Cash Cow: How Trump's Rich Friends are Profiting from Public Lands

The latest kleptocratic actions by the Trump administration from the week of June 8, 2026

American Kleptocracy and Friends of USAID

Jun 10, 2026

Kleptocrats view our public lands not as treasured resources but as opportunities for self-dealing. In previous editions of our Weekly Update (like this one and this one), we highlighted how the Trump administration has already reshaped the Forest Service, gutted environmental safeguards, and weakened democratic oversight. These anti-democratic tactics have created the conditions by which government officials are able to steer policy-making in directions that benefit private interests, including their own.

Control over hundreds of millions of acres of public land, as well as our tax dollars, are at stake. As the examples below illustrate, administration officials, their family members and their rich friends have made investments that position themselves to profit from the very policy agenda they set. The ethics system designed to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest has been sidelined through withheld disclosure documents, mass firings of inspectors general, gutting of civil service staff levels and capacity, retroactive ethics waivers to “resolve” conflicts of interest, and appointments strategically structured to avoid Senate confirmation.

Luxury Livestock on the Public Dime

For decades, federal government policy about ranching on public lands has effectively served as welfare for the rich. Livestock grazing is permitted on more than 240 million acres of federal land. In 2024, the Bureau of Land Management—within the Department of Interior—charged ranchers just $1.35 per animal unit month, which is a 93% discount in comparison to private market rates. In parallel, during the same year, the federal government invested at least $2.5 billion into subsidy programs, such as disaster assistance, that public lands ranchers can access.

The beneficiaries of this policy skew rich. Like ultra-rich. About two-thirds of Bureau of Land Management grazing is controlled by the wealthiest 10% of permittees. This elite group includes billionaires (and Trump allies) like Stan Kroenke and Rupert Murdoch.

Though this has been longstanding policy, we’re witnessing an acceleration under Trump’s Department of the Interior. In May 2026, the White House released a proposed rule on grazing regulations that would weaken government oversight on hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. Conservation groups have raised alarms that the administration is attempting to push through the rule without preparing a full Environmental Impact Statement.

What’s behind this proposed rule? It appears that at least one senior official in the Department of the Interior, Karen Budd-Falen, stands to benefit personally from it.

Public Office, Private Payday

Associate Deputy Secretary Karen Budd-Falen, the third highest official at the Department of the Interior, has announced plans to rewrite the federal regulations that govern public lands ranching. She was already involved in the recent overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act, which will benefit public land ranchers across the country. She’s also committing to evict bison from Montana public lands and increase the number of grazing allotments issued to ranchers, effectively expanding livestock use of public rangelands.

Yet Budd-Falen isn’t just a high-level government official. She also happens to be an owner of large-scale ranching operations, who enjoys grazing allotments on more than 250,000 acres of national public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. If approved, her proposed policy changes would almost certainly benefit her own family’s vast ranching interests, as reported by The Washington Post. Richard Painter, former chief Interior department ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, called it “a pretty slam-dunk financial conflict of interest.”

It should be noted that this isn’t Budd-Falen’s first rodeo, so to speak. During the first Trump administration, she was also a top Interior legal official. In that period, however, she was prohibited from working on grazing matters due to the conflict of interest. It’s no holds barred in Trump 2.0, however: Budd Falen has reportedly received an ethics waiver for work on grazing during Trump’s second term.

Earlier this year, another scandal surfaced. Public Domain reported that Budd Falen had undisclosed financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada—a project that the Trump administration worked to fast-track during its first term and in which it’s taken an equity stake in the second term. According to The New York Times, Budd-Falen’s husband received $3.5 million for water rights from Lithium Nevada Corp., a deal that was contingent on federal regulators approving the mine. She also met with officials from Lithium Nevada Corp. a year into her tenure during Trump’s first term, according to her official calendar.

Though her husband’s lucrative deal with the mine dated back to 2018, Budd-Falen had failed to disclose her ties on financial disclosure forms between 2018 and 2021. These ties were included in the financial disclosure she filed when she joined the current Trump administration in May, but only became public when the Department of the Interior’s Office of Government Ethics released the document after pressure from Public Domain and High Country News.

In January, House Democrats asked the Department of the Interior’s Inspector General (IG) to investigate whether Budd-Falen played a role in the federal approval of the mine that netted her family a multi-million dollar windfall. In March, Democratic Senators also called on the IG to investigate the ranching-related conflicts of interest.

No Confirmation, No Problem

Like other agencies under Trump 2.0, the Department of the Interior is using paperwork sleight-of-hand to avoid Senate confirmation hearings for controversial staff picks. In April 2025, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed a secretarial order handing effective operational control of the entire department to Tyler Hassen, a DOGE operative and former Houston oil executive. Hassen spent nearly two decades as an executive at Basin Holdings, a company involved in manufacturing and servicing oil rigs worldwide, and holds financial stakes in Albemarle Corp., which owns Nevada’s Silver Peak lithium mine.

When Secretary Burgum passed control of the agency to Hassen, Ablemarle Corp. was in the process of seeking authorization to expand its operations from the department. By February of this year, the Bureau of Land Management had approved the request.

A financial disclosure report obtained by the Associated Press suggests Hassen made millions from these companies. In the spring and summer of 2025, Hassen had not divested his energy investments or filed an ethics commitment to break ties with companies that pose a conflict of interest. Hassen avoided Senate confirmation and the ethics requirements that come with it by holding the title of “principal deputy assistant secretary” rather than assistant secretary. Though Hassen has since left the Department of the Interior, his appointment despite compelling documentation of his conflicts of interest is illustrative of how the Trump administration operates.

Remember the Ambler Road

In April, we reported on the Ambler Road in Alaska as an emblematic example of the administration’s self-dealing at the expense of taxpayers. A proposed 211‑mile industrial route through remote Alaska wilderness, Ambler Road would open access to copper and zinc deposits but cut through Gates of the Arctic National Park and lands relied on by more than 30 Alaska Native communities.

In his first and second terms, Trump’s Department of the Interior granted a right-of-way for the project. At the same time, Trump announced that the federal government would take about a 10% equity stake in Trilogy Metals, a company tied to the project. This announcement triggered a stock surge that delivered an estimated windfall of tens of millions of dollars to John Paulson, major shareholder and Trump supporter. Paulson, who owns roughly 9% of the company and raised $50.5 million for Trump at his Palm Beach home in April 2024, saw his stake rise from $30 million to about $100 million overnight. Ten Alaska nonprofits have filed suit. The federal government is now a financial stakeholder in a mining company whose permits are issued by that same government, overseen by officials who bypassed Senate confirmation and whose ethics documents remain undisclosed.

Keeping Public Lands in Public Hands

These cases make clear that public lands policy has become a vehicle for private enrichment, with officials and their allies treating forests, rangelands, and mineral rights as personal asset classes rather than public trust. Reversing that trajectory will require sustained pressure from Congress, the courts, affected communities, and voters to restore real ethics enforcement, close self‑dealing loopholes, and keep public lands in public hands.

Weekly Wins

Court Tosses Illegal Oregon Timber Sale

A federal judge ruled on May 15 that the Bureau of Land Management broke environmental laws when it approved the Blue and Gold timber sale, a roughly 3,000 acre logging project on public land near Yoncalla in Douglas County, Oregon. The judge ordered the agency to throw out the entire plan. Plans to log the Blue and Gold were finalized under the Biden administration and were moving forward under Trump. The court found the Bureau had ignored significant evidence of protected old growth trees within the logging plan, after environmental groups filed for a restraining order. This legal victory represents a direct check on efforts to accelerate logging and mining on public lands without adequate environmental review.

Federal Court Rules against Trump’s USCIS Travel-Ban Pause

Another court ruling struck down US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies that had frozen green cards, work permits, naturalization, and even asylum decisions for immigrants from 39 “travel ban” countries, calling the measures unlawful and “pretextual” national security theater. The ruling vacates four sweeping policies, forcing USCIS to resume processing long-stalled applications and barring officers from treating an applicant’s country of origin as an automatic black mark in discretionary decisions.

86-47 Is A-OK, Says Judge

In another win for free speech, a federal judge in Washington, DC ruled that an anti-Trump protest group can keep flying its “86 47” flag near the National Mall, rejecting the Trump administration’s claim that the slogan is a true threat on the president’s life. Judge Randolph Moss held that in context, the phrase is protected political speech urging Trump’s impeachment and removal, not incitement to violence, and temporarily barred the National Park Service from revoking the group’s permit or taking down the flag.

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Cash Cow: How Trump's Rich Friends are Profiting from Public Lands

The latest kleptocratic actions by the Trump administration from the week of June 8, 2026

Luxury Livestock on the Public Dime

Public Office, Private Payday

No Confirmation, No Problem

Remember the Ambler Road

Keeping Public Lands in Public Hands

Weekly Wins

Court Tosses Illegal Oregon Timber Sale

Federal Court Rules against Trump’s USCIS Travel-Ban Pause

86-47 Is A-OK, Says Judge

More Links, More Kleptocracy

Build a Protection Racket

Bribes and influence peddling

Cronyism and favoritism

Sending a signal from the top

Decentralized violence and surveillance

Get Rid of Independent Checks on Power

Executive power grabs

Centralizing executive authority

Targeting civil society and subnational government

Scientific integrity and academic freedom

Drive Division

Driving social division

Control the Media and Suppress Free Speech

Censorship and retaliatory litigation

Data production, stewardship, and privacy

Coordinate with Kleptocrats Abroad

Aligning with kleptocrats on the international stage

Manipulate Elections

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?