What wildlifers might expect from presidential candidates on conservation

As we near Election Day next week in uncertain times, one thing is certain—there will be a new administration and new policies that affect wildlife, their habitats and wildlifers. TWS attempted to reach both presidential campaigns with questions on key conservation issues, but received no response from either.

We reached out to Outdoor Life Hunting and Conservation editor and TWS member Andrew McKean who recently published a comprehensive three-part series on the upcoming presidential election. While the original series, which can be found here, covers a broad swath of issues related to the outdoors and opinions from several conservation leaders, TWS asked the author to compile the part of his reporting on the most salient issues to the wildlife profession.

Though not an official TWS position or product, we appreciate the extra focus that these community discussions place on wildlife and hope you find this helpful as we approach Election Day next Tuesday, Nov. 5. Regardless of who you vote for, we hope that all members get out and vote.

The following is a Guest Editorial by Andrew McKean.

As the drum-tight race for president enters its final days, campaigns are naturally focused on issues that mobilize most American voters—immigration, reproductive rights, the economy.

But in the 100 days that Democrat Kamala Harris has been campaigning and two years that Republican Donald Trump has been an announced candidate, there’s been little discussion about secondary issues, including the environment, climate change, public-land management or even priorities for Cabinet-level agencies such as Interior and Agriculture.

Given the dearth of detailed information from the campaigns, I queried conservation leaders about their expectations of how a second Trump administration or a first Harris administration might differ in three key areas: conservation policies, public-land management and administrative style.

Conservation policy priorities

The conservation community has drafted a set of recommendations circulated to both campaigns. Wildlife for the 21^st Century details policy priorities from the American Wildlife Conservation Partners, a collection of 52 organizations including The Wildlife Society that outline both executive and legislative branch initiatives. According to AWCP leaders, neither presidential hopeful has incorporated its recommendations in campaign messaging.

Linear comparisons of the candidates are complicated because Vice President Harris has distanced herself from the Biden administration without offering clear guidance on how to judge many of her policy positions. Trump has the advantage of a first administration that offers some insights into his priorities, but it’s important to note that any comparisons or contrasts are speculative, and many sources have suggested that a second Trump administration, unconstrained by re-election, might pursue norm-bending policies, further frustrating clear forecasting.

But overall, sources expect a second Trump administration to favor hunting, angling and traditional uses of federal lands, to remove federal protections of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) in the Lower 48 and gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the Great Lakes region, and to remove the United States from international climate treaties. A Trump administration would likely de-emphasize both public and private conservation easements, would be unlikely to use the Antiquities Act to protect landscapes, and would likely de-emphasize tribal co-management of public land.

“I’d expect that we’ll have a return to core hunt and fish policies under a second Trump administration,” said the CEO of a wildlife-conservation organization who offered his perspectives with the agreement that his name and the name of his organization wouldn’t be disclosed. As a nonprofit, the CEO’s group is constrained from appearing to influence political candidates.

The source cited the Trump administration’s first Hunt Fish Rule for recreational management of National Wildlife Refuges. The rule expanded hunting and fishing opportunities on some 2.3 million acres on 138 national wildlife refuges. While the opportunities were not always for high-priority species or landscapes, the rule showed “Trump’s orientation generally for sportsmen and access.”

Trump also signed the Great American Outdoors Act, which earmarked about $10 billion for public-land infrastructure projects. The law also permanently authorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a perennial goal of public-land advocates. Ryan Zinke, Trump’s first Interior Secretary, signed Secretarial Order 3362, which for the first time focused state and federal agency resources and attention on western big-game migration corridors.

But conservation gains in the Trump administration were largely offset by policies that commodified natural resources and industrialized landscapes. While Zinke’s secretarial order aimed to identify and conserve big-game winter range and the ancestral routes that wildlife travel to reach it, the first Trump administration ramped up the pace and scale of energy development, especially on public lands in the West. America’s oil and gas output hit historic highs during Trump’s first administration, as he pursued a policy of “energy dominance.”

Some critics think he went too far, and that a subsequent Trump administration would favor energy development over other multiple uses of public land, including recreation. His “drill-baby-drill” drumbeat combined with rollbacks of environmental standards and dismantling regulations ignored market preferences for renewable energy and electric vehicles and public support for world-leading environmental standards, especially those that reduce the impacts of climate change.

While Harris has been consistent about not being judged by the policies of the Biden administration, it’s hard to imagine that her administration would deviate from some of its core conservation directions, including the idea that public lands are engines for climate recovery and resiliency and social-justice reconciliation.

One source outlined the differences between the first Trump administration and the Biden administration.

Under Biden, “we got climate policy instead of hunting-and-fishing policy, we got tribal co-management of public lands instead of reinvesting in infrastructure of the BLM and the National Wildlife Refuge System, and we got policies built around biodiversity and social justice instead of wildlife habitat and public access.”

With just three weeks remaining in the campaign, and maybe recognizing the electoral power of hunters and anglers in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, the Harris-Walz campaign launched Hunters & Anglers for Harris-Walz. The specific priorities articulated on the coalition’s website include “conserving our wild places, expanding outdoor opportunities, and protecting the Second Amendment.”

But those are pretty thin and unsurprising policy prescriptions that don’t give much guidance to how conservationists might expect Harris to govern. Most observers expect a Harris administration to retain America’s enrollment in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord and to continue the Biden administration’s pursuit of the goals of the 30×30 initiative, which aims to protect biodiversity on 30% of cooperating nations’ land by the year 2030 in order to preserve and promote biodiversity. Under Biden’s Interior Department, those goals were delivered under the America the Beautiful initiative that focused restoration and conservation grants to restore and connect habitats.

Energy policy is likely to influence either administration’s conservation policy. Trump has aggressively pursued fossil-fuel extraction as an antidote to spiking inflation, while either denying or minimizing the link between human-caused greenhouse gases and climate vagaries. Meanwhile, Harris has broadly supported investments in clean energy, including stricter regulations on power plants. But neither candidate has articulated a post-oil future, and given the global trends toward electric vehicles, renewable energy and digital technology—and the searing weather events attributed to climate change—that seems an oversight.

Under a second Trump administration, programs like conservation easements might slow or stop. The first Trump administration, “did not want to do anything on private-lands conservation as they wanted as many acres in crop production as they could get,” said a conservation leader active in agricultural policy. “Farmers are experiencing some of the toughest market conditions we’ve seen in decades, and a Farm Bill is critical to providing some degree of certainty to producers, and it will be interesting to see how various conservation programs, such as CRP, would be implemented in a second Trump administration.”

Public land management

There’s a narrative that another President Trump administration would drill, mine and sell our national estate. That’s probably too extreme. Trump’s administration would likely also make federal lands more accessible for recreationists, expanding roaded areas and opposing protections for critical landscapes that tend to limit multiple use. Sources cite Wyoming’s Rock Springs Resource Management Plan as an example of a Biden-administration plan that balances either conservation or development in its alternatives that is likely to be killed by an extraction-oriented Trump administration.

Under a Trump Interior Department, “I think some of the first actions will be gutting the [BLM’s] Public Lands Rule, the Rock Springs RMP, potentially allowing old-growth [timber harvest], [easing angler restrictions around] right whales, and cutting the lead bans and phase-outs,” observed a conservation leader who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Under a Harris administration, public-land management would lean heavily toward biodiversity, climate change and tribal co-management in pursuit of engineering social justice.

“I think you’d see continued expansion of solar and wild development, potentially in unfragmented sage-steppe and grassland ecosystems,” on public land, said the conservation leader. “I think you’d see additional closures of BLM and Forest Service lands for recreational shooting. But, depending on the makeup of Congress, there could be significant investments in conservation.”

Whether there might be another once-in-a-generation funding effort like that culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act and Biden-administration Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is anyone’s guess. But both those acts, while they drained the federal Treasury, invested heavily in habitat, stewardship, and public-resource infrastructure.

Well beyond public-land management philosophy, the candidates differ on the very ownership of federal land.

Both candidates have suggested one remedy for the nation’s affordable housing crisis is to sell parcels of federal land for housing development. But to public-land advocates, one of the most troubling recent trends in the West is a resurgent effort to transfer federal lands to state management.

Many western Republicans have called for wholesale transfer of federal lands in their states. While the Trump campaign has distanced itself from this resurgent Sagebrush Rebel, the GOP’s party platform in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho are clear: they would get rid of federal land in their states. And in the West, the Republican Party is squarely the party of Trump, giving these platforms added emphasis. Adding to the emergence of this issue, the Supreme Court in its next term may agree to hear a landmark case on who owns western public lands.

But federal lands would likely be developed under a Harris administration, too, though Democrats haven’t articulated or supported plans to sell federal lands in the West.

The Biden administration aggressively pursued policies that promoted renewable energy development on public land, especially large tracts in the American’s Southwest. The BLMs Western Solar Plan details a “roadmap” for renewable energy development on fragile lands, mainly in the Great Basin. While most of the Biden administration’s wind-energy plans have been for off-short coastal sites, it developed a detailed plan for terrestrial wind energy, including installations that can have the same impact on wildlife and habitat that oil-drilling rigs do.

Administrative style

Many election-watchers have wondered: Who would populate either administration’s departments, bureaus and field stations. It’s a good question, according to the governmental-affairs liaison of a conservation organization.

For voters who are vapor-locked on whether to support Trump on gun policies and market-based economics, and those who support Harris for her defense of environmental regulations and investments in climate resiliency, consider how each candidate might govern.

Instead of focusing on the titular head of each party, perhaps voters should look at who might do the granular work of governing, from the director, department head and administrative ranks. But the real impact of an administration isn’t at the top, but rather down the ranks, deep in the civil service that implements executive-branch priorities

“Most of the good work that’s done on the ground is done by career civil servants,” said another conservation leader who also asked not to be named. “Politicos come and go, but a large portion of the actual work gets done by people whose names you’ll never know. And those people down the ranks are worried about a Trump 2.0 administration, because of budget cuts and layoffs and political-patronage appointments. On the other hand, they’re worried that a Harris administration might think they have a mandate from the election to go in some pretty crazy directions” including full tribal management of public lands and all-in climate-resiliency policies on public lands.”

“I don’t think there are many traditional hunters or anglers in the Harris camp, and unless they reach out to our community, I worry that animal-rights activists, social-justice activists, and environmental extremists could take important roles,” in natural-resource agencies.

Another worry for federal employees lies in Project 2025, a briefing book prepared by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, which calls forconverting potentially tens of thousands of civil service jobs to “at will” appointments. While Trump has distanced himself from the document and said it doesn’t represent his viewpoints, more than half its authors served in his first administration or campaigns.

But beyond lofty policy-level ambitions, the next administration will be defined by more granular governance decisions.

“I don’t think either campaign really knows the reduced state of our agencies,” said the CEO of another wildlife-conservation group. “We are asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do more with less every year. That agency is down 800 to 900 FTEs [full-time equivalent employees]. We have national wildlife refuges all around the country that are ‘complexed,’ meaning that a number of different refuges that might span tens of thousands of acres are being managed by a single complex manager. This at a time when the National Refuge System is increasingly important for hunting access and species management. It’s a slow-motion car crash.”

Another conservation leader notes that neither candidate, Harris and Trump, is a hunter or a conservationist. “Given that, whoever they select in their administration for Interior Secretary or Agriculture Secretary will be the true decision makers. And we generally have no idea who those people will be.”

Links to complete Outdoor Life profiles on both campaigns:

https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/harris-walz-administration-hunting-conservation

https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/trump-vance-administration-hunting-conservation

This article was edited by TWS CEO Ed Arnett and staff.