The Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge covers more than 6,000 acres of the Texas Panhandle. With its lakes and open prairie, the federal reserve is a popular stopover for migratory birds, and is a year-round home for wildlife such as pronghorn antelope, jackrabbits, and prairie dogs.
For years, staff at Muleshoe property worked on a plan that would allow it to expand through voluntary agreements with nearby property owners. Last week, however, officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took the rare step of scrapping the plan altogether.
Michael Doyle, a reporter for E&E News, spoke to Texas Standard about why the Trump administration scrapped the potential expansion. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, you report that the withdrawing of this kind of plan, which would have allowed the refuge to expand but not required it to, is a rare step by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. How so?
Michael Doyle: Well, first in terms of whether it is a unique step, I tried my best using the database of the Fish & Wildlife Service to see if there ever have been, in recent history at least, withdrawal of a plan. And I could not find any.
There may be some. These land protection plans are drafted over the course of many years. The discussion about the Muleshoe Refuge Plan began about 15 years ago. The formal planning work started several years ago.
So in that time, the stakeholders and the property owners and, preferably, the elected officials are all brought into the circle of trust so that at the end of the day, there’s a plan that everybody could buy off on. But in this case, something seemed to be missing, and that was the support of the local Republican congressman and some private property groups.
Well, just to be clear, the future of the refuge itself is not in jeopardy, but we’re talking about the plan to expand it, correct?
That’s right. The land protection plan sketches out the theoretical maximum boundaries, future boundaries of the refuge.
As you say, the current refuge is about 6,400 acres. Under the land protection, it could have gone to as many as 700,000 acres, but that would all depend on a willing buyer, willing seller offering either conservation easements or fee-title sale.
And so it sounds like they were able to get that. So what was the rationale offered by the federal government as to why they scrapped this expansion plan?
It was a very Trumpian rationale. The Fish & Wildlife Service, through its acting director, declared that this is a way to encourage or liberate energy production, agricultural development, and the local economy.
So this was cast as a way to avoid the, quote, “locking up” of the land and enable the marketplace to have its way with it.
Well, how did the plan become contentious in the first place?
You know, that’s a really, really good question. The local congressman, Jodey Arrington, a Republican and chairman of the House Budget Committee, has been in office during the drafting of the plan and was an early opponent of it. I’m not sure how much consultation his office had with the Fish & Wildlife Service.
An outside group called the American Stewards of Liberty, a private property group based, I believe, in Nevada, rallied against this expansion as a example of what the Biden administration called the 30 by 30 plan.
There seemed to be a coincidence of a conservative local congressman taking notice of a plan that he did not like, an outside interest group seeing in this plan an example of the federal government locking up private property. And that sort of combination proved fatal over the course of the past several years.
I should say, Congressman Arrington introduced a bill last year in Congress to stop the expansion. It failed. He introduced the bill again this year, and so the Trump administration was, in essence, following the lead of the local Republican lawmaker.
Well, what does this signal to you about potential future actions by the Trump administration regarding public land? And in this case, is the administration telling private landowners what they can do with their own property?
Well, what it foretells is there will be a very skeptical eye cast on any efforts to expand public land ownership.
Your second question as to what does it tell the private property owners is exactly the point made by supporters of the plan. Congressman Jared Huffman, a California Democrat who’s the ranking member of the Democratic Party on the House Resources Committee said what the withdrawal does is it stops private property owner from doing wants to do with his own land – to sell it to the Fish & Wildlife Service or to offer a conservation easement.
So they turned the tables on the supporters of a small federal footprint and said, “here you’re denying private property owners their alternatives.” So it tells private property owner, however, that their interests writ large are paramount to the administration.