America 250 Funding Push | A Look at the Department of Interior's Draft Strategic Plan
The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) has launched an advocacy campaign to provide funding for America 250 activities in the FY26 federal appropriations. The campaign asks for robust funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which could offer avenues for investing in state and local organizations. It may seem odd to ask for additional funds for IMLS as current grants have been cancelled. But even as IMLS, National Endowment for the Humanities, and other federal agencies are curtailed, interest in 250th activities may prove a viable way to preserve functions of these agencies. The 250th is also an opportunity for Congress to hear about the importance of IMLS and related agencies to tourism and the communities we serve.
In a bipartisan effort, Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA) and Rep. John Larsen (D-CT) have circulated a Dear Colleague letter asking members of the House to sign a letter to the leadership of the House Appropriations Committee asking for dedicated funding for the America 250 in FY26. Attached is the sign on letter and a template letter you can individualize and send to your congressional delegation. For those of you engaged with your state America 250 commission, consider having them weigh in as well. Note that the letter includes a Quill Link that allows congressional offices to sign onto the letter, this can only be accessed using a House of Representatives email.
A Senate letter is also in the works.
Making the rounds today in Washington is a draft of the Department of the Interior’s Strategic Plan for 2026-2030. This impacts several of tourism’s key federal partners, including the National Park Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Most of the focus is on reducing the size of federal monuments and opening up public lands for energy and mining development but the plan also calls for restoring “heritage lands and sites to the states” could potentially impact National Heritage Areas and historic sites such as the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. The draft plan is attached. I am also pasting below an article from E&E News that provides some analysis of the plan. You can expect that we will be hearing a lot more about this in the day ahead.
A look inside Burgum’s draft plan for Interior
The strategic plan that outlines the department's goals for 2026 to 2030 targets national monuments and promotes “assets” like fossil fuel production.
By: Scott Streater, Heather Richards | 04/24/2025 01:34 PM EDT
GREENWIRE | Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wants to marshal his agency to speed production of oil and gas on public lands, cut regulations and “right-size” national monuments, according to a draft strategic plan viewed by POLITICO’s E&E News.
The draft document calls for targeting “our National assets for the benefit of the American people” by, among other things, increasing development of “clean coal, oil, and gas” with “faster and easier permitting.” Interior aspires to “streamline processes,” with the goal of also ramping up “revenues from grazing, timber, critical minerals, gravel and other non-energy resources.”
The working plan offers a look at how Burgum, who is also chair of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, is running an agency whose day-to-day business of overseeing public lands has been overshadowed by the White House’s efforts to cajole, pressure or force a historic downsizing of the federal workforce.
Burgum’s draft agenda ticks off several of the areas capturing the attention of the president and his top officials since January, including energy development, slashing regulations, reshaping national monuments and increasing law and order through a boosted police presence. Interior late Wednesday said it would limit environmental reviews of energy projects on public lands to a maximum of 28 days, leaning on Trump’s declaration of an “energy emergency.”
Interior did not respond to a request for comment on the draft plan. Kathryn Martin, a department spokesperson, told The Washington Post it was “beyond unacceptable that an internal document in the draft/deliberative process is being shared with the media before a decision point has been made.”
“We will take this leak of an internal, pre-decisional document very seriously and find out who is responsible,” she said. “The internal document is marked draft/deliberative for a reason — it’s not final nor ready for release.”
If codified, the draft plan, first reported by the online news site Public Domain, would represent a substantial departure from the strategic plan the Biden administration finalized in 2022, which was set to run through the fiscal 2026 budget cycle. The plan in the works by Interior now would cover 2026 to 2030.
The Biden administration plan’s goals and objectives focused on categories such as promoting “equity, well-being, and justice for tribes, American Indians, Alaska Natives” and others, as well as restoring “natural and cultural resources in the face of climate change and other stressors.”
Those goals and strategies are nowhere to be found in the new draft plan, though Burgum’s draft does make enabling “self-determination and self-governance” for tribes a key strategy, along with expanding economic growth in meeting its responsibilities to Native American governments and people.
Another “key strategy” noted in the draft document is to “assess and right size” national monuments. The first Trump administration dramatically reduced the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, though the move was later reversed by President Joe Biden.
The reversal by Biden muted a court case weighing the legality of Trump’s reduction, but the president is expected to again revisit the topic of shrinking national monuments.
Burgum has scorned the use of the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law signed and often deployed by his personal hero Theodore Roosevelt, to set aside wide swaths of land, arguing that the law was intended for small archaeological sites.
Interior’s draft plan also calls for restoring “heritage lands and sites to states,” a potential nod to the more than 60 National Heritage Areas that have been designated by Congress across the country. Heritage areas are part of the National Park System and so are under Interior’s purview.
But NPS only plays a supportive role in those areas, such as distributing matching grant funds provided by Congress for historical preservation projects. But it does not own, nor dictate, the uses of those lands.
Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, said the implication that these lands would be returned to states is a misunderstanding of what they are. For example, the entire state of Tennessee is a National Heritage Area that was designated in 1996 to provide support for protecting its Civil War history.
“I think people need a history lesson,” she said. “Heritage areas are just agreements between local authorities and nonprofits with the park service that they're going to manage historical assets.”
Protection of people and property on public land is named as a main objective in the draft, with strategies including support of law enforcement, wildlife fire risk mitigation and growing capacity for law and justice services for Native American tribes.
The focus on fossil fuel expansion in the draft echoes the stated priorities of the administration. Trump and Burgum have also signed a flurry of orders and directives aimed at reducing regulatory barriers to mining and fossil fuel development.
Burgum at an April 9 all-staff meeting referred to the vast natural resources managed by the agency as “assets.” He said several times that the agency would hold “the world’s largest balance sheet” if it were a stand-alone company, overseeing natural resources like critical minerals and coal deposits worth potentially trillions of dollars that could be used to help pay down the national debt.
“When we manage those lands, when we have a timber lease, when we have a grazing lease, when we have all that, people send us checks” that, in turn, are “helping us pay down the debt, helping us reduce the deficit. They’re helping us make this country better for your children and your grandchildren.”
Burgum added: “They are our customers, the people that lease timber from us, the people that graze on our lands, the people that want to do critical mineral development so that we don’t have to buy critical minerals from our adversaries. And the intention we have to move towards is to treat them as customers.”
But he also said the agency can conserve and restore public lands that need to be protected, while also exploiting the vast mineral resources.
“We are so blessed,” he said. “I mean no nation is blessed like we are in terms of the scale and the scope of the resources that we have.”
The draft plan cites as a goal increasing opportunities for recreation on federal lands and a goal to “restore lands and waters” so that they “remain sound and sustainable.”
But some conservation groups chafed at the plan's objectives.
“This draft plan confirms what we expected: the Trump administration sees public lands as nothing more than numbers on a balance sheet or products to be sold off and exploited,” said Jennifer Rokala, the executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. "It resembles a business plan from a desperate CEO, not a framework to steward public lands for the benefit of all Americans.”
Western Watersheds Project also took issue with the draft plan’s call to “reduce the costs for grazing and other land uses.”
“Livestock grazing is already authorized at such heavy levels that it destroys native grasses, promotes the invasion of flammable weeds like cheatgrass, and outcompetes native wildlife like mule deer and elk for forage, radically reducing their numbers,” said Josh Osher, WWP’s policy director. “The last thing the Department of Interior should be doing is pushing cattle and sheep into lands that have been protected from livestock for decades, where native perennial grasses are recovering, and wildlife populations have been rebounding.”