The Big Betrayal Bill Becomes Law: On Independence Day, the Administration Declared War on Public Lands

While Americans celebrated freedom, Congress signed it away—greenlighting the largest rollback of environmental protections, public oversight, and democratic safeguards in a generation.

On July 4th, as fireworks exploded and Republican lawmakers cloaked themselves in patriotic spectacle, President Trump signed into law a bill that shreds the very freedoms they pretend to honor.

The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”—now more accurately remembered as the Big Betrayal Bill—is a 1,100-page act of legislative vandalism. It passed the Senate on a razor-thin 51–50 vote, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. In the House, it squeaked through 218–214 after an overnight voting marathon. Not exactly a landslide, but enough to greenlight the largest rollback of environmental protections, public oversight, and democratic accountability in a generation.

The Looting Has Been Legalized

Under the new law, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service are mandated to hold quarterly lease sales for oil, gas, and coal on public lands—regardless of environmental consequences, market conditions, or public opposition. These sales must include at least 50% of industry-nominated parcels and are required to continue for the next ten years. In the Western Arctic Reserve—a critical migratory and subsistence landscape home to caribou, polar bears, and Indigenous communities who have fought to protect it for decades—the Department of Interior must offer at least 4 million acres every two years, and conduct five sales within a decade.

The bill also reinstates the agencies’ authority to issue noncompetitive leases—reviving the antiquated “first-come, first-served” system, allowing land to be handed out for as little as $1.50 per acre, often to shell companies or speculators with no real development plan.

Meanwhile, royalties paid to the public for resource extraction are cut to 12.5% for onshore oil and gas—down from 16.67%, a rate only recently increased under the Inflation Reduction Act. That puts the U.S. well below many international standards, and below what many states charge on private land. It’s a corporate giveaway.

And it gets worse. H.R. 1 allows corporations to prepare their own Environmental Assessments (EAs) and Environmental Impact Statements (EISs)—the foundational documents of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Agencies are directed to “accept and rely” on those self-funded documents, and timelines are accelerated: EAs must be completed within 180 days, and EISs within a year. Public input becomes secondary. Scientific scrutiny is optional. This is not oversight—it’s collusion.

Meanwhile, the bill mandates massive new logging targets. The Forest Service must increase timber sales by 250 million board feet per year, and BLM by 20 million board feet annually—ratcheting up extraction with every fiscal cycle from 2026 to 2034. It also requires at least 40 new long-term Forest Service logging contracts and five more from BLM, each lasting no less than 20 years. There are no ecological restoration requirements, no increase in funding for prescribed fire, and no meaningful safeguards for climate-resilient forest management. Just clearcuts—locked in for decades.

For the livestock industry, it’s a bonanza. The Livestock Indemnity Program is expanded to guarantee 100% reimbursement for cattle lost to predation by wolves, grizzlies, or mountain lions—as well as to disease and extreme weather. This codifies livestock as sacrosanct while offering nothing to the ecosystems or species they displace. At the same time, the bill leaves more than 247 million acres of public lands open to livestock grazing at $1.35 per cow/calf pair per month—a rate that hasn’t really changed since 1986, despite inflation, habitat collapse, or the staggering ecological costs

What Do You Call It When a Government Abandons Its People?

This bill didn’t just loot the land. It gutted the country.

To fund the giveaways, Congress gutted life-saving programs for people, too. It slashed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), capping food benefits and adding new work requirements for adults up to age 64. It pulled billions from Medicaid and imposed impossible-to-track work hours—likely pushing millions of low-income Americans off health care. It tore into student aid and climate programs. It defunded housing grants and rescinded clean energy investments meant to make communities more self-reliant. Meanwhile, the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement soared past $100 billion.

While it is the mission of Western Watersheds Project to protect and restore native wildlife habitat on public lands, we recognize that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Stripping the American people of social financial safety nets goes hand-in-hand with removing their rights to public lands, clean water, and abundant wildlife. It steals from the poor to give to the rich, and it’s wrong.

This Is the West They Want

The world imagined by the architects of H.R. 1 is not a democratic one. It’s not a world of shared resources, thriving ecosystems, or free-roaming wildlife. It’s a corporate frontier—a hollowed-out landscape patrolled by cattle, mined for gas, and silenced by law.

The Big Betrayal Bill is more than a legislative assault—it’s a blueprint for the future its authors want. A future where the public has no say. Where industry writes the rules. Where fossil fuel expansion is framed as patriotism, and ecological collapse is branded as progress. Where the West—once wild, once free—is reduced to a revenue stream.

But that future isn’t inevitable. The truth is, they’re betting on our silence. They’re counting on the complexity of the bill to bury its implications, on the heat of summer and the churn of headlines to make us forget. They are assuming that public lands don’t have defenders. That we’ll be too tired, too distracted, too cynical to fight back.

But we’re not done. We still have tools: litigation, protest, public comment, and a growing national awareness that these lands are not commodities—they are the living foundation of climate resilience, biodiversity, cultural heritage, and future survival. We still have laws, however battered. We still have the truth. And we still have each other, and power in numbers.

This bill may have passed. But the story of the American West is still being written.

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