Funcionarios de Trump, multimillonarios y la silenciosa reconfiguración de las tierras públicas de Estados Unidos

At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property. For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.

“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight. Wilson, a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter, has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains for most of his life.

The road beyond the gate leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S.

Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club, an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky. “It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.

For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. There are more than 600 million acres of federally owned public lands across America, but now nearly 90 million of those acres are at risk of some kind of development due to what critics describe as an unprecedented shift in policies under the first and second Trump administrations.

In Arizona, a sacred Indigenous site was handed over earlier this year to a copper-mining company. In Utah, Republican Sen.

Mike Lee attached a provision last summer to the federal budget that would have sold up to 3.2 million acres of public land across the West. And in April, the U.S.

Senate voted to overturn a 20-year-old mining ban on federal lands in Minnesota, clearing the way for a foreign-owned copper mine. Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands — and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings — more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.

“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains.

Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot. And now the public doesn’t have that access.” Every American — not just Montanans — should care, he warned, “because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.” Perched more than 7,000 feet above sea level, the Yellowstone Club was built atop former public lands acquired through land exchanges with the U.S.

Forest Service in the 1990s. It has since converted more than 15,000 acres outside Big Sky into one of the most exclusive communities on the planet.

The club’s membership has included celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton; tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt; and financial elites like Bill Ackman, Warren Buffett and Robert Herjavec. Inside its gates, the Yellowstone Club has an 18-hole golf course, a concert venue, a movie theater, a dedicated fire department, hundreds of luxury homes and nearly 3,000 acres of private ski slopes.

Initiation runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and an undeveloped lot inside the gate has sold for as much as $10 million, according to Forbes. CrossHarbor Capital Partners, a Boston-based investment firm, bought the Yellowstone Club out of bankruptcy in 2009.

In the 17 years since, the firm has expanded its Montana portfolio — developed through a subsidiary called Lone Mountain Land Company — to become one of the largest luxury-resort footprints in the Rocky Mountains. “They’re gobbling up mass swaths of Montana,” said Erik Nylund, who served as a staffer for former Democratic Montana Sen.

Jon Tester and met often with club representatives. “They will throw money around at anybody and everybody to get what they want.” In 2016, the Yellowstone Club drew criticism after more than 30 million gallons of its sewage overflowed into the headwaters of the Gallatin River, drawing over $300,000 in penalties and financial commitments from the company — and outraging locals.

The Yellowstone Club declined an on-camera interview for this story. In a written statement, a company representative noted that numerous lawsuits against the club over its impacts to local waterways “have been dismissed by federal judges” and the club has spent millions to treat its wastewater “to the highest standards the State of Montana assigns.” CrossHarbor also did not respond to an interview request.

The club has also become a favorite refuge among high-level Trump administration officials. Energy Secretary Chris Wright owns a home there; Vice President JD Vance reportedly spent Christmas at the club; and Trump himself hosted a campaign fundraiser there in 2024.

And the man in charge of most of America’s public lands is also a member. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum oversees 500 million acres of federal land in the U.S., and has referred multiple times to these parcels as “assets on America’s balance sheet.” Since early 2025, Burgum — along with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — has helped the Trump administration pursue major overhauls of public lands management, including a $1 billion cut to the National Park Service budget, opening the Arctic to potential oil and gas drilling and repealing the 2001 Roadless Rule, the safeguard that has kept new roads and clearcuts out of nearly 60 million acres.

A real estate developer and the former governor of North Dakota, Burgum owns a $22 million condo at the Yellowstone Club, according to Montana property records reviewed by Floodlight. It’s held through an entity called Lone View, LLC.

Burgum disclosed last year that he rented it out in 2024 for income between $100,001 and $1 million. Burgum also holds a separate ownership stake in the club itself that he valued at up to $250,000 and that paid him nearly $22,000 in 2024.

Burgum’s latest financial disclosure form shows he did not divest from any of these interests upon taking office. A representative declined to answer if the secretary would abstain from any future decisions involving the club or its affiliates.

Meanwhile, Burgum has partnered with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to explore ways for public lands to be sold in order to make room for more affordable housing across the country. “He shouldn’t be involved in residential development on public lands while he owns that,” said Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer to the George W.

Bush administration. “Let someone else handle that — he’s got a deputy.” Burgum’s office did not answer Floodlight’s emailed questions, but responded to the inquiry with this statement: “Secretary Burgum has complied with all federal ethics requirements and remains committed to protecting America’s ability to responsibly use and care for our federal lands for the profit and benefit of future generations.” In the past, Burgum has argued his policies aim to lower the national debt and address the nation’s housing crisis.

“They’ll say the words ‘affordable housing’ and there’s not going to be anything affordable about it,” said Nylund, arguing that only luxury home builders and private resorts would be interested in developing America’s largely remote and inaccessible public lands. “It’s all about development,” he said.

“And if you’ve taken a ride to Big Sky or the Yellowstone Club lately, you’ve seen what development looks like, and it’s a bunch of mansions.” Despite their distance from Big Sky, the fear of luxury resorts replacing wilderness hangs heavy over the Crazy Mountains. “The wealth that’s coming here is just changing our way of life,” Wilson said.

Wilson, 71, lives a quiet life in Wilsall, a tiny town at the foot of the Crazies. The walls of his small home are adorned with antlers and family photographs dating back to the 1800s.

“I grew up with a pack on my back hiking those mountains,” he said. “Both of my sons grew up in the Crazy Mountains.

And I cannot tell you how special they are to me — because I get choked up sometimes.” The Crazies resemble a mountain fortress — an island of jagged peaks rising more than 7,000 feet above the surrounding high plains, complete with secluded river valleys and alpine lakes. Yet their beauty belies a long history of heated conflict rooted in century-old decisions.

In the late 1800s, Congress paid the transcontinental railroads for their work by giving them every other square mile of federal land across whole regions of the West, which resulted in a checkerboard pattern of private and public land ownership. Anyone could continue to use public roads and trails that crossed through these newly minted private parcels, according to congressional acts and court rulings.

Over time, however, those parcels in the Crazies were bought up by some of the richest people in the state, some of whom objected to the public crossing through their land. “They began to do things that violated those rules, such as blocking these roads, blocking these trails,” said Posewitz.

Wilson first noticed the change around 2016, when he encountered a blocked trail on the west side of the Crazies that his grandparents had used nearly a century ago. “All of a sudden I’m like, ‘No, you can’t do that.

That’s ridiculous,’” Wilson recalled. Around that time, a U.S.

forest ranger began to defend public access in the range by putting up Forest Service signs along contested trails. The big landowners weren’t happy.

They reached out to Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines and Trump’s then-Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue.

It wasn’t long before the ranger was reassigned. Daines and Perdue did not respond to Floodlight’s repeated requests for comment on the ranger controversy, and Forest Service officials said they wouldn’t talk about it.

However, Mary Erickson, the former Custer Gallatin Forest supervisor and the former ranger’s boss, did talk, and she denied any political interference. She said the ranger “wasn’t reassigned,” he was “just assigned to something else while the investigation was in place.” She acknowledged the move looked punitive but said it was for the ranger’s own protection as the process played out.

Nylund served as Senator Tester’s natural resources liaison at the time, and said he worked closely with the Forest Service. To him, the ranger controversy exemplified the growing influence of Montana’s elites on the Crazies.

“The political forces of the country came down on this district ranger and they put him in his place,” Nylund said. The ranger was eventually reinstated in 2017 after being cleared of any wrongdoing.

Around the same time, Nylund said he was approached by a high-end consultant for an unnamed client seeking to swap land in the Crazies with the U.S. Forest Service.

“That was the Yellowstone Club,” Nylund said. Nylund later learned that in order to get the land they needed for an “expert ski run” in Big Sky, the club agreed to help the Forest Service solve access disputes in the Crazies by organizing a land exchange.

“We didn’t have the time and resources to resolve some of that,” said Erickson, the former Forest Service supervisor. But she said she made it clear that “the Yellowstone Club wouldn’t call the shots, and I do feel like that was true the whole way.”