The Trump Administration opens up the national “refuge” system for hunting
On August 13, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced what it called the largest expansion of hunting and sport-fishing opportunities in the agency’s history. The headline states: 1,488 new hunting and fishing opportunities, spread across 111 national wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries in 32 states. The administration says the change will make more than 92 million acres (more than 95% of the National Wildlife Refuge System) available for hunting.
It is being presented as if this is a tremendous gift to the American public. But we should be asking the question:
Why is the wildlife in America’s wildlife refuges being treated as though its primary purpose is to provide recreational shooting opportunities?
The answer matters because the National Wildlife Refuge System wasn’t created to maximize opportunities for people to kill things. It was created to conserve wildlife and the habitats wildlife needs. That is definitely not the same thing.
A refuge is supposed to be a refuge. The clue is in the name.
The National Wildlife Refuge System is the largest network of lands and waters in the world specifically dedicated to wildlife conservation. The system encompasses hundreds of refuges and wetland management districts and receives tens of millions of visitors every year. Not just hunters and anglers, but birdwatchers, photographers, hikers, educators, families, and people who simply want to see wildlife doing wildlife things.
Hunting is not inherently incompatible with that mission. But there is an important qualifier: hunting on a refuge is supposed to be compatible with the purposes for which that refuge exists and with the mission of the Refuge System. That distinction is important.
The question should not be: How much more hunting can we squeeze onto federal wildlife lands?
The question should be: Where does hunting actually make biological and conservation sense?
Those are very different questions. The Trump Administration has made it abundantly clear which question it prefers.
The genuinely significant part of the announcement is that hunting or fishing is being introduced for the first time at 17 federal properties, while hunting is being significantly expanded in other locations.
This raises a very basic conservation question: why was hunting and fishing excluded or limited in those areas in the first place? Sometimes “closed to hunting” is the conservation plan.
Sometimes the smartest thing a wildlife manager can do is leave an area alone. A refuge can contain habitat that is particularly important during migration, breeding, nesting, wintering, or other vulnerable periods. It can provide animals with somewhere they can feed without disturbance, rest without being chased, or simply exist without having people wandering around with firearms.
That doesn’t mean every hunting prohibition is permanent or sacred. Wildlife populations change. Habitats change. Management objectives change. But if a refuge manager previously determined that a portion of a refuge should function as a sanctuary, opening it (or expanding hunting around it) should require a compelling biological justification. Not simply a political preference for “access.”
Consider Grass Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Montana. The refuge was established in 1942 specifically as a refuge and breeding ground for migratory birds and other wildlife. Today, FWS describes the southern half of the refuge as permanent refugia for wildlife, closed to hunting and public access. The northern half is open to hunting, wildlife observation, and photography. That arrangement illustrates the basic idea behind refuges rather nicely: wildlife conservation sometimes requires actual refuge. Not every acre needs to be converted into a recreational hunting opportunity.
“But hunters fund conservation!”
Yes, hunters and anglers contribute license fees, excise taxes, and other expenditures that theoretically get rolled back into conservation.
Hunting, fishing, and trapping license fees generated about $1.60 billion in 2019, or 42.5% of all dedicated revenue received by state wildlife agencies. Pittman-Robertson funds (taxes on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment) generated about $678 million, another 18.1%. Together, those two sources accounted for roughly 60.6% of dedicated state wildlife-agency revenue.
But this doesn’t mean that every conservation decision should therefore be designed around maximizing hunting access. That’s like arguing that because hospitals employ nurses, every hospital policy should be designed to maximize nursing shifts. A successful conservation program is supposed to manage wildlife for wildlife. Hunting can be one tool within that system, but it should not become the system’s organizing principle.
The really troubling part is the philosophy behind the announcement. Look at how the administration describes the rule. The Interior Department says the change is intended to “reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens,” remove barriers to hunting and fishing access, and align federal regulations more closely with state wildlife-management frameworks.
But federal wildlife refuges exist precisely because the federal government has responsibilities that extend beyond whatever use happens to be most popular in the surrounding state. A refuge isn’t merely another piece of public land with a federal address. It is a place where the federal government has deliberately said: This land has a special job. Sometimes that job is protecting migratory birds, conserving endangered species, preserving wetlands, maintaining breeding habitat, or it could be providing a secure wintering area.
Sometimes, yes, the purpose of an area may include hunting. But the whole point is that the answer should depend on the conservation mission of the particular location.
Making federal regulations conform more closely to state hunting frameworks reverses that logic. It risks turning the question from “What does this refuge need?” into “What does the state allow us to do here?” Those are not equivalent questions.
What does this increase in hunting mean for wildlife?
This increase in hunting could have multiple deleterious impacts on wildlife in refuges, including increased disturbance, habitat fragmentation, increased human activity, and the possibility of killing animals that were never intended to be targets. In classic Trump Administration fashion, none of these issues were researched or investigated before the decision was made.
In particular, the accidental-kill problem is very real. This is especially important in refuges containing multiple species occupying the same habitat. A hunter might be legally pursuing a duck, deer, goose, turkey, or other game animal. Meanwhile, other species may be using exactly the same landscape. That creates the possibility of mistaken identification and illegal take.
The Service’s own refuge regulations demonstrate how complicated managing hunting can become. Station-specific rules can include particular seasons, species, weapons, access restrictions, closed areas, ammunition requirements, hunting hours, boat restrictions and numerous other conditions. This is because wildlife management is complicated.
This makes the administration’s rhetoric about simply removing “barriers” concerning. Sometimes a barrier is there because something needs protecting.
Regulations are only useful if somebody can enforce them
Here’s another awkward problem. Wildlife regulations don’t enforce themselves. A refuge needs biologists and managers who understand the landscape, law-enforcement personnel who can enforce hunting restrictions, and staff capable of monitoring whether wildlife-management objectives are actually being met. Opening more land to hunting increases the number of places, seasons, species, and rules that have to be monitored.
That doesn’t necessarily make enforcement impossible. But it does mean that expanding access should be accompanied by the staffing and resources necessary to manage that access. Otherwise, “more opportunity” can quietly become “more opportunity with less oversight.” That is a particularly bad combination when the thing being managed is wildlife.
To date, there has been absolutely no sign of additional funding or staffing required to manage this increase in management needs. Indeed, staffing is at a low ebb, due to DOGE-related firings and Congressional budget cuts.
A refuge is not a theme park for shooting
This is where the administration’s framing gets the fundamental relationship between public lands and public access backwards. Public access is important. But access is not the only public-land value. A national wildlife refuge is one of the few places in the American landscape where the government has explicitly prioritized the needs of wildlife. That means sometimes people should be allowed in. But sometimes they should be kept out.
Sometimes you can be allowed to hunt, but sometimes you shouldn’t. Sometimes a wetland needs to be a quiet place where exhausted migratory birds can land, feed, and rest. Conservation is the art of knowing the difference. A wildlife refuge is supposed to be a refuge first.
If we turn every conservation decision into a question of how much more access humans can get, eventually we are going to discover that the people have access to everything, and the wildlife has nowhere left to hide. That’s not conservation. That’s just another form of habitat loss, dressed up in camouflage.