What will be the biggest public land stories of 2026?

“It’s tough to make predictions,” said Yogi Berra, the famous New York Yankee catcher and coach. “Especially about the future.”

Some may even suggest that such an effort is a fool’s errand. Yet, in the realm of America’s public lands, enough actions have been initiated, words spoken by decisionmakers and histories accumulated to get a sense for what their future might be in 2026.

Bolstering that understanding is how America’s public lands are one of many ping-pong balls that are batted back and forth every four or eight years by incoming presidential administrations. National monuments make that notion clear: One president establishes Bears Ears National Monument, the next one shrinks it a few years later, then a third expands it a few years after that.

It’s not just federal monuments in Utah, though. A president’s prevailing winds help to flip policies that support or suppress natural resource extraction, that establish or change conservation efforts, that fund or cut budgets. With the current administration, there’s precedent to draw on in the prediction racket. The ping-pong ball is already arching back along a somewhat familiar trajectory.

While it’s ultimately a guess, the issues below are ones that readers should expect to see dominating the, ahem, landscapes in the year to come regarding public lands.

The potential for permitting reform

American projects are held up by lengthy and expensive permitting processes. McKinsey & Company estimates about $1.1-$1.5 trillion in project expenditures now stuck in the permitting phase.

One such is the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland; it’s not yet rebuilt since it was knocked down by a container ship in March of 2024. Another is the years-long attempt to build infrastructure for Utah to send geothermal power across the state.

The calls to dismantle these regulatory burdens are unsurprisingly coming from Republicans, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, but they’re also coming from Democrat pundits like the “abundance” proponents, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, as well as Democrat legislators, too.

As a result, the notion of “permitting reform” is gaining momentum in Congress on both sides of the aisle and efforts to streamline the various processes have already begun. One such is the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, a bill put forward by Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas, who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources.

The SPEED Act limits the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act in order to accelerate the development process. It passed the House this fall and is now with the Senate.

Some stakeholders are still skeptical that such reform is possible.

“The road to any sort of ‘permitting reform’ is extremely steep, if not blocked entirely,” said Aaron Weiss, the executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation advocacy group.

“At this point, there aren’t many — if any — Democrats who are foolish enough to trust the Trump administration to implement any sort of permitting deal. Doug Burgum trying to stop already-permitted wind energy projects was probably the nail in that coffin,” he said.

Will there be a litigation backlash against 2025’s new policies?

In 2025, actions were taken by the Trump Administration and Congress that crossed a number of interest groups across the West. It’s likely that those who disagreed will challenge the federal government in court.

“An issue that for us is going to be big in the next year is litigation,” said Aaron Johnson, the vice president of public and legislative affairs for the Western Energy Alliance, a trade organization for oil and gas companies.

“We’re going to see more environmental groups sue the Trump administration just as they did in the first term, but I think we’ll see more litigation in ’26 than we had in ’25.”

Such cases can go on for as long as a decade, Johnson said, with his organization still navigating issues in the West that kicked off during the Obama administration.

One action of Congress with the potential to be quite litigious was its use of the Congressional Review Act to block approved land use plans. At least three different established records of decisions in Alaska, North Dakota and Montana have been overturned by Congress. Now, any substantially similar plan is void from consideration in those regions.

The legal underpinnings “are a little yawn-inducing,” Deseret News wrote in October, but some legal minds think that using the Congressional Review Act against a few land use plans potentially opens all of them up to litigation.

“Keep in mind that, potentially, every resource management plan since 1996 is eligible to be overturned,” said Kaden McArthur, director of congressional affairs for Trout Unlimited, a conservation advocacy group, at the time.

“That is what decides oil and gas leasing plans for millions of acres. Future Democratic Congresses and Democratic presidents — not that far into the future, potentially — could call up the CRA on any number of oil and gas-heavy (resource management plans) and overturn those and freeze oil and gas production. That is absolutely a concern."

A leaked anonymous legal complaint that showed what a lawsuit to challenge land use plans might look like was written up in Wyoming last fall. There are hundreds, if not thousands of land use plans that could get challenged.

There’s a chance it, or something like it, might get used sometime this year.

The Great American Outdoors Act

In 2020, a landmark piece of legislation was signed into law by then-president Donald Trump. It was a true bipartisan effort, creating a fund, The Legacy Restoration Fund, to address the billions of dollars in deferred maintenance that the National Parks and other land management agencies could not afford to address.

$1.9 billion in funding was guaranteed through 2025, but lapsed this fall amidst Congress’ other priorities. It is expected that the Great American Outdoors Act will be up for renewal sometime in 2026.

“There’s a lot of momentum to go ahead and re-up the program and to see even more better work happen,” said Westerman, the Republican representative from Arkansas, about the next iteration of the Great American Outdoors Act in September.

“I’ll just say that history is showing us that people tend to agree on our parks and our outdoor recreation. And it’s been fun to work on bills like that because it is something we can still come together on,” he said.

The impact of staffing and budget cuts

With a full year of data collected, it’s likely that there will be more clarity on the effects of budgeting and staffing cuts within the public land management agencies.

While the National Parks’ staffing and budget cuts have been heavily covered, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have also experienced reductions and the overall impact on those agencies might also come to light.

“The impacts of the Trump/Burgum cuts to public land staffing will become even more apparent,” Weiss said. “They were able to paper over some of the damage this year, but eventually you have to pay the piper when you lose that much experience and personnel.”

Potential for states to gain more responsibilities

The White House’s budget request from May asked for the National Park Service budget to be reduced by $900 million. It argued that the NPS “include(s) a large number of sites that are not ‘National Parks,’ in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks.”

Interior Secretary Burgum said at several congressional hearings that such an idea is being considered.

The state of Utah, too, entered a cost-sharing agreement with the U.S. Forest Service this year. Utah also has an established fund to keep the “Mighty 5″ national parks within the state open during government shutdowns.

Such blurring of the financial lines between states and the federal government over land management, according to Kate Groetzinger, the communications manager for Center for Western Priorities, signals quite the sea change.

“We’ll see the Trump admin pushing more land management responsibilities onto the state,” she wrote in an email.

National monuments and other regulation rollbacks

The first Trump Administration shrunk the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. While Biden expanded them back once he entered office, there remains the potential for Trump to do so again.

That’s supported by Department of Justice arguments from this past May that made clear it understands the president has the power to reduce or alter national monuments. Its review applied to as many as six national monuments, according to a Washington Post review.

At the Department of the Interior, Burgum initiated a review of the national monument’s potential for natural resource extraction in one of his first secretarial orders.

Also, Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, introduced legislation last January seeking to dismantle the 1906 Antiquities Act that gives presidents the right to create national monuments in the first place.

“Congress should be deciding what should be a national monument and what’s not,” Maloy said in February. “That’s something I want to fix, no matter who’s in the White House.”

Whichever direction it comes from, it will not be surprising to see national monuments come back into the national conversation again.

Public land sales

Will public land sales come up again? The 2025 attempts were some of the biggest public lands stories of the year.

Since federal land being sold to the states was an idea with such support from Utah’s congressional leaders (and the governor and state attorney general’s office), there’s a chance that the state’s delegation seeks ways to put it back on the national agenda.

Lee insists that he has no intentions of selling national parks, but he has often repeated that he agrees with the Utah v. United States lawsuit’s premise that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to hold nearly 60% of the land in the state in perpetuity. In the House, too, Maloy tried to sell public lands in 2025.

“It’s going to be an exhausting game of whack-a-mole,” Weiss said.

Honorable Mentions

Water rights and the Colorado River

The Bureau of Reclamation, part of the Department of the Interior, set a deadline for last fall for the seven states of the Colorado River basin to come to a consensus on water reduction. The deadline came and went without any resolution.

With droughts and the Colorado River basin running low, water rights and the subsequent political and cultural tensions will stay front and center for those who have the patience to stay up-to-date on the debates.

It’s another one of those stories that folks might find boring, but how this plays out — or does not — will affect the West for decades to come.

Reducing the regulatory burden

This past year, the process to dismantle several major regulatory rules began.

Some examples are the National Environmental Policy Act, the 2001 Roadless Rule, the Public Lands Rule as well as several potential changes at the Environmental Protection Agency that relate to the Clean Air Act and forever-chemical classifications.

It is unlikely that such attempts to reduce the regulatory burden will slow down and, subsequently, the rabble from those that agree and disagree will get loud.

A new BLM director

A former New Mexico congressman, Steve Pearce, was nominated to be the next director of the Bureau of Land Management.

Pearce is a polarizing figure in his own right. He has been staunchly supportive of the energy industry and Trump, while also agreeing with several efforts to sell public lands.