LWCF Funding Highlights Republican Hypocrisy Outdoors

Reports that DOI plans to steal congressionally-mandated public lands funding is latest in multi-decade effort to defund public lands, then greenwash the messaging

A report in the Washington Post reveals that the Department of the Interior is “seeking to divert” $276.1 million of the Land and Water Conservation Fund’s $900 million annual budget to other projects. According to senators, this would be an illegal misuse of congressionally-appropriated funding. And, it’s just the latest effort by Republicans to turn LWCF from a critical source of funding for public lands into a little more than a tool in their wider campaign of disinformation.

If you’ve ever parked at a trailhead or put in at a fishing access site, you’ve likely benefited from LWCF. Established in 1965 for the purpose of ensuring access to outdoor recreation for all Americans, LWCF uses fees assessed on offshore oil and gas drilling to fund the acquisition of new public land, conservation grant programs, and the construction and maintenance of recreation facilities like parks, playgrounds, swimming areas, and trailheads.

In its 60-year history, LWCF has funded more than 46,000 access projects across every single county in the country. A recent highlight was the $100 million purchase of a 640-acre plot of formerly-private land locked inside Grand Teton National Park. Instead of serving as luxury real estate, that land is now open to the public, and serves as a vital migration corridor for antelope, elk, and mule deer.

You’d think that using a very small portion of offshore drilling royalties to improve public access to the outdoors would be utterly uncontroversial, and draw broad consensus across political lines. Of course, it’s anything but.

Congress established a target funding level for the program in 1978, and set that amount at $900 million annually. Since that time, the price of oil has outpaced inflation, but that funding target has remained at the same dollar amount. $900 million today would only have been worth $175 million in 1978. So even when LWCF funds are fully appropriated, they are able to do less and less work each year.

But Congress has historically failed to appropriate even that $900 million in oil and gas royalties to LWCF. Between 1978 and 2020, it only did so twice, with average appropriations across that time period coming out to only $450 million annually.

Fixing that is something Republicans made much noise about when they passed the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020. That bill mandated full funding of LWCF, but did nothing to correct its budget for inflation. The bill’s sponsor, Steve Daines (R-Montana), successfully defeated a challenger from three-time Montana Governor Steve Bullock, largely using GAOA as an effective campaign tool.

LWCF contains a specific provision that its funds must be used for access programs, not maintenance. But, as agency budgets have been slashed across the last five decades of modern Republican politics, maintenance on public lands has been neglected, creating massive, multi-billion dollar backlogs.

Another provision in GAOA sough to fix that by establishing the Legacy Restoration Fund, which was given $9.5 billion to spend on that maintenance backlog over five years.

As I explained back in May, that sum was so laughably insufficient that it’s actually caused maintenance backlogs to balloon. In the National Park Service, for instance, the backlog in 2020 was $14.37 billion. According to Republicans’ own math, that $23.26 billion.

Since the Post is reporting on leaked information, we don’t have any official information on why or how DOI plans to divert LWCF money to maintenance. And, under Trump, that agency no longer responds to inquiries from the press.

Assuming Interior Secretary Burgum and his minions are engaged in an intellectually honest effort to use their funding to best serve the American people (spoiler alert: they’re not), they’re not wrong to identify that public lands maintenance is in need of more money. The big issue there is simply with the amount being diverted. $276 million only represents 0.7 percent of the total maintenance backlog across all federally-managed public lands. It’s only 15 percent of the amount the backlog is growing by in national parks alone each year.

So this money won’t make a dent in maintenance. That’s doubly an issue, because, as Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) explained to the Post, this use of appropriated money is against the law.

“It’s illegal to spend LWCF funds on maintenance and they know it,” the Senator stated. "If they move forward, they will be sued and they will lose. It’s not too much to ask to follow the law.”

LRF funding is set to end this year, something Daines is hoping to correct with a new bill, the America The Beautiful Act, which will likely also be his primary campaign tool as the Senator runs for re-election next year. While he says he hopes to increase the budget for addressing maintenance backlogs through it, that amount also falls vastly behind inflation, so it will actually create a net reduction in efforts to address backlogs, growing them further.

It’s possible that, as Daines and other Republicans seek to burnish their image with America The Beautiful, they may also use the bill to correct DOI’s illegal misappropriation of LWCF money, then add that to their campaign messaging.

But beyond naked politics, it’s hard to identify a real purpose here. Given the vast nature of America’s unique system of public lands, and the amounts of money it takes to manage all of it, $276 million just isn’t a hugely significant sum. At best, this is simple mismanagement that will result in missed opportunities for fostering public access, and cost taxpayers the money it will take to litigate all this in court. At worst, it’s likely just another attempt to break our public lands system, then point to the resulting mess as justification for privatized operations or a sell-off. For you and I, it’s one more reason to fight to regain control of Congress in the mid-terms.

Top photo: USFS

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