The Briefing:
- Trump signed two orders on September 17 opening the Castle Mountains and Craters of the Moon national monuments to hunting and guaranteeing the use of traditional lead ammunition and tackle.
- The move extends an 18-month rollback of Biden-era conservation rules: the White House has already killed the BLM's Public Lands Rule, the Roadless Rule, protections on three Pacific marine monuments, and the Endangered Species Act's definition of "harm."
- The firearms industry is celebrating the backing; conservation coalitions insist the lead restrictions were grounded in scientific evidence that hasn't changed.
With more than 100 hunters, anglers and outdoor-industry executives seated at tables in the Rose Garden, Donald Trump signed two executive orders Thursday scrapping his predecessor's lead ammunition restrictions and opening two national monuments to hunting. "We're eliminating those restrictions, and we're doing it immediately," Trump told the crowd during the dinner.
At the same event, Trump was explicit about who the order was aimed at: "This order also expands fishing seasons and fishing quotas, undoing another Biden disaster," he said — the line that best captured the evening's tone.
The move lands less than two months before the midterm elections and touches a constituency the White House views as pivotal: rural voters, the firearms industry, and a recreation sector that, by official estimates, generates more than $1.2 trillion a year and supports over 5 million jobs.
A Pressure Campaign Against Biden's Environmental Record
The scene played out as political theater as much as policy rollout. Trump framed the orders as payback against a bureaucracy that, in his telling, strangled hunters and anglers — citing boat speed limits and electric-motor mandates among the grievances.
The central target, though, is lead. The Fish and Wildlife Service had approved a 2022 rule expanding access to national refuges in exchange for phasing out lead ammunition and tackle, with cutoff dates set for 2026. The new order reverses that logic outright, explicitly directing agencies to permit "the use of traditional lead ammunition and tackle."
What the Hunting Order Actually Requires
The hunting order sets hard deadlines. Beyond the 90-day ultimatum for the two monuments — limited to species not protected under the Endangered Species Act — the secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and War have 180 days to propose regulatory changes expanding federal access.
Agriculture has 60 days to overhaul river-access lotteries on Forest Service land, prioritizing U.S. citizens and blocking automated computer entries. Within a year, Interior must push states to expand Sunday hunting.
Another target is "landlocked" terrain — public acreage surrounded by private property with no legal way in. Roughly 9.52 million acres of federal land in the West are locked this way, according to mapping by onX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, with Montana among the states holding the largest share. The order pushes voluntary easements, land swaps and cooperative agreements to open them up.
A Wider Offensive: Everything Else Trump Has Undone From Biden
The fight over lead and monuments didn't happen in isolation. Since January 2025, the White House has been dismantling Biden's conservation framework piece by piece, and the September 17 order is simply its latest chapter focused on hunters and anglers.
In May 2026, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum canceled the Public Lands Rule, the 2024 regulation that had placed conservation on equal footing with mining, drilling and logging as a legitimate use of the Bureau of Land Management's 245 million acres. Burgum argued the rule exceeded the agency's authority and blocked access to energy resources.
A year earlier, in June 2025, the Agriculture Department repealed the 2001 Roadless Rule, which for a quarter-century had restricted road-building and logging across nearly 40 million acres of national forest. Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the repeal as a wildfire-prevention measure.
By June 2026, the rollback reached the ocean: a presidential proclamation reopened three Pacific Ocean national monuments to commercial fishing, more than 300 million acres that had carried protections dating to the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations. A month later, in July, federal wildlife regulators redefined the word "harm" under the Endangered Species Act, narrowing legal protection across 87 million acres of habitat.
Congress did its part too: using the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers overturned four land-management plans covering Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, while Interior revoked mineral withdrawals that had shielded the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and the Pecos River watershed in New Mexico. Taken together, the moves trace a consistent strategy — shifting federal land and water management away from conservation and toward extraction and recreation, with hunting and fishing serving as the most popular, least controversial face of a shift that draws far more resistance on energy and timber.
Fishing: Deregulation, Reefs and Real-Time Data
The second order targets the ocean. Commerce and NOAA must suspend or review, within 30 days, regulations burdening boaters and marine businesses; evaluate multiyear charter-operator permits of at least three years within 60 days; and review artificial-reef policy in marine sanctuaries within 120 days.
Its most ambitious piece is the Federal Outer Continental Shelf Reef-in-Place Program, which allows decommissioned oil and gas platforms to stay on the seafloor as artificial reefs. The carve-out is explicit: it does not apply to offshore wind infrastructure.
The data system changes too. Mail-in surveys used to estimate recreational catch are on the way out, replaced by mandatory electronic reporting through mobile apps, with Atlantic striped bass singled out as the flagship fishery.
Industry Cheers, Conservationists Sound the Alarm
The industry reaction was immediate. Joe Bartozzi, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, praised the order, saying "this administration stands with America's sportsmen and women." The trade group notes the Pittman-Robertson excise tax funneled $1.3 billion to states in February 2026, with $804 million of that coming directly from firearm and ammunition manufacturers.
On the other side, the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks warned in June that the lead phase-outs rested on "sound science" and that risks to wildlife and to people who eat game meat haven't diminished.
Why It Matters Now
The calculation is transparent. By dressing environmental deregulation in the language of individual freedom and family tradition, the White House turns a technical dispute over ammunition into a cultural symbol. Chained together with the Public Lands Rule, the Roadless Rule and the marine monuments, it builds a broader narrative: every Biden-era rule that falls gets sold as a win for ordinary citizens over the state. In Western states where federal land defines the local economy, that framing can outweigh any debate over toxicity or habitat loss.
