From Public Lands to Private Hands

Last week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee held confirmation hearings for Kevin Lilly, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks of the Interior Department. Lilly, a wealthy investment banker, has been quietly serving as the position’s acting leader since at least June 2025 and officially doing so since August 1, 2025. But here’s the snag: despite now being expected to permanently oversee the U.S.’ 5 marine national monuments, 63 national parks, and 573 national wildlife refuges, Lilly possesses zero experience in managing and conserving natural resources.

So if not an environmental steward, who is Lilly? According to his LinkedIn profile, he spent over 36 years in the private wealth management world. For 22 years, Lilly was a Founding Partner at Avalon Advisors LLC, Texas’ biggest privately-owned wealth management firm with $8.4 billion in client assets. In 2023, Avalon was acquired by CI Financial Corp., the parent company of Corient, a private wealth management firm offering “comprehensive solutions to its high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients” with $508 billion in assets under management. From 2023 to 2025, Lilly served as Corient’s Vice Chairman. Before his Avalon and Corient roles, Lilly was Principal of Private Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley for five years, helping the investment bank launch its first Private Wealth office in Texas. Prior to that, from 1989 to 1996, he was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, working in the company’s Private Wealth Management Division. (And as if his ties to big money weren’t already extensive enough, in 2004, Lilly joined the Young Presidents’ Organization, a clandestine club for the uber-rich.)

In addition to his longtime career in private wealth management, Lilly has held other political appointee positions. In 2009, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) tapped Lilly to serve as a Regent of the Texas State University System on the Finance and Audit Committee and as Chairman of the Texas State University System Foundation Board. Eight years later, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) selected Lilly as Chairman of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission to regulate the state’s liquor industry. He was reappointed to the role in 2023 before stepping down to assume his current position. But time spent as a political appointee at a liquor licensing commission does not a conservationist make.

Lilly’s lack of qualifications were on full display during a speaking engagement at the Moab Chamber of Commerce’s Business Summit in Moab, Utah on January 14-15, 2026. At the summit, Lilly spoke about his work in law enforcement, which purportedly involved busting a cartel from using business storefronts for illicit activities like sex trafficking and money laundering. “Why did I do that? I did that to protect the businesses,” Lilly said. “That may not apply exactly in my job now, but part of my job is to protect the federal lands, to use our enforcement personnel to protect those that come on, who are also your customers, right?” He added that if visitors “don’t feel safe, they won’t come here, and they won’t buy your product, and they won’t pump gas, and they won’t stay in the hotel,” noting that businesses and national parks are part of the same “ecosystem.”

It seems telling that Lilly’s priority in his past work was “to protect the businesses” rather than the potential individual victims that were harmed, an unfortunate preview of where his loyalties will lie if and when he is confirmed as Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. According to the Times-Independent, Lilly admitted that he had “never been through the parks here.” Despite asking that local officials and representatives from nonprofit groups supporting public lands be invited to a reception event after the summit for his own edification, Lilly showed up to the reception 10 minutes before it concluded, suggesting a careless disregard for the system he is meant to be overseeing for the enjoyment of all people. His late arrival also allowed him to conveniently avoid protestors attempting to meet with him who were standing outside, holding signs like “Keep public lands in public hands.”

Meanwhile, Lilly’s purported emphasis on preserving the safety of national parks is at striking odds with the Trump administration’s systematic assault on national parks and public lands through staff reductions and budget cuts. More Than Just Parks, a public lands advocacy and digital media group, rightly pointed out that you can’t really defend public lands when there aren’t enough employees to tell you what’s going on. For example, as it stands, the 95-million acre national wildlife refuge system is patrolled by fewer than 400 officers, which means that one officer is responsible for every 378 square miles. That’s more than 445 officers short of the recommended number needed to provide sufficient protection.

Further, in a report titled Trump’s Polluter Playground: Fossil Fuel Insiders & Ideologues Prop Up Dirty Energy & Derail Clean Power, our Toni Aguilar Rosenthal and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen noted that as of July 2025, the National Park Service’s (NPS) permanent staff had been reduced by 24% since Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Additionally, seasonal hiring during peak visitation had fallen with about 40% of positions still vacant. They wrote: “The cuts create a dangerous dynamic at many parks, where there may not be enough staff on site to guarantee adequate safety infrastructure for visitors who rely on the service’s lifeguards, wildlife firefighters, and emergency rescue experts. The cuts also have devastating impacts on the NPS’s educational services, conservation work, and stewardship of infrastructure on park lands, like visitor centers, bathrooms, campgrounds and trails.” Yet, the Trump administration vows to continue DOGEing the federal workforce across the Interior Department.

To top it off, Lilly’s ethics agreement discloses equity interests in a wide range of energy, mining, and tech companies, including Alphabet, Apple, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, Phillips 66, Tesla, Valero Energy, and more. This makes Lilly a fitting companion for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a staunch ally to the oil and gas industry and former governor of North Dakota, the third-largest U.S. crude oil producing state. Perhaps it is no wonder then that North Dakota senator Kevin Cramer (R) recently praised Lilly for “bringing a business-minded perspective” to his role.

Ultimately, Lilly is likely to be another crony for Burgum’s agenda to sell public lands to private investors and extractive industries. With Burgum at the helm and Lilly as his accomplice, public lands will continue to be under siege.

Image: Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. Credit: “Arches National Park” by Eugene Kaspersky, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.