William Perry Pendley wrote the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025. Doug Burgum now runs the Interior Department, and he is carrying it out. Endangered species, America’s public lands, and the sacred places on them are paying the price.
Key Takeaways
- Project 2025 wanted wild horses disposed of. The government sold 3,700 of them last year, many for as little as $25, through a loophole that for some ends at a slaughter plant.
- Project 2025 complained that Trump’s first-term monument cuts didn’t go far enough. He has now cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, both in Utah, by about 90 percent each.
- Project 2025 wanted the Endangered Species Act kept out of the way of “economic development.” The wildlife agencies didn’t wait for Congress. They rewrote the rules, and 20 states and the District of Columbia sued on September 9. Five days later, Fish and Wildlife told its field offices that killing an endangered animal breaks no law unless the killing was the point.
- Project 2025 called for “aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border.” Homeland Security has waived cultural and environmental laws to build it, and crews are blasting Kuuchamaa, a Kumeyaay sacred mountain on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The mustangs had waited years in an Idaho feedlot, penned there since helicopters ran them down off the range. In March, the Bureau of Land Management finally shipped 68 of them out. The trailers went 1,800 miles east to Brandon Jones, an Ohio livestock trader who had paid the government $25 a head. Around midnight the next day, two double-decker cattle trucks came for the horses. Jones won’t say where they went.
Jones told The New York Times, which ran the investigation on its front page in August, that he has nothing to do with Fred Bauer. Bauer is one of the largest exporters of slaughter horses to Canada, where they are processed into meat for human consumption and sold abroad.
William Perry Pendley, who wrote Project 2025’s Interior chapter, once ran the bureau now selling those horses. A federal judge ruled in 2020 that he had served unlawfully as its acting director for 424 days. His chapter asked Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act and to rein in the Endangered Species Act. Congress has done neither. Interior, under Secretary Doug Burgum, has found other ways, and the horses show how.
Project 2025’s section on wild horses ends by telling Congress to pass a law letting the bureau “dispose humanely of these animals.” Congress never did, and it still bars the bureau from spending money to kill healthy wild horses. A 2017 survey of 556 registered voters, commissioned by wild horse advocates, found 80 percent of respondents, including 86 percent of Trump voters, opposed killing them.
Livestock inspection records show some of the government’s mustangs on trucks bound for Canadian slaughter plants.
The bureau posts wild horses on its online adoption site, and after three one-week listings with no takers, it labels a horse unadoptable and can sell it. Once sold, the horse loses its protections. The buyer promises in writing not to slaughter it or knowingly sell it to someone who will. The middleman signs nothing, and the horses go to Canada. The government can spend more than $3,000 to capture a mustang and bring it to market, then sell it for $25.
Slaughter plants pay up to $750 per horse.
Clare Staples runs Skydog Sanctuary, a rescue for wild horses and burros with ranches in California and Oregon. She wrote to Burgum the day the Times story ran, demanding the sales program be shut down. She had spent more than a year combing the bureau’s own sales records and standing at the kill pens. Her count runs 19 months, a longer stretch than the government’s one-year figure: 6,331 wild horses sold, against a historic average of about 1,200 a year. More than half were one to four years old, prime adoption age, and nearly three-quarters sold for $25 or less. Staples has tracked 333 wild horses and burros into kill pens this year alone. Selling protected animals for $25 to be butchered abroad, she said, is “a betrayal of the law and the American people.”
Sacred Lands
Trump signed the monument orders in the Oval Office on July 13, 2026, with Utah’s senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis, Gov. Spencer Cox, and state House Speaker Mike Schultz lined up behind him. The proclamations took effect September 11, and Bears Ears was reduced from 1.36 million acres to 121,000, a 91 percent cut. Grand Staircase-Escalante lost about the same share. Conservation groups sued on September 2.
The proclamation itself acknowledges the twin buttes known as the Bears Ears, “which are considered sacred by the Native American tribes that call this area their ancestral home.” The same document lists “critical minerals such as silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.”
The proclamation also ended the Bears Ears Commission (BEC), through which the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni had co-managed the monument with the federal government. In its place is an advisory committee whose named seats number 15: five for the tribes, four for San Juan County and its towns, and six for people recommended by Utah’s governor. The secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture now have no “obligation to engage, consult, or coordinate with the BEC or a comparable entity,” the proclamation states, though it still requires them to consult tribes under other laws.
Pendley has fought over sacred ground before. In 1996, Mountain States Legal Foundation, the Denver firm he then led, sued the Park Service over a voluntary June climbing ban at Devils Tower in Wyoming, a site many Northern Plains tribes hold sacred. A federal appeals court tossed the case in 1999, ruling that the climbers had no standing to sue.
In his Project 2025 chapter, Pendley wrote that Trump’s first-term review had been “insufficient” because only two Utah monuments were cut. The next administration, the chapter says, “must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906.” The law protects “cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands,” and it confines each monument to the “smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” Whether that clause lets a president carve down a monument a predecessor created is the question the conservation groups have asked a federal court to answer.
The day the cuts took effect, mining companies filed 16 new claims on land stripped from Bears Ears.
What Counts as Harm
Since 1975, wrecking an animal’s habitat has counted as harming the animal. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service deleted that definition in a rule published July 14, 2026, and wrote nothing to replace it. The rescission took effect September 14. Logging the last of an owl’s nesting ground no longer harms the owl. Two more rules followed a week later. Newly listed threatened species lost their automatic protection. Critical habitat can now be trimmed when a company makes a credible case about the cost of preserving it.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia sued in federal court in California on September 9, five days before the harm rescission was due to take effect. The rules “are wrong on the merits, the morals and the law,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said. The complaint calls the harm rescission “a reversal of staggering proportions.” The rescission’s own preamble invites companies holding “take” permits to hand them back “in order to not have to continue spending resources to mitigate.”
Brian Nesvik, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, signed the memo on September 14 and sent it to every one of the agency’s field offices. The New York Times obtained a copy. It turns on one word. Until now, “take” has covered killing or injuring a listed animal whether or not anyone meant to. Now it covers only the killings someone intended. Wildlife advocates say that lets a logging company knowingly cut down a forest full of endangered bats, as long as it was after the timber.
Most endangered animals that die at human hands are killed by accident, in the course of somebody’s business, the Times reported. Because those deaths have counted as take, developers seek permission first. A builder who wants to put houses where an endangered salamander lives traditionally applies for an incidental take permit promising to protect a few of them, or pays to conserve some elsewhere, and the government forgives the rest. The memo appears to upend that arrangement. If an accidental death breaks no law, nobody needs the permit.
Andrew Mergen argued endangered species cases for the Justice Department and teaches law at Harvard now. Everyone has understood the act to mean one thing, he told the Times: “Don’t kill endangered species.” The memo drains it of that meaning. People are held responsible all the time for harm they never intended but should have seen coming, Mergen said.
Interior’s press office wouldn’t say why it adopted the new reading, or whether the memo is already in force, and sent an unsigned statement saying the act “continues to prohibit take of endangered wildlife.” Stateline reported on September 21 that the memo’s instructions to staff take effect immediately.
Pendley’s chapter asks Congress to keep the Endangered Species Act from being used to “seize private property, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states.” Interior got there with a rule and a memo. Pendley cheered the result. The new reading, he told Cowboy State Daily, “will shield innocent people from litigation by the country’s largest law firm, the Department of Justice.”
The Border
Kuuchamaa, a 3,885-foot peak that straddles the border near Tecate, is sacred to the Kumeyaay. In their creation story, a shaman became the mountain. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992, and the listing itself states that disturbing its natural state would be sacrilegious. Contractors have been blasting it anyway, and the explosions send rock tumbling down its Mexican side.
From a park in Tecate, Baja California, about half a mile away, Norma Meza Calles can hear the crews breaking boulders. Kumeyaay from both sides of the border have climbed the mountain for generations to sit on those boulders, Meza Calles, a Kumeyaay leader who works as a guide, told KPBS. “They’re destroying it,” she said in Spanish. “No one ever consented or supported the use of dynamite on the mountain,” Emily Burgueno, a Kumeyaay Nation member in California, told the Associated Press. The Department of Homeland Security waived cultural and environmental laws to speed the work.
Project 2025’s Homeland Security chapter directs the Pentagon to “assist in aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border.” Congress has since put more than $46 billion behind construction. The waiver power Homeland Security is using comes from a 1996 immigration law that Congress broadened in 2005, long before Project 2025 existed.
In Southern Arizona, the wall has reached O’odham country, which straddles the border. In April, a Homeland Security contractor damaged the Las Playas Intaglio, a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge that pointed toward the Gulf of California. The Tohono O’odham Nation sued Homeland Security in June to stop a 30-foot wall in three places along the stretch of border that crosses its reservation. Tribal leaders posted No Trespassing signs on August 7. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon denied the Nation’s request to halt construction a week later. On August 25, according to the Nation, contractors entered the reservation with about 20 masked, armed Border Patrol agents. Homeland Security says the work sits inside the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot federal strip along the border. The Nation appealed on August 26.
About 30 miles west of the reservation, a second fence is planned 150 feet from the existing wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Crews have already cleared ground a few miles east of Quitobaquito Springs, a desert oasis where O’odham families have held ceremonies for generations and where the endangered Quitobaquito pupfish and the Sonoyta mud turtle live. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, a Hia-Ced O’odham elder whose great-great-grandparents walked about 50 miles through the Sonoran Desert to the springs, called the wall “another slap in the face” to her ancestors. “This is not ours to own. It is ours to protect,” Verlon Jose, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, said at the springs.
Nobody Home
The National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to weigh what a project will do to historic places, and to consult tribes, before they build. Pendley’s chapter asked Interior to revive a first-term order “clarifying” those reviews. Hiring rules under the Trump administration cap the agencies at one new employee for every four who leave, so most vacancies stay open.
Landscape Architecture Magazine combed Office of Personnel Management data and counted about 6,700 Park Service departures, close to three in 10 of the people who worked there in 2024.
The White House wanted deeper cuts. Its 2026 budget asked Congress to take nearly $4 billion from the land agencies. Appropriators balked and held Park Service funding roughly level, but a budget line can’t rehire a ranger who took the buyout. This year’s request targets the Historic Preservation Fund, which pays for state and tribal historic preservation offices. It would cut the fund by 95 percent.
What Hasn’t Happened Yet
Pendley’s complaint about Trump’s first term was that the cuts to protected lands stopped at the Utah line. The new list doesn’t. In April 2025, a senior Interior official told E&E News the department was weighing cuts to at least six monuments: Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon. Burgum said the monuments were under review but “not a top priority of the administration.” Two are done. Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni covers 917,618 acres around Grand Canyon National Park, takes in Red Butte and land the 13 tribes of the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition fought to protect, and keeps new uranium mining out. It is still on the list.
The horses never needed a vote. The ban on killing them rides in the spending bill nearly every year, and the White House left it out of its 2027 budget request, as it did the year before. Congress put it back last time.
