America’s current president is trying to dismantle the nation’s public lands and the laws that protect them, but those same public lands are a lot more popular with Americans than he is.
President Trump claims he is more popular than he is and that the American people are somehow against protecting the lands that belong to them. Let’s debunk the myths he’s spreading.
Here are five ways America’s public lands are more popular than its president and his policies.
According to a CNN poll released early November 2025, Trump has a 37% job approval rating, while a whopping 63% of Americans say he is doing a bad job. That is the second highest disapproval rating for any American president, the only higher one being for Trump himself during his first term as president, after he incited the January 6 Capitol Hill riot.
Let’s compare those numbers to the approval ratings of US public land agencies. A 2025 poll conducted by Colorado College found that a majority of Western voters approve of the jobs done by federal land management agencies.
The US Forest Service has an approval rating of 79%, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is at 75%, and the National Park Service is the most popular with a stellar 86% approval rating. There are few things in America that are as universally loved as America’s national parks.
And, despite the attempts of Trump and his allies to vilify and politicize it, the Environmental Protection Agency is also viewed by Americans as doing a great job, with three out of five of those polled supporting their work.
Also included in the Colorado College study was a rebuke of the current Administration’s attempts to alter management of federal lands.
The Administration is proposing massive budget cuts to federal land management agencies; three-quarters of those polled oppose these budget cuts.
The Administration is pushing out career employees at public lands, but a November 2025 poll by the National Parks Conservation Association shows that only 16% of Americans support these staffing cuts, meaning national park employees have bipartisan support to keep their jobs. And this public support is similar for employees at other public land agencies, with 9 out of 10 Western voters polled in the Colorado College study saying they prefer career public land professionals over politicians to make decisions about federal public lands.
And here’s the big one: Trump and his allies have been making a major push to give federal lands over to states, but 65% of Western voters–people who live in states with lots of federal lands–oppose that change. And that number has increased 9% in the last eight years, showing that federal public lands are gaining more support, not less.
Even the people who live in the states Trump is claiming are being harmed in some way by federally-owned public lands disagree with him.
In recent months the Trump Administration has announced its plan to lift the Roadless Rule, which protects wilderness areas in US Forest Service lands. The Administration shortened the normal period for public comments, and yet still they received over 200,000 comments on the proposed rule change. Over 99% of those comments were opposed to ending the rule.
These Americans overwhelmingly spoke out against ending federal protections for public wilderness areas, issuing a rebuke of the president’s policies.
In the summer of 2025, US national parks were ordered to display signs asking for comments critical of the job that park staff were doing and of the information that national parks were disseminating. The signs asked visitors to be wary of information that is “negative” about American history or science; in other words, asking for national park visitors to rat out parks for offering any accurate historical or scientific information that the Administration doesn’t like.
So how did park visitors respond? By commenting on their love of parks and their approval of the jobs that national park staff are doing.
A batch of these public comments leaked to NPR, showed not a single criticism and pages and pages of praise for national parks. Once again, when given the opportunity, the American public is standing up for their public lands.
An April 2025 survey by the Trust For Public Land found that 71% of Americans, including 61% of Trump voters, oppose the selling off of federal public lands.
Despite this bipartisan opposition, the Trump Administration is moving forward with plans to sell off federal public lands, proposing transferring tens of millions of acres of land belonging to the American public to oil, gas, mining, and timber companies. The president is proving yet again that he doesn’t care about the wants and needs of the American people, including his own voters.
Conclusion
The situation for America’s public lands is dire at the moment; the threats to them are real. But these threats are not the will of the American people.
America’s president is courting the super rich by offering them access to public lands, but he is unpopular and so are his policies.
If you support America’s public lands, you are not alone; in fact you are in the majority. America’s public lands have the popularity Trump wishes he had. And we, the American people, can and will continue to fight for them.
Ready to support America’s public lands? Here are five ways to get started.