Since January 2025, the federal administration has introduced a dizzying number of policies, rules, and revisions that have eroded our bedrock climate and environmental laws and are fundamentally undermining how conservation works in public lands.  Explore our interactive timeline to see these decisions in more detail.

The California desert is home to three national park units; Joshua Tree and Death Valley National Parks, and Mojave National Preserve. The Bureau of Land Management oversees another 11 million acres, including the new Chuckwalla National Monument. But our public lands and the people who manage them for our benefit are in dire straits. The 2025 One Big, Beautiful Bill brought deep cuts to land management agencies. Congress is still considering even more massive defunding proposals for our public lands and waters.

The Endangered Species Act protects more than 1,600 species. But our ability to fight the extinction crisis is in peril. In 2025, the Trump administration launched a major challenge to the Endangered Species Act by prioritizing economic impact over critical habitat, removing climate change impacts, and abolishing automatic protections for threatened species. The Mojave desert tortoise became endangered in 2024 due largely to loss of critical habitat—one of the key elements under attack in these proposed rules. Stay updated. Learn what we are doing to protect the desert’s iconic species through proactive programs.

Desert life is accustomed to adapting to planetary extremes, and there are climate innovations everywhere you look. Like the desert tortoise’s bladder, which functions like a spare water bottle. Or the Joshua tree, which does its photosynthesizing at night. The Mojave Desert Land Trust is bringing its own innovations to the climate change struggle, from banking seeds to protecting natural carbon sinks and redefining how we look at species protection.

The California desert is one of the most biodiverse places in the country. It is home to over 2,000 species of native plants, comprising over 30% of California’s diverse flora. The extreme environment to which these plants have adapted has produced some extraordinary characteristics. Iconic species like the Joshua tree and the Endangered desert tortoise provide vital ecosystem benefits as keystone species. But today, habitat fragmentation through development, wildfires, and invasive species threatens the desert’s rich biodiversity.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is America’s major source of funding for conservation and recreation. In 2025, Secretarial Order 3442 was introduced to halt the use of LWCF for conservation and recreation expansion on Bureau of Land Management lands. Hundreds of projects may not receive funding as Congress intended. That includes the stalled transfer of land stewarded by MDLT. To date, LWCF has enabled MDLT to return 57,900 acres to national parks, wilderness areas and national monuments. This improves the well-being of our communities by enhancing the health of our ecosystems, supporting people’s physical and mental health through recreation, and boosting rural economies.