Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order in January directing federal land managers to strip away what he called "unnecessary regulatory or administrative barriers" to hunting and fishing on public lands, and managers at parks, refuges, and wilderness areas across the country have already started complying. The directive, first detailed by the Associated Press, applies to 55 National Park Service sites in the lower 48 states and requires agencies to justify any hunting or fishing regulations they want to keep on the books.
The changes are already visible on the ground. Site managers have lifted prohibitions on hunting stands that damage trees, training hunting dogs, using vehicles to retrieve game, and hunting along trails, according to a review by the National Parks Conservation Association. At Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts, the hunting season would extend through spring and summer. At Lake Meredith National Recreation Area in Texas, hunters would be allowed to clean kills in park restrooms. At Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Louisiana, alligator hunting would be permitted.
For sportsmen and rural communities that depend on hunting, the order is straightforward: the federal government is getting out of the way. For conservation bureaucrats who spent years layering restrictions on public land, it is an overdue reckoning.
Burgum's January order flips the default. Instead of assuming restrictions are valid unless challenged, it tells managers that federal lands "should be open to hunting and fishing unless a specific, documented, and legally supported exception applies." Agencies must now document the legal basis for any rule that limits access, or remove it.
Interior Department spokesperson Elizabeth Peace framed the directive in an email as a "commonsense approach to public land management." She added that closures or limits needed for public safety, resource protection, or legal compliance would remain in place.
"For decades, sportsmen and women have been some of the strongest stewards of our public lands, and this order ensures their access is not unnecessarily restricted by outdated or overly broad limitations that are not required by law."
That language matters. It acknowledges what hunters have long argued: many of the rules governing federal lands were not driven by science or safety but by bureaucratic inertia and ideological preference. Burgum's order forces a reckoning with that legacy.
The move fits a broader pattern of the Trump administration dismantling regulatory barriers that accumulated under prior administrations. The Interior Department has also scrapped Biden-era offshore wind leases and redirected resources toward American energy production, the same instinct applied to a different domain.
Hunting is currently allowed across roughly 51 million National Park Service acres spanning 76 sites. But the geography is misleading. The vast majority of that acreage sits in Alaska. Only about 8 million acres in the contiguous United States are open to hunters, a fraction of the land the NPS controls in the lower 48.
Fishing fares somewhat better, with 213 NPS sites allowing it. But the broader trend is clear: participation in hunting has declined for years. Only about 4.2 percent of the U.S. population over age 16 identified as a hunter in 2024, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Census data.
That decline is partly cultural, partly demographic. But it is also partly regulatory. When the federal government layers restrictions on where, when, and how Americans can hunt on their own public lands, it should surprise no one that fewer people bother. Burgum's order is a bet that removing barriers will reverse at least some of the slide, and that doing so will strengthen, not weaken, conservation.
The secretary said as much in the order itself. Expanding hunting and fishing opportunities, Burgum wrote, "not only strengthens conservation outcomes, but also supports rural economies, public health, and access to America's outdoor spaces."
Major conservation and sportsmen's organizations lined up behind the order quickly. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership posted a statement in January calling it a balance between wildlife management and the outdoor traditions hunters and anglers support.
Ducks Unlimited followed in March, saying Burgum's order recognizes duck hunters' "vital role." The group's statement was direct:
"This process will streamline federal regulations, make them more consistent with existing state rules, and provide more public-land access for outdoor recreation. Thank you, Secretary Burgum, for prioritizing America's hunters and anglers."
That endorsement from Ducks Unlimited carries weight. The organization has conserved more than 15 million acres of wetlands and associated habitats. When groups like these say expanded hunting access and conservation go hand in hand, it is worth listening, especially when critics frame the debate as sportsmen versus the environment.
This is not the first time a Trump administration has moved to open federal land to recreational use. During the first term, the Interior Department announced plans to open 2.3 million acres across more than 100 national wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries to hunting and fishing. Then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the expansion would "increase nationwide hunting and fishing opportunities ahead of the fall season."
Even earlier, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed an order to expand access on public lands, parks, and monuments. That directive called for amending management plans at national monuments to ensure public access for hunting, fishing, and target shooting, and required a plan within 120 days to expand hunter access on lands managed by the NPS, Bureau of Land Management, and Fish and Wildlife Service. Zinke described it as "the latest example of how the Trump administration is actively moving to support hunting and other forms of outdoor recreation on public lands."
The consistency is notable. Across two terms and three Interior secretaries, the Trump administration has pushed the same principle: public land belongs to the public, and access should be the default.
Not everyone is pleased. Dan Wenk, the former Yellowstone National Park superintendent and NPS deputy operations director, told the Associated Press that park managers built their existing regulations through stakeholder engagement and that dismantling them without public discussion is reckless.
"This was never a big issue. I'd love to know the problem we're trying to solve. Then I could understand the costs that it's going to take to solve it in terms of resources and visitor safety."
Wenk also took a shot at the administration's approach to process: "Process never seems to stand in the way of many things with this administration."
Elaine Leslie, the former head of the NPS biological resources department, offered a more visceral objection. She said the order does not reflect science-based management and painted a picture of parks overrun by hunting activity.
"I don't want to take my young grandchildren to a park unit only to have a hunter drag a gutted elk they shot across a visitor center parking lot. Nor enter a restroom where hunters are cleaning their game."
Leslie added: "There is a time and place for hunting, trapping and fishing... but that doesn't mean every place has to be open to every activity especially at the expense of others and degrading our public resources."
These are fair concerns to raise. But the Interior Department has already addressed the safety question directly. Peace stated that closures or limits needed for public safety, resource protection, or legal compliance would remain. The order does not eliminate all restrictions. It eliminates restrictions that lack documented legal or scientific justification.
That distinction matters. The question is not whether any rules should exist. It is whether bureaucrats should be able to restrict access to public land without showing their work. Burgum's order says no.
The hunting order does not exist in a vacuum. It reflects a governing philosophy that runs through the Trump administration's approach to federal regulation: default to access, force agencies to justify restrictions, and stop treating the public as an inconvenience on its own land.
The same instinct has driven the administration's approach to energy regulation, where Biden-era EPA emissions rules forced manufacturers like Isuzu to halt production lines. It has shaped personnel decisions at the Interior Department itself, where the administration pulled Scott Socha's nomination to lead the National Park Service, leaving the agency without a permanent director as these policy changes take hold.
Whether the subject is drilling permits, emissions standards, or deer stands, the pattern is the same: the prior administration layered rules that restricted what Americans could do on or with public resources, and the current one is peeling them back.
Several questions remain open. Which specific regulations have managers retained, and what justifications did they provide? What public outreach, if any, accompanied the rollbacks at individual sites? How will the NPS handle conflicts between hunters and other park visitors during newly extended seasons, particularly at high-traffic sites like Cape Cod?
The NPCA identified changes already underway at multiple locations, but the full scope of the rollback across all 55 covered sites is not yet public. The Interior Department has not released a comprehensive accounting of which rules survived the review and which did not.
Those details will matter. The principle behind Burgum's order is sound: public land should be open to the public unless the government can explain why it shouldn't be. But execution matters, and transparency about which rules were kept and which were dropped will determine whether the policy earns lasting public trust.
For now, the direction is clear. Hunters and anglers are getting access that bureaucrats spent years taking away. The people who actually use public land, and whose license fees and excise taxes fund much of its conservation, are being treated like stakeholders again, not trespassers.
That shouldn't be controversial. It should be the starting point.
