How the federal 30 by 30 program moved from executive order to land-use fight, then to rescission

WASHINGTON — The most ambitious federal land-conservation target in U.S. history was a single sentence buried in Executive Order 14008, and after four years on the books it was struck down with a single line in another executive order. What the federal government called 30 by 30 is no longer a presidential directive. The policy infrastructure it built, however, did not vanish with the rescission.

The lineage of the program, the way it played out in the Point Reyes ranching settlement, and the parallel international target adopted at the United Nations biodiversity conference in 2022 came up on The Kim Monson Show on April 29, 2026, when Dr. Jill Vecchio walked listeners through the program as a property-rights story. The primary documents tell a layered version of that story.

The order

President Joseph R. Biden signed Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” on January 27, 2021. Section 216 of the order directed the Secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce, along with the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, to recommend steps “to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” That phrase became the source text for what the public came to know as 30 by 30.

The operative language is broader than federal ownership. “Conserving” lands and waters covers voluntary easements, state and tribal lands, private stewardship agreements, and existing protected areas alongside federal holdings. “30% of the land in the United States will be owned, owned by the federal government,” Vecchio said on the show. The order itself directs a conservation goal, not an ownership target.

The branded program

In May 2021, the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce, together with the CEQ, released the interagency report “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful.” Signed by Sec. Deb Haaland, Sec. Tom Vilsack, Sec. Gina Raimondo, and CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory, the 24-page document translated Section 216 into a 10-year, locally led campaign with eight stated principles.

Principle 6 reads: “Honor Private Property Rights and Support the Voluntary Stewardship Efforts of Private Landowners and Fishers.” As written, the federal framework was domestic and voluntary. The report does not cite the United Nations, the Convention on Biological Diversity, or the Sustainable Development Goals as authority. The pressure on private land that became the political flashpoint of 30 by 30 came not through direct federal seizure but through downstream litigation, NGO-brokered settlements, and federal-lease decisions on ground already in federal hands.

The international parallel

On December 19, 2022, the parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Target 3 calls on parties to “ensure and enable that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas, and of marine and coastal areas… are effectively conserved and managed.”

The U.S. is not a party. The CBD treaty was signed by the United States in 1993 but has never been ratified by the Senate, putting the U.S. among a small group of non-Parties that includes the Holy See, Andorra, and South Sudan. The federal 30 by 30 goal and the international target are parallel policies, not a treaty obligation. The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015, articulated SDG 15 (“Life on Land”) in aspirational terms without binding land-use percentages. EO 14008 does not invoke either the SDGs or the CBD as authority.

What the federal land base actually looks like

The political weight of a 30 percent conservation goal is set by where federal land already concentrates. Per Congressional Research Service Report R42346, the federal government owns about 640 million acres, or roughly 28 percent of the 2.27 billion total U.S. land acres. Almost all of that footprint sits in the 11 contiguous western states and Alaska. Across those 11 western states the federal share averages about 46 percent; Alaska on its own is about 61 percent federal.

Nevada tops the list at 80.1 percent. Utah, Idaho, and Alaska all run above 60 percent. Oregon, Wyoming, and California sit between 45 and 53 percent. Colorado is 35.9 percent. East of the 100th meridian, the federal share collapses. Connecticut and Iowa each sit at 0.3 percent.

Point Reyes as the working case

The case study Vecchio brought to the show audience as the program’s downstream effect is Point Reyes National Seashore, a 71,028-acre preserve on the Marin County, California coast. Authorized in 1962 by Public Law 87-657, introduced by U.S. Rep. Clem Miller and signed by President John F. Kennedy, the seashore came together in the 1970s as the federal government purchased ranchlands inside the new park boundary and granted long-term leases back to the families to continue dairy and beef operations. About 28,000 acres remained in active grazing.

In 1978, ten tule elk were translocated from the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge to Tomales Point. The herd grew. By the mid-2010s, conflicts between elk and cattle drove litigation from environmental groups. A 2017 partial settlement, a 2021 NPS environmental impact statement supporting continued ranching, and additional NGO lawsuits set the stage for a final negotiated end.

On January 8, 2025, the National Park Service announced a settlement brokered by The Nature Conservancy under which 12 of the 14 ranches will close within roughly 15 months. Two ranches will continue grazing under new leases. The cattle herd will fall from approximately 10,000 to 200. Most of the seashore reverts to wilderness status. Vecchio characterized the resolution as a “secret settlement” on the air, but the National Park Service announcement put the terms of the deal on the public record the day it was reached; the negotiations themselves were confidential beforehand, which is standard practice for litigation settlements.

Ranch workers and their families who lived on the leased lands were not part of the settlement. Volunteer attorneys are providing pro bono representation to displaced workers seeking relocation assistance. That part of Vecchio’s account matches the public reporting.

The Wildlands Network thread

Vecchio described a map she identified as a U.S. government chart titled “Simulated Reserve and Corridor System to Protect Biodiversity,” showing core reserves, corridors, and buffer zones across the lower 48 states. Independent verification does not bear out the federal provenance. The core-reserves-and-corridors framework comes from the Wildlands Network, formerly the Wildlands Project, an NGO founded in 1991 by conservation biologist Michael E. Soulé, Earth First! co-founder David Foreman, and philanthropist Douglas Tompkins. The map and its conservation strategy are advocacy work product, not federal documents. The framework is verifiably published by Wildlands Network and its founders going back to a 1992 special issue of Wild Earth.

Where things stand now

On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions, which expressly listed EO 14008 among the orders rescinded. The federal 30 by 30 directive ended that day. The program’s website at americathebeautiful.gov no longer resolves. The Department of the Interior under Sec. Doug Burgum has reoriented away from the prior administration’s conservation campaign.

The lineage continues elsewhere. California’s state-level 30 by 30 directive, issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom as Executive Order N-82-20 in October 2020, predates the federal order and is unaffected by its rescission. The Kunming-Montreal framework remains in force at the international level among its signatories. Conservation NGOs continue to run easement programs, broker private buyouts, and litigate federal-lease decisions on the same model that produced the Point Reyes outcome.

Vecchio’s frame

Vecchio brought the topic to the show audience as a property-rights story: federal-control growth, NGO partnerships, and displacement of multi-generational land users. “There’s public-private partnerships, NGOs behind this whole 30 by 30 project in order to boot farmers off of their land and essentially put them out of business,” she said. She pointed listeners to American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based property-rights advocacy nonprofit, as a follow-up resource. The infrastructure she described, federal grants flowing through NGO partners and conservation-easement frameworks layered over federal lease decisions, persists across administrations even with the federal directive withdrawn.