Portland-based timber group set the stage for Trump’s Project 2025 assault on our public lands
There's a rat scurrying in the background that needs to be brought to light.
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Donald Trump promised to become a dictator and open up our public lands to destructive resource extraction. The Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian roadmap for Trump, Project 2025, provided many requests to terminate protections for our public lands.
William Perry Pendley, Trump’s disgraced former acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, wrote the Department of the Interior chapter of Project 2025. Pendley aimed to dissolve the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument for timber harvest expansion.
Conservatives like Pendley believe that the land set aside in the Oregon and California Grant Lands Act mandated permanent timber production. According to Pendley, “the federal government erected a trifecta of illegal barriers to the accomplishment of the congressional mandate, beginning with a response to the listing of the northern spotted owl, continuing a decade later with the designation of the Cascade–Siskiyou National Monument, and concluding in 2017 with an expansion of that monument.”
National monument designations are major obstacles for extractive industries. Still, this right-wing attack also stems from the conservative belief that a President’s designation of national monuments via the Antiquities Acts is a form of government overreach.
They desire authoritarianism, but the goal of electing a dictator to President is to give power to corporations.
Much of the focus on Project 2025’s plan to dissolve the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument is rightly on Trump, Pendley, and the Heritage Foundation. However, I want to shine a light on the rat scurrying behind the scenes and laying the foundation for this assault on our public lands – the American Forest Resource Council.
AFRC is a Portland-based timber industry lobbying group with a history of casting doubt on science and fighting regulations on federal lands. It challenged the use of the Antiquities Act to expand the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in a case that would find its way to the Supreme Court.
The Cato Institute, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, intervened to support AFRC in the court case. The PLF, formed in 1973, helped bring “the modern movement to defend liberty,” according to its origin story. It viewed the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute as part of “a forest of vaunted liberty-oriented groups, interconnected and flourishing.”
The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute are virtually the same from a functional standpoint. Both are right-wing think tanks funded by the same small group of billionaires with the expressed interest in dismantling what semblance of democracy remains in favor of corporatocracy.
The Heritage Foundation supported AFRC’s efforts to challenge the Antiquities Act. It claimed that the act “would continue to allow the executive power of the president to undermine established law” and that “[b]y reining in executive overreach and restoring accountability to the monument designation process, we can ensure that our nation’s treasures are preserved for future generations without sacrificing the law’s integrity.”
The Supreme Court rejected AFRC’s challenge in March. However, conservative Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh favored hearing the case.
Perry told E&E News, “Chief Justice Roberts has made it quite clear he has some concerns about this statute and its abuse. The court wants to meet whatever [question] it’s looking for, and it appears this wasn’t it.” This setback did not deter him. He added, “Nothing the president does is ever set in stone.”
AFRC’s failed court case set the stage for Project 2025 and showed conservatives how to hone their attack on our public lands. AFRC will continue to play a pivotal role in dissolving the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument should Trump be elected for another term in November.
Right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute need lobbying groups like AFRC to drum up support for their anti-democratic campaigns. AFRC legitimizes the false narrative that giving our public lands to billionaire-owned timber companies will magically help those of us in the working class.
This is nothing new. The Wise-Use Movement brought together these think tanks and lobbying groups to “Get Government Off Our Backs” and deregulate extractive industries in the 1990s. Contrary to popular belief, the movement hasn’t ended.
AFRC President Travis Joseph said about the Antiquities Act, “I don’t know a single American who would support giving a president that unlimited power, at least Americans who still believe in democracy.” If Joseph believed in democracy, he wouldn’t be working with the groups trying to dismantle it.
Recommended reading:
Oregon State University researcher carries water for timber industry lobbyists