A Secret Meeting in Utah Tried to Rewrite Who Controls Your National Parks
Utah officials met in secret with leadership from the National Park Service and Department of Interior last week.
On Monday, behind closed doors in Salt Lake City, Utah politicians and top Trump Interior officials gathered in an old pioneer museum to bounce around ideas about something they absolutely did not want the public to witness: redrawing the power structure of America’s national parks.
There was no public notice for this highly unconventional meeting. No press allowed. Just sixty hand-picked officials, a carefully curated guest list that was precisely one body short of triggering transparency requirements, and a wish list that would make Theodore Roosevelt vomit.
I know by this point we’re all used to Utah’s harebrained schemes to steal your land, papered over with the usual lies about how it became federal land in the first place and their ever-shifting rationales for wanting it. After all, the state is home to Senator Mike Lee, the serial public lands traitor who’s latest effort involves trying to industrialize wilderness areas.
But this meeting wasn’t just some quirky Utah sideshow, as some might have you believe.
Friendly newspapers and Utah politicians have already tried to reassure the weary public that it was simply a brainstorming session about things as mundane as managing traffic flows in the towns and counties surrounding Utah’s national parks.
Nothing to see here folks.
What They Discussed in The Secret Meeting
The state’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office convened the gathering. They chose the venue, This Is The Place Heritage Park, with the symbolism so thick it may as well have been underlined. Then they barred journalists and stacked the room with the anti-public lands politicians, county commissioners, legislators, mayors of gateway towns, congressional staffers, and, critically, the superintendents from most of Utah’s national parks.
Let me be clear: the true purpose of the meeting was to tell the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior how Utah wants its national parks run.
Not our national parks. Utah’s.
Their list of demands, presented quietly and without public scrutiny, went something like this (there were more, but this is what we know so far):
Kill the timed-entry systems at Arches and Zion.
Open Capitol Reef and Canyonlands to OHVs, even into fragile areas where a single bad actor can scar the landscape for centuries.
Pave the Burr Trail, a decades-long obsession of local politicians seeking to turn a backcountry corridor into a highway.
Open more seasonally closed park areas including Rainbow Point Road in Bryce Canyon National Park, the visitor center at Hovenweep National Monument, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Increase visitation across the board. As one attendee put it, “get as many people in there as possible,” the ecological consequences be damned.
Give Utah more “operational authority” during shutdowns, a Trojan horse for permanent state leverage over federal decisions.
Absent from the conversations was any talk about conserving the parks’ fragile landscapes. And tellingly, there was no discussion whatsoever about the massive cuts to National Park Service staff or the White House’s proposed billion-dollar cut to the NPS budget for 2026.
Funny how that never came up.
And Who Was Sitting at the Head of the Table? Karen Budd-Falen.
That’s the part that should make the hair on your neck stand up.
The Trump administration sent Karen Budd-Falen, a Sagebrush Rebellion lawyer whose life’s work has been undermining federal authority over public lands, to hear Utah’s demands. Oh, and she’s now the Associate Deputy Secretary of the Interior.
This is a person who has:
Drafted “county supremacy” ordinances that claim local governments can overrule federal land managers.
Represented ranchers and extremists who believe federal agencies have no legitimate authority.
Advocated, repeatedly and publicly, for transferring federal public lands to the states.
Now she’s sitting inside the Department of the Interior, nodding along as Utah officials demand access, expansion, pavement, and control inside national parks that belong to the entire country.
Please take a moment to think about that. What does it say that the Trump administration sent one of the highest ranking officials at the DOI, an avowed enemy of federal land ownership, to secretly meet with Utah politicians about federal land management?
Who Decides What Public Lands Are For
It’s difficult to understand this fully without stepping back.
At the heart of all these fights, the attacks on NEPA, the gutting of the ESA, the dismantling of NPS protections, the attempts to privatize or “co-manage” federal lands, is one foundational question:
Are America’s public lands a trust or a commodity?
Utah’s political class has answered that question many times over. In their worldview, a landscape has value only when it can be taken from — through crowds, through pavement, or through extraction. Their demands in this meeting were framed around visitation, but the deeper ideology is the same one driving their long war against federal ownership itself: public lands must be “productive,” which always seems to mean more drilling, more mining, more grazing, more pressure on already fragile places.
This meeting was a dream come true for Utah’s ruling anti-public lands politicians. The people in that room weren’t there to talk about wildlife, or watersheds, or cultural sites, or solitude, or dark skies, or the miracle of a landscape that still belongs to all of us.
They were there to talk about money. That’s it.
Everything else — the secrecy, the careful engineering to dodge public transparency, the presence of an extremist lawyer now wearing a federal badge — flows from that one truth.
Why This Should Terrify You Even If You’ve Never Set Foot in Utah
You may be tempted to see this as “Utah being Utah.” But that’s a dangerously naive way to see this. This is how it begins.
First: normalize “coordination” and “local control” as euphemisms for state influence over national parks.
Second: insist that preservation tools like timed-entry and limiting paved roads are “anti-business” and therefore illegitimate.
Third: use shutdowns and “emergencies” as leverage to wedge states deeper into park operations.
Fourth: quietly shift authority from the federal government to the state under the banner of “partnership.”
They’ll say things like, “Oh, well during the shutdown the state paid for the visitor center to remain open. And due to federal budget cuts the state paid for that new sewer system or parking lot. Isn’t that nice?”
No. The federal government should be fully funding our parks with the staff and resources they need and that the public demands, not ceding control to states and private entities under the guise of charity. They don’t need charity. They need to be properly funded. We’re the richest country on earth for god’s sake.
But once the line has been crossed, once the idea that national parks can be reshaped to suit local political demands has been established, it doesn’t go back.
What Utah and this administration is testing isn’t some small tweak around the edges. They’re testing whether the American public will notice, or care, if states start pulling the crown jewels away from the people they belong to.
If Utah succeeds, the next meeting won’t be in secret. It’ll be in broad daylight. And it won’t stop with Utah.
What To Watch For
I know we’ve got an administration that’s avowedly anti-public lands combined with a compliant House, Senate, and Supreme Court. That seems like a completely stacked deck. And it almost is. But they don’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and they haven’t gotten every American to look the other way. Yet.
Utah thinks they’ve found the solution to all their grievances in this administration and this Supreme Court. They know this may be their best shot to steal millions of acres of your land. And they’re going to take it.
What we need to do is watch for any sign that this administration is willing to transfer ownership of federal land to Utah or any other state. Letting Utah manage parks in their state by dictating their demands to Washington is repulsive, but it can be undone. Transferring ownership can’t.
We need to make sure to voice our opposition to Steve Pearce becoming the director of the BLM. The man is hellbent on transferring federal land to states and private entities.
And we’ve got to stay vigilant. When we rose up in opposition of Mike Lee’s reconciliation scheme we stopped it. That won’t be the last attempt under this administration.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Jim
Theft in broad daylight! Everything to this regime is a commodity. While Canada is working with their indigenous people to protect land, our corrupt government, MAGA States are trying to steal it. If we let them do that our Federal lands will start looking like the East Wing of the White House. (Maybe the White House should have been designated a Federal Park). After Reagan refused to live in the California Governors Mansion, the State protected it and it still stands. How arrogant and entitled these people are! We have Federally protected land so that corrupt States can't destroy them. Although with this President, States like California have to lead the fight to protect their Federally preserved lands. Thank you for exposing this. We need to spread this information to all of the American people and the representatives who actually care about preserving the land. Also, Indigenous people need to be brought in and listened to.
This is shocking, the corruption and greed needs to stop! I can’t believe all people in Utah are for this, I hope they will come out against it. People have the Power, we need to continue to use our voices to spread the word. Thank you