated from the USFS budget.

*USFS data without fire is from FY2025 since it’s unavailable for FY2026.

Agency Staff

Measured by direct civilian full-time equivalent

Note: For our analysis, we used publicly-available data published by the federal government. Because agency budgets are governed by fiscal years rather than calendar years, that’s what we used. We also tracked federal employees by the common metric of Full Time Equivalents. Actual staff headcount and losses can be higher since federal agencies often employ part-time or seasonal workers. Each graph is indexed by percentage, so you can compare relative losses within each agency.

Breaking Down Public-Land Budgets and Staff

USFWS has taken the largest hits to budget and staffing out of all four agencies, with a 26 percent decline in budget (adjusted for inflation) and 27 percent decline in staff since FY2002.

“Staff was already at a critically low number when I was there,” says Martha Williams, the former director of USFWS from 2022 to 2025.” We were struggling to figure out how to meet our statutory responsibilities. We weren’t cutting the good stuff, we were trying to figure out how on earth we could cover what we were required to cover.”

Public-land agencies are federally mandated to fulfill their respective missions, yet they still have to fight for the funding to do so. 

“For me, the hardest and most important part of my job was to try to get money for our agencies so we could run,” says Williams. “You fight for your budget. And I had to fight for my budget with the Interior, through the White House … You gotta fight for your budget even to get into the President’s budget. And then try to have your pieces of the President’s budget survive the appropriations process.”

The federal budget-setting process is complex and political. A simplified breakdown looks something like this: 

Public-land agency leaders (usually appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate) propose their own budgets and submit them to the White House. After internal discussions, the White House issues the president’s proposed budget for the year. That budget goes to Congress, where agency leaders testify in support of it — even when the White House cut what they originally asked for. Eventually, Congress must pass spending bills — or a stopgap continuing resolution — before Oct. 1 every year. Failing that, funding lapses and the government shuts down.

When a president takes office, he inherits the previous president’s budget for most of his first year. For instance, when President Biden took office in 2021, he inherited the budget President Trump’s administration had set through that fall. But agency budgets aren’t just dependent on the party affiliation of the sitting president; they also depend on who controls Congress. During the second half of the Biden administration, Congressional control was divided. So far during the second Trump administration, Republicans have controlled both chambers of Congress. This makes passing a particular agenda much easier.

When the White House released President Trump’s budget in April for fiscal year 2027, which begins Oct. 1, 2026, it included zero funding for USFS research labs and significantly reduced maintenance funding for trails, road, and other infrastructure. While Congress can and often does shore up funding for essential items that are omitted or curbed in the president’s annual budget, this process has its limits, says former U.S. Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell.

“It’s always hard for Congress to lift the budget significantly above the president’s request. I went through that for nine years,” says Tidwell, a career USFS employee who rose through the ranks to ultimately lead the agency from 2009 to 2017. “I was always able to share the trade-offs. I was never asked to say there wouldn’t be impacts from not having this level of funding … I could say, ‘Yeah, it’d be great to ask for more money, but here’s the president’s budget. This is what we can get done with it. This is what will not happen.’”

As maintenance backlogs grow, inflation eats away at budgets, and federal lands go unmanaged, the path for politicians who want to sell public lands becomes easier.

“I think it’s on purpose, right?” says Williams of the deteriorating funding for federal public-land agencies. “They don’t want [our agencies] to work.”

While both Republicans and Democrats could have done a better job prioritizing the budgets of our public-land agencies in recent decades, says American Hunters & Anglers co-chair Land Tawney. And indeed, looking at the graphs above shows squeezed budgets and staff losses across all recent adminsitrations. But, he adds, the second Trump administration has embraced a strategy of deliberate neglect.

“What’s vastly different with this administration is that while we are running up a national debt that’s $40 trillion and counting, they’re trying to basically defund, ultimately dismantle, and divest our public lands,” says Tawney. “That’s reflected in their budgets. The budgets that are being put forward, along with the DOGEing that happened to our public-land employees — that is being done to break the agencies. These aren’t normal cuts. These are drastic cuts.”

A massive restructure of the U.S. Forest Service this year will shutter dozens of research stations across the country and spur a relocation of the agency headquarters to Salt Lake City — away from Washington D.C.’s key players in budget appropriations and political dealmaking. 

“If you want to get rid of an agency, you make it less relevant,” Tidwell said. “[If] people aren’t getting the service they want, they’re going to demand something else.”

Appropriations for next year’s budget (FY2027) have yet to be approved. President Trump signed H.R. 6500 into law on Sept. 2, which extends funding for federal agencies until Dec. 11.

A Crisis on the Ground

Here’s a look at what all those budget and staff cuts mean for each agency and the public lands its employees manage.

US Fish and Wildlife Service

The USFWS has taken the biggest hit to both funding and staff. As Tawney puts it, the agency is “in the emergency room right now.”

• Total USFWS headcount has declined 36 percent since 2024, according to FOIA records.
• The National Wildlife Refuge system has lost more than a fifth of its dedicated staff since January 2025, according to the NWR Association.
• Not a single refuge managed by the USFWS is fully staffed, according to refuge advocacy groups.
• More than half of the country’s more than 570 NWRs have no staff on site at all, reports the NWRA. That means many are closed to the public and are completely unmanaged — even as visitation has surged by 50 percent since 2010.
• Just 204 law enforcement officers currently patrol 850 million acres of refuge lands and waters, according to 2024 data from the NWRA and USFWS. The Chiefs of Police call for at least 1,000. Excluding water, that’s an average of 440,000 acres per officer.
• The U.S. has added 21 new refuges to the system since 2010, even as funding has floundered, according to that same NWRA report.

US Forest Service

• USFS has already lost about 5,900 people or approximately 16 percent of its staff during the second Trump administration. 
• The proposed White House budget plan for FY 2027 would cut the overall number of Forest Service employees from 30,000 to 12,000, or more than half.
• This month 23 research and development facilities “with little to no staffing” were identified for closure. 
• The estimated USFS maintenance backlog alone was more than $8.6 billion as of 2023 and is expected to be higher than that in 2026 — especially if the Roadless Rule is rescinded.

Related: First Came the DOGE Cuts, Then Came the Wildfires

Bureau of Land Management

• BLM staff lost nearly a fifth of staffers during the first year of the second Trump administration.
• The FY 2027 White House budget proposes eliminating more than 2,100 full-time equivalent positions.
• Range land monitoring shows that healthy BLM lands dropped from 72 percent in 2022 to 58 percent in 2024, with future evaluations in doubt due to budget cuts.
• The administration has proposed slashing the oil and gas company lease application fee from $3,100 to $155, which pays for agency staff time and other resources.
• The deferred maintenance and repair needs for BLM lands was valued at $6.27 billion for 2026. That’s a 9.7 percent increase from the previous year.

National Park Service

• The NPS has lost nearly 25 percent of its total workforce – over 4,000 staff – since Jan. 2025, according to NPCA. 
• The FY2027 White House budget proposes eliminating more than 2,900 full-time equivalent staff positions.
• More than 90 NPS sites reported problems like lost revenue and cuts to emergency services thanks to staff and budget shortages, according to internal DOI data reported in one investigation.
• Visitor centers have reduced hours, rangers aren’t educating the public as much, bathrooms have gone uncleaned and unstocked, and parks have lost entrance fee revenue, according to that same Times investigation.
• The estimated NPS maintenance backlog was $24 billion by the end of FY2025.