Enter MABA: Trump’s Version of Greenwashing

First there was MAGA—Make America Great Again—the acronym that has come to symbolize the political movement Donald Trump kicked off in 2015. Then came MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, Trump second-term health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s controversial effort to change Americans’ approach to medicine.

Trump has finally gotten around to stretching his signature campaign theme to conservation. Enter MABA, or Make America Beautiful Again, a new White House commission that will, according to an executive order signed by President Trump earlier this month, further the mission of “conserving our great American national parks and outdoor recreation areas.”

According to the MABA executive order, the main problem facing public lands is excessive regulation—a view not generally shared by conservationists. “Years of mismanagement, regulatory overreach, and neglect of routine maintenance require action,” the executive order says. “Land-use restrictions have stripped hunters, fishers, hikers, and outdoorsmen of access to public lands that belong to them. These bureaucratic restrictions have undermined outdoor traditions and threatened conservation funding.” 

In response to the executive order, the Mojave Desert Land Trust condemned what it described as “the troubling narrative that our public lands have incurred maintenance backlogs and poor conservation outcomes due to burdensome regulations. In reality, many of these issues actually stem from declining staffing and funding for land management agencies.”

In effect, the commission could pave the way for more all-terrain vehicles on public lands and fewer restrictions on hunting. Both are Republican priorities at odds with what are widely considered to be sound conservation practices, especially in fragile ecosystems. Trump has also weakened protections inherent to the Endangered Species Act.

"Despite its language around stewardship, this initiative promotes deregulation, expanded industrial access, and voluntary measures that have historically failed to protect ecosystems.”

Critics say the new commission will do little to beautify America and will instead only act as cover for a conservative agenda that aims to strip protections from public lands. 

The commission is “less a conservation effort and more a political stunt,” said Jennifer Mamola, policy director of the John Muir Project, which has decried the Trump administration’s efforts to expand logging in national forests. “It repackages extractive agendas under the guise of patriotism and public service. Despite its language around stewardship, this initiative promotes deregulation, expanded industrial access, and voluntary measures that have historically failed to protect ecosystems.”

Supporters of the MABA commission disagree, pointing out that the executive order seeks to address the $23 billion in deferred maintenance across the National Park Service, as well as $10.8 billion in similar shortfalls at the US Forest Service. They also say it is important to engage Republicans on conservation, as opposed to merely writing them off as uninterested in those efforts. 

However, the same administration is looking for a “nearly $4 billion cut to national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, wilderness and recreation areas, and more,” according to the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy institute in Washington, DC. Agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management will see their budgets shrink by a third—and that’s in addition to staffing cuts already implemented by the Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump’s beautification, it seems, will have to be done on the cheap.

“There are things that people are frustrated about—about this administration,” said Benji Backer, chief executive of Nature Is Nonpartisan. Another group that Backer led until recently, the American Conservation Coalition, helped craft the MABA executive order while also making sure that the recent Republican domestic spending package (Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act) was stripped of a measure to sell off public lands. “To let what happened a month ago dictate the next three and a half years—in terms of not even trying—is the quickest way to zero progress,” Backer added.

The MABA commission will be chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a booster of the ailing coal industry. Other members will include Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin, who has spent the last seven months eviscerating rules and regulations meant to prevent pollution (including a reported effort to rescind the EPA's "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane pose a threat to human lives), and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has referred derisively to “climate change crap.”

Although Burgum has moved to facilitate energy extraction on public lands, the MABA executive order makes no mention of that effort, though its primary goal is to “promote responsible stewardship of natural resources while driving economic growth.” Other goals include “expand access to public lands and waters for recreation, hunting, and fishing” and “encourage responsible, voluntary conservation efforts,” presumably as opposed to efforts mandated by the government.

Backer cited wildfire mitigation and wetland protection as top priorities, but it is not clear if the MABA commission will ultimately come to share his concerns. “It’s a directive from the president,” he said, “and as the whole world knows, when this current president says something, people—especially Republicans—tend to follow. So having him say that conservation is a priority is just inherently a win.”

But because of his association with the Trump administration, Backer has yet to win over many environmentalists, who remain skeptical of him and MABA, to say nothing of the Trump administration on the whole. “I am not inclined to give anyone with close association to this administration the benefit of the doubt these days,” said Jacob Malcom, a former high-ranking Interior Department official who now runs Next Interior, a site highly critical of the Trump administration. “I guess if we end up seeing some actual, substantive good movement then I'll be open to it, but the trust has to be earned these days.”

“It's absurd to think that this order will do anything meaningful," said Randi Spivak, director of the public lands program at the Center for Biological Diversity, in an interview. “It’s just window dressing.”

“Systematically, the Trump administration from day one has overturned what little protections exist for public lands,” Spivak said. “Everything is about 'drill, baby, drill.'"