Trump's "Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage" Order Is the Most Sweeping Pro-Hunter Move in Years
On a warm September evening in Washington, the White House Rose Garden looked more like a field camp gathering than a formal government ceremony. President Trump hosted more than 100 hunters, anglers, and outdoor industry officials for a dinner to announce executive orders rolling back certain hunting and fishing restrictions. The crowd included some of the biggest names in American sportsmen culture — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was there, along with Bass Pro Shops' Johnny Morris and Jeff Crane, president and CEO of the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation. Then Trump signed two landmark executive orders that, depending on who you ask, either mark the dawn of a new era for American hunters or represent a carefully worded promise still waiting to be kept.
On Thursday, September 17, 2026, President Donald Trump signed two major directives to benefit outdoor heritage: the "Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage" and the "Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation" Executive Orders. Together, they represent the most comprehensive presidential action on behalf of American sportsmen in recent memory — touching everything from where hunters can legally set foot on federal land to what ammunition they can load into their rifles. The details matter, the politics are complicated, and the implications for millions of American hunters and fishermen are substantial.
What the "Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage" Order Actually Says
Trump's "Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage" order, signed September 17, directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and other Cabinet officials to propose changes to policies that prevent access to public lands for recreation, infrastructure repair, and wildlife management. But the order goes well beyond a single bureaucratic directive. The executive order includes provisions to encourage easements and land exchanges to boost access to landlocked federal land, using volunteers to target invasive species and work on wildlife management, and stressing the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle.
The order's preamble doesn't mince words about its rationale. "Hunting opportunities in our Nation have declined due to the Federal Government's regulatory overreach, confusing and inconsistent access policies, and heavy-handed restrictions on hunter education and recruitment efforts," the document states. Its answer is what the White House calls a "presumption of accessibility" for federally managed land — a philosophical inversion of how federal agencies have traditionally approached land use decisions, shifting the default from restriction toward access.
Trump signed the executive order to expand access to America's public lands and waterways, foster and recruit the next generation of hunters, and promote robust and healthy wild game populations. The order ropes in multiple cabinet departments, with the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of Commerce directed to propose changes to policies that prevent access to public lands for recreation, infrastructure repair, and wildlife management, as well as to encourage volunteers to manage wildlife populations and invasive species, allow the use of assistive technology on access trails and hunting locations for people with disabilities, and allow the use of traditional lead ammunition and tackle.
The Two National Monuments Now Open to Hunters
The most concrete and immediately consequential provision of the order targets two specific national monuments that have historically been off-limits to hunters. The order directs Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to allow hunting within California's Castle Mountains National Monument and Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve within 90 days.
Castle Mountains, California
The California monument protects almost 21,000 acres of land in the Mojave Desert near Nevada. Established under President Obama in 2016, Castle Mountains sits in a corner of the Mojave where desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, and other game species roam across rugged terrain that has largely been inaccessible to hunters under monument designation rules. The monument adjoins the Mojave National Preserve, which already permits hunting, making the opening of Castle Mountains a logical extension of existing access rather than a radical departure. In California, at least 75,000 acres of public land were identified as entirely surrounded by private property in a 2025 investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, illustrating just how fractured the state's public access landscape already is — and why monument access matters to hunters trying to find legal ground to work.
Craters of the Moon, Idaho
Craters of the Moon National Monument is in the south-central region of Idaho between Boise and Yellowstone National Park and features a 618 square-mile lava field. While the stark volcanic landscape might not conjure the image of a classic hunting ground, its preserve section — which is managed under National Park Service rules that differ from monument-only designations — harbors pronghorn, mule deer, and other species. The order's expansion here is particularly significant for Idaho hunters who have long watched that land remain locked up while neighboring BLM parcels were open.
Both openings carry important caveats. Hunting must be appropriately managed, and the order states it would not put the historic and scientific interests protected by these monuments at risk. It does not allow unrestricted hunting or automatically permit hunting of endangered species. Specifically, Trump's order allows hunting on these federal lands only for species that are not protected under 16 U.S.C. 1533 of the U.S. Endangered Species Act. In practice, that means state fish and wildlife agencies will retain meaningful authority over seasons, bag limits, and species management — the federal order opens the door, but the states will decide who walks through and when.
Lead Ammunition: A Decades-Long Debate Gets Resolved — For Now
No provision in the order generated more reaction from the hunting community than the reversal of Biden-era restrictions on lead ammunition. Under former President Biden, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2023 expanded a ban on the use of lead tackle and ammunition in eight national wildlife refuges to safeguard these areas from potential lead poisoning risks. That ban, and the broader regulatory momentum toward non-lead alternatives, had become a flashpoint for hunters, shooting sports retailers, and ammunition manufacturers across the country.
Republican lawmakers and hunters pushed back against these restrictions, citing increased costs associated with alternatives to lead products. The price gap between traditional lead ammunition and copper or other non-lead alternatives is not trivial — particularly for hunters who shoot high volumes during seasons, reload their own cartridges, or operate on tight budgets. The president directed his administration to authorize the use of traditional lead ammunition and tackle within 180 days of the order.
Trump's own commentary on the subject at the Rose Garden signing was characteristically unscripted. "I don't know what the hell that means, but I know you wanted it and I'm here for you. So the order protects the use of affordable, traditional lead ammunition, that sounds good to me," the president told the assembled crowd. The comment drew laughs, but the policy behind it carries real weight for the industry. The executive order includes several NSSF-priority issues, including protecting the use of traditional ammunition, opening public land access, and increasing Sunday hunting opportunities on federal and state lands.
Unlocking Landlocked Public Land: The Access Problem Nobody Talks About Enough
Beyond the monument openings and the ammunition fight, one of the order's most practical provisions addresses a problem that has quietly frustrated hunters for generations: landlocked federal parcels. The states with the most landlocked federal parcels are generally those with checkerboard land ownership, particularly in the western region of the country. These are federal lands surrounded by private or other non-federal property, making access difficult without permission or an easement.
The administration proposed expanding hunting access by unlocking checkerboarded and landlocked parcels through voluntary access easements and land exchanges. The order also opens inaccessible public land through cooperative agreements with private property landowners. This approach — using incentives and agreements rather than condemnation or forced easements — threads a political needle, appealing to both hunters who want access and rural landowners who are skeptical of federal overreach.
It is not yet clear which states will be further affected by the proposal to open landlocked federal parcels, and implementation will require individual negotiations and agreements that could take years to finalize. Still, the directive sends an unmistakable signal to federal land managers: access for hunters should be a priority, not an afterthought.
Volunteers, Invasive Species, and a New Model for Wildlife Management
One of the more operationally creative sections of the order enlists hunters themselves as a force multiplier for wildlife management. Section 4 tells the Secretaries of War, Interior, and Agriculture to coordinate with state agencies on growing game populations. The tools listed include voluntarily removing barriers to wildlife movement, reducing invasive species, habitat degradation, and disease, and targeted management of predators and competing species. It also calls for prescribed fire, vegetation management, water development, grazing, and agricultural practices, along with voluntary agreements with private landowners and producers.
The volunteer provision is where things get genuinely interesting for serious hunters. Ryan Callaghan pointed to examples like mountain goats in Grand Teton National Park and invasive pythons in Big Cypress National Preserve, places where hunters could help do the work. The Burmese python problem in South Florida has been well-documented and catastrophic for native wildlife — opening the door to organized volunteer hunter involvement represents a pragmatic, market-driven solution to what has been an intractable problem for agency biologists working with constrained budgets.
The order also takes aim at one of the more overlooked problems in American hunting culture: wasted protein. Section 5 is about feeding people. The Secretary of Agriculture is directed to issue guidance supporting state venison donation programs, including through the Emergency Food Assistance Program. This is a genuinely bipartisan idea — hunters have long donated game meat to food banks and local charities, but a patchwork of state regulations has made the process inconsistent and sometimes legally murky. Federal guidance could standardize and expand those programs significantly.
Sunday Hunting: A State Rights Question the Feds Are Nudging
The order's encouragement of expanded Sunday hunting is simultaneously one of its most culturally significant provisions and one of its most legally limited. The executive order encourages state fish and wildlife agencies to expand Sunday hunting opportunities on federal and state lands where restrictions remain. Sunday hunting bans are a relic of blue laws — colonial-era religious restrictions that have survived, in modified form, in a handful of states, particularly in the Northeast. For hunters in states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, Sunday hunting has been a contentious issue for decades.
Many of the hunting-related initiatives named in the order are voluntary and some, like encouraging more hunting on Sundays, are generally up to states and outside the purview of the federal government. NSSF has led the effort to roll back antiquated Sunday hunting restrictions that create artificial barriers to hunting participation and mentoring a rising generation of conservation-minded hunters. The federal executive order can nudge, but cannot compel — states with Sunday bans will have to change their own laws, and the political dynamics in those states are complex, with landowner lobbies and traditional rural constituencies often split on the question.
The River Lottery Reform and Access for Disabled Hunters
Two additional provisions deserve attention from serious sportsmen. On river access, within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Agriculture shall review high-demand Forest Service-administered river access lotteries, and shall initiate the reform of such lotteries to prioritize United States citizens, including prior unsuccessful applicants, and prohibit the use of automatic computer entries into the lotteries. This reform targets a frustration shared by countless fly fishermen and river hunters who have watched coveted permit draws get gamed by automated software entries and guide services running bot-assisted applications.
On disability access, the order directs agencies to authorize the use of assistive technology on access trails and hunting locations. This provision, quiet as it is, could meaningfully expand hunting participation among the nearly 61 million American adults living with some form of disability — a population that has historically been underserved by public lands access infrastructure.
Building on an Already Active First Year
The September 17 orders didn't emerge from a vacuum. Trump said the hunting order builds off a new rule the Interior Department finalized in August that has allowed hunting at 95% of National Wildlife Refuge System lands, encompassing 92 million acres. The move extended hunting rights to 107 national wildlife refuges and four national fish hatcheries, following executive action Trump took during his first month back in office.
During Trump's first term, he signed the Great American Outdoors Act — the single largest investment in America's national parks and public lands in history and the most significant conservation achievement since Teddy Roosevelt's presidency. By the end of his first term, his administration designated 1.3 million new acres of wilderness, added 1,645 miles of new trails to the National Recreational Trails System, and expanded hunting and fishing opportunities across more than 2.3 million acres of land. The current orders extend that record further, making the argument that conservation and hunting access are complementary rather than competing values.
The administration has also moved aggressively on wolf management, a perennial flashpoint in the West. In an appeal to ranchers, Trump this month directed his administration to begin the process to remove the gray wolf and Mexican gray wolf from the federal list of endangered species. Taken together with the hunting orders, the administration is assembling a comprehensive policy portfolio aimed squarely at Western sportsmen and rural constituencies.
The Second Order: Saltwater Anglers Finally Get Their Day
While the hunting order dominated the evening's headlines, the White House also announced a second wide-ranging executive order, "Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation," on Thursday. For the estimated 15 million-plus saltwater recreational anglers in the country, this order is every bit as consequential as its hunting counterpart.
The executive order on fishing loosens restrictions on boaters and saltwater anglers to allow for multiyear permitting, expanded fishing seasons, and access to more fisheries. It directs federal agencies to revise recreational fisheries management policies, modernize recreational fishing data collection, streamline permitting and marine access regulations, establish artificial reef programs, and prioritize recreational fishing interests in federal ocean and coastal resource management decisions.
The order recognizes that recreational saltwater angling "is a strong driver of our Nation's outdoor economy." The order's purpose is to modernize federal fisheries management by shifting the federal posture from restricting recreational access to fishing to actively empowering affiliated industries and coastal communities. American Sportfishing Association President and CEO Glenn Hughes praised the action, saying "This Executive Order will have long-term benefits for the sportfishing industry and America's 15.5 million saltwater recreational anglers."
Industry and Conservation Reactions: Praise, Skepticism, and Nuance
The reaction from the conservation and hunting community was broadly positive, though not uniformly so. Joel Webster, chief conservation officer for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said "We appreciate the administration's support for wildlife corridors, access to landlocked public land, and management of invasive species and wildlife disease. We look forward to working with the departments and agencies to implement several elements of the order."
Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation President and CEO Kyle Weaver thanked President Trump and his administration "for recognizing the vital role hunters play in sustaining wildlife" and for issuing the order, which "strongly aligns with RMEF's mission to ensure the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage."
Secretary Doug Burgum stated, "Sportsmen are among our greatest conservationists, and this administration is committed to supporting the men and women who help protect our public lands and wildlife."
Not everyone signed off without reservation. Ryan Callaghan, CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, offered a measured take. "I would applaud it for what it is," Callaghan said. "It's a clear nudge or go ahead for the agencies and departments to put an emphasis on these things, which are largely all positive." But he cautioned that the executive order on hunting requires between 60 and 365-day deadlines for the regulations and policy changes, which is "where we're going to see the actual details."
From a more skeptical quarter, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers President Land Tawney offered sharper criticism of the administration's broader record. "Starting with the dismantling of the agencies in charge of public lands through DOGE, proposed budgets that drastically cut management agencies, and an energy abundance agenda that puts billionaires before the people, the attacks on the hunting community by this administration have been sustained and numerous," Tawney said. "So while we appreciate some of what is in this order, by no shape or form does it bring them out of the doghouse." It is the tension between executive-order rhetoric and actual agency-level management — staffing, budgets, enforcement capacity — that concerns critics who have watched public land management agencies strain under workforce cuts.
The Next Generation of Hunters: Recruitment as Policy
The order also promotes "growing a new generation of hunters" by funding youth archery and hunter education programs, expanding Sunday hunting opportunities on government lands, and streamlining hunting authorization processes. This is perhaps the most consequential long-term provision in the entire document. Hunting license sales and participation rates have been in secular decline for decades, and with fewer hunters comes less Pittman-Robertson Act funding — the federal excise tax on firearms and ammunition that has financed most of American wildlife conservation since 1937.
The executive order on hunting requires deadlines for regulations and policy changes, with a focus on declining hunting rates across the country and involving various federal agencies in the initiatives. The "Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage" Executive Order directs federal agencies to expand public access to hunting and outdoor recreation, encourage hunter recruitment, increase wildlife management efforts, and support game meat donation programs, with the stated goal of strengthening America's hunting traditions and conservation practices. Youth archery programs in particular have shown strong results as on-ramps to broader hunting participation — the order's emphasis on that pipeline reflects an understanding that the demographic problem facing American hunting is real and will require sustained, institutional investment to reverse.
What Comes Next: The 90-Day and 180-Day Clocks Are Running
The most important thing to understand about executive orders is that they are directives, not legislation. The policy details — seasons, bag limits, specific easement agreements, ammunition authorization rules — will emerge from the regulatory process over the coming months. The ultimate effects of both orders will depend on how federal agencies interpret and implement the directives in the months ahead.
The open-until-closed default, the lead ammo policy, and the landlocked access tools all arrive as proposals due around mid-March 2027. That means the next hunting season in most of the country will still operate largely under existing rules, with the full picture emerging in the regulatory proposals and agency guidance documents that follow. Hunters watching for concrete change should track Interior Department rulemaking notices and Forest Service guidance documents over the next six months — that is where the real action will happen.
On the legislative front, if the Senate passes the Protecting Access for Hunters and Anglers Act and it is signed, lead protections on federal land become law — something far more durable than an executive order that a future administration could reverse. The fate of that legislation may ultimately matter more than anything signed in the Rose Garden on September 17.
"We believe that public lands belong to the American people and to the public, and hunters, fishers and outdoorsmen should be able to access them," Trump said to the assembled crowd. That sentiment commands genuine consensus across most of the American sporting community, regardless of political affiliation. The question — as it always is with executive actions — is whether the agencies below the signature line have the resources, the will, and the direction to turn a declaration into a hunting trip. The 90-day clock on the monument openings is already running.
