Lawmakers in Washington are considering a bill that would shut down a plan to potentially expand the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, the oldest refuge in Texas.
The refuge covers 6,440 acres of the Panhandle, close to the New Mexico border. The vast grassland is dotted with playas and saline lakes. It’s an indispensable resource for sandhill cranes, pronghorn antelope, quail and many other animals and plants.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, released a plan last year that would allow for its expansion up to 700,000 acres. U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Lubbock, has led an attack against the idea.
“Somehow we think we need to spend more money on behalf of the taxpayers to buy up more land that we don’t manage. We don’t manage the land that we have well,” Arrington said last week at a subcommittee hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
The hearing included testimony on H.R. 839, Arrington’s bill, which would prevent the plan to expand the refuge from being implemented.
In his view, because of the size of the national debt, the federal government has no business acquiring additional land. And if it does, there could be serious ripple effects for the surrounding rural community. Bryan Baker, a cotton farmer in nearby Sudan and board president of the Texas Producers Cooperative, told the subcommittee that managing the land for conservation rather than agriculture would erode the local tax base.
“With 700,000 acres potentially being vacated from private landowners and taxpayers, there will be multiple economic losses, including the reduction in the number of teachers, bus drivers, and staff, as fewer children will be enrolled in local schools,” Baker said. “After all, there will be nobody left to live and farm on these acres.”
» MORE: Major expansion of Panhandle wildlife refuge criticized as government overreach
This exaggerates the potential impact of the plan, however, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. The plan allows for property owners in a 700,000-acre area to either sell land to the government outright or, more commonly, to agree to a conservation easement, where landowners keep their property but follow certain rules to protect the land. These rules could include prohibiting subdivision of the property, or limiting the amount of impermeable cover that can be built. The wildlife refuge will not grow through the government seizing property, however.
“I think it’s just really important to understand that a conservation easement is voluntary and that nobody can force you into a conservation easement,” said Kathryn Tancig, a lawyer from College Station who helps people set up conservation easements for a living.
Generally, her clients are people who want to protect family land from being developed in the future. Agreeing to a conservation easement is not necessarily incompatible with farming and ranching.
“If the landowner wants to keep the property open and available for agricultural use, a lot of times conservation easements allow for those uses of the property,” Tancig said.
A Georgetown-based interest group called American Stewards of Liberty has pushed the idea that the Muleshoe refuge’s expansion is a land grab by the federal government. The group supports private property rights and is led by executive director Margaret Byfield, whose family fought the federal government over access to their property in Nevada. She did not respond to an interview request for this story.
The group linked the expansion plan to the Biden administration’s 30×30 initiative, which sought to federally protect 30% of the country’s land and water by 2030.
“The Biden Administration has targeted this region for permanent protection as a part of their unauthorized 30×30 land grab,” American Stewards of Liberty wrote on their website.
For a while, a rumor circulated that the expansion could include not 700,00 acres, but 7 million, and that figure is still up on the American Stewards of Liberty website.
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Byfield has been critical of conservation easements.
“There’s a lot of really good intentions behind the conservation easement program. However, when you really understand the device, you find out that those purposes are not what it accomplishes,” she said on the Tennessee Stands podcast in 2024. “The purpose is to control the land.”
In August, American Stewards of Liberty held a public meeting in Littlefield to rally opposition against the Muleshoe refuge expansion. The speakers included Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who released an op-ed afterward opposing the expansion and linking it to the Biden administration’s agenda.
“While the new land purchases to expand the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge are supposedly ‘voluntary,’ the real question remains: why on earth does the federal government need more land? The answer is that it doesn’t,” Miller wrote.
Cassie Gresham, a land lawyer based in Austin who also helps set up conservation easements, said she’s never encountered private property being seized for conservation purposes.
“I’ve never seen that happen,” Gresham said. “It’s usually a landowner … saying, ‘I want to, you know, my family’s done this for a really long time, or I want to protect the stewardship and legacy.”
So far, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not taken on any new land as part of the Muleshoe expansion. Arrington’s bill to prevent that from ever happening has a long way to go: It still needs to be passed out of the House Natural Resources Committee, and then the full House before being considered in the Senate.
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