On July 1, President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will visit Medora, North Dakota for the grand opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a privately funded $450 million museum built on 93 acres near the entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Trump is the most anti-conservation president in history, and his administration is attempting to hide that fact by hitching itself to a celebration of Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy.
Roosevelt protected approximately 230 million acres of public land, more than any president before or since. His conservation record was connected to his broader fight against the monopolies and industrial interests that controlled the country at the turn of the 20th century, also known as the Gilded Age, when railroad barons, timber interests, and mining companies treated public land as their private domain.
Roosevelt’s conservation legacy was at its core about shifting power from private industry to the American public, whereas the Trump administration is actively working to reverse that shift by implementing policies that put industry back in the driver’s seat on public lands, gutting the agencies Roosevelt built, and turning America’s 250th anniversary into a vehicle for partisanship and self-promotion. If the administration truly wanted to honor Roosevelt’s legacy, it would restore the federal workforce, properly fund the National Park Service and other land management agencies, and rein in private industry’s ability to exploit public lands.
To learn more about the contrasts between Teddy Roosevelt and Donald Trump’s conservation legacies, read the Center for Western Priorities’ latest Westwise blog post on Substack.
Analysis shows reflecting pool spending accounts for nearly all ‘urgent’ no-bid contracts
A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that the botched Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool overhaul accounts for almost all of the surge in “urgent” no-bid contracting at the National Park Service under the Trump administration. Federal contracting law lets agencies skip competitive bidding when there is an issue of “unusual and compelling urgency” upon which inaction would “result in serious injury” to the government. In the first 522 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Park Service obligated $21.2 million through “urgent and compelling” contracts that bypass competitive bidding. Of that, $16.4 million, or 77 percent, went to two Reflecting Pool contracts: one to coat the pool, and a second for algae treatment.
Quick hits
A river crisis is unfolding in the American West
Reflecting Pool repairs account for 77 percent of the National Park Service’s no-bid contract spending
National Parks Traveler | CWP contract analysis
Trump-backed ‘Freedom Trucks’ tell a sanitized version of the country’s founding
3 firefighters killed in Colorado as wildfires driven by heat and wind rage across the West
Associated Press | New York Times
Could a new Utah law help fix the oil bonding system?
Map shows a Colorado wolf crossed east of I-25 as part of wide-ranging movement
Court filing says the park service will drain, repair the reflecting pool after the 4th of July holiday
Trump admin quietly removed mentions of slavery from Independence Hall, Thomas Jefferson portrait
Quote of the day
President Roosevelt recognized that the landscapes he protected would define who we are as a nation. Today, our public lands remain a great unifier, a shared inheritance and a symbol of our freedom as Americans. As we mark our nation’s 250th anniversary, our country should be talking about how we can hand our public lands down, not over.”
—Tracy Stone-Manning, president of The Wilderness Society, National Parks Traveler
Picture This
This summer is hot and dry, that’s no secret. People have questions about fishing in Colorado. We have answers.
Hear directly from our senior aquatics biologists about how the drought is impacting Colorado’s fishing on the latest episode of our Colorado Outdoors podcast. Our experts cover many of the burning questions anglers across the state have been sending our way, including:
🐟Pro tips and helpful hints on how to find good fishing across the state
🐟Responsible fish handling techniques
🐟Closures, salvages and how hatcheries help fish populations
🐟Much, much more!
Click the link in our bio to listen now, or anywhere you get your podcasts 🎧
Featured image: President Theodore Roosevelt. Source: NPS Flickr