Interior Department Secretary David Bernhardt issued a recent secretarial order on the Land and Waters Conservation Fund. The Order prioritizes input from local governments and leaders, which will help stop unchecked land grabs by the federal government. It requires written support from local governments for any land or water acquisition. “The LWCF was created to be a discrete tool to strengthen recreational opportunities for local communities and improve public lands management,” says Kaitlynn Glover, NCBA Executive Director of Natural Resources and the PLC Executive Director. “States and local stakeholders know best what their communities need and should be directly involved in those decisions.” She says ranchers appreciate the secretary’s work to make certain LWCF cannot be used as a tool for rampant, unchecked acquisitions that would compromise the health of Western landscapes and federal agencies’ ability to manage the lands and waters already under their jurisdiction. The Great American Outdoors Act was signed into law back in August. It gave federal agencies free rein to spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year of LWCF funding for the sole purpose of acquiring new private land without any oversight from Congress.
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