“Make America Beautiful Again”: A Commission Without Teeth, A Policy Without Backbone

Behind the patriotic branding lies a familiar agenda: weaken regulations, favor industry, and call it conservation.

Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

On July 3, the Trump administration announced the creation of a new federal advisory body: the President’s Make America Beautiful Again Commission. Its stated purpose? To “prioritize responsible conservation,” restore lands and waters, and “protect our Nation’s outdoor heritage for the enjoyment of the American people.”

That sounds fine—until you read the fine print.

This executive order does not strengthen environmental protections. It does not fund new restoration programs. And it does not confront the most serious ecological crisis facing public lands today: climate change.

Instead, it recycles a familiar pattern: patriotic language, grandiose promises, and vague policy objectives that, in practice, could weaken the very safeguards meant to protect wild landscapes and the species that depend on them.

A commission with power—but no public accountability

The new Commission will be chaired by the Secretary of the Interior and includes cabinet-level officials from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, and EPA, among others. It is housed within the White House and charged with making policy recommendations on conservation, land access, and fish and wildlife recovery.

Conspicuously absent? Any mention of Indigenous leadership, independent scientists, community voices, or public participation. The Commission’s membership includes no requirement to consult tribes, environmental justice advocates, or the general public—despite the fact that public lands belong to all Americans.

Collaboration over regulation?

The executive order repeatedly emphasizes “voluntary conservation” and “collaborative” approaches to fish and wildlife recovery—language that may sound benign, but often signals a desire to move away from enforceable federal protections. This framing mirrors past efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act and shift environmental decision-making to state or private entities.

As conservationists, we support cooperative solutions—when they’re backed by science and binding standards. But removing regulatory teeth from our nation’s most critical wildlife laws in favor of voluntary participation rarely results in meaningful recovery. Especially when the extractive industries that caused the problem are the ones invited to define the solution.

Expanding access—or expanding destruction?

The order highlights a broad array of outdoor recreation goals, from hiking and biking to off-roading and snowmobiling. But nestled in this language is an implicit invitation to expand destructive uses—like ATV traffic and motorized recreation—into previously intact, roadless areas. Bulldozing roads to enable this kind of access doesn’t just fragment habitat or disturb wildlife—it lays the groundwork for a familiar pattern of land-use escalation.

Photo by Kevin Wiegand on Unsplash

Because once the roads go in, the cows follow.

From the Owyhee Canyonlands to the Escalante, public lands once considered too remote or ecologically sensitive for grazing have been opened up under the guise of “access improvements.” These roads become vectors for new grazing allotments, expanded livestock infrastructure, and the steady creep of industry into wild places. That’s not a side effect—it’s part of the design.

The vision of “beauty” here is not one of intact ecosystems—it’s a West crisscrossed with tire tracks, grazing fences, and political giveaways.

A $90 million park funding distraction

On the same day, President Trump issued a separate executive order directing the National Park Service to raise entrance fees on foreign tourists, with the aim of generating $90 million to address deferred maintenance. But according to experts, deferred maintenance across our national parks now exceeds $23 billion. Meanwhile, the Park Service is facing staffing reductions, resource shortages, and increasing pressure from climate-driven wildfires, drought, and ecosystem collapse.

Raising fees without restoring agency budgets or hiring capacity is a patch on a gaping wound. And for an administration that has slashed environmental funding and rolled back more than 140 environmental safeguards since taking office in January, it’s hard to see this as anything more than a cosmetic fix.

Climate: still missing in action

Despite citing the Great American Outdoors Act and praising outdoor recreation, the executive order makes no mention of climate change. Not once. There is no reference to carbon emissions, climate resilience, drought, megafires, or warming temperatures—all of which are rapidly reshaping public lands and threatening species across the American West.

You cannot meaningfully “make America beautiful” without confronting the ecological realities on the ground. Any serious conservation initiative must acknowledge the role of fossil fuel extraction on public lands, account for ongoing biodiversity loss, and commit to science-based recovery and climate mitigation.

This commission does none of that.

The real work remains

We are not opposed to national conservation efforts. In fact, we welcome serious, well-funded, inclusive federal action to restore the land. But this isn’t it.

The Make America Beautiful Again Commission lacks vision, structure, and safeguards. It offers no new legal tools, no new budgetary authority, no meaningful public oversight, and no grounding in climate science. And while it gestures at preserving beauty, it ignores the deeper work of protecting ecosystems—work that cannot be done without facing hard truths about deregulation, extraction, and agency capture.

At Western Watersheds Project, we will be watching closely. We will track the recommendations the commission makes and the policies it tries to influence. And we will continue to speak up for the land, the water, and the wild lives who have no commission to defend them.

Grace Kuhn is the Digital Director for Western Watersheds Project. grace@westernwatersheds.org