New Trump executive orders expand hunting, fishing across America

On Sept. 17, 2026, President Donald Trump signed two major directives to benefit our outdoor heritage, the Reinvigorating America’s Hunting Heritage and Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation executive orders. These executive orders come on the heels of another executive order benefiting sportsmen and women that the White House issued earlier this month.

How presidential directives work

“These terms are loose and are not always consistently applied, but presidential directives generally fall into two categories: executive orders and proclamations,” said Michael Jean, litigation counsel for the Sportsmen’s Alliance. “Generally speaking, executive orders are instructions to other members of the executive branch of government that usually tell them to do or refrain from doing something, while proclamations generally communicate a decision the president made to the public and the government.”

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Presidential directives depend on the authority granted to the president under the Constitution or by acts of Congress. “A good example of this would be the Antiquities Act,” said Jean. “Congress typically requires major executive actions to go through notice-and-comment rulemaking and to be supported by a record that is developed in that process. That limits what the president can accomplish through a directive. But the Antiquities Act gave the president a lot of discretion to proclaim any federal land to be a national monument. So the President can make National Monument declarations on his own, without developing a supporting record or going through notice-and-comment proceedings.”

Reinvigorating America’s Hunting Heritage

The order begins by recognizing that “hunters, anglers, and landowners are the greatest conservationists the world has ever known.” It then declares that it is “the policy of (the Trump) administration to reinvigorate, protect, and expand America’s hunting heritage to benefit our people and our land.”

It seeks to accomplish those goals by ordering the Secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, War, Commerce, Labor, and Education to implement the following:

• Allow hunting on specific national monuments.
• Improve the process for authorizing migratory bird hunting seasons.
• Encourage states to lift Sunday hunting restrictions.
• Propose regulations that would allow hunting, fishing, and shooting on federal lands.
• Improve access to federal lands, including repairing roads and infrastructure.
• Authorize assistive technology on trails and hunting locations.
• Permit the use of lead ammo and tackle.
• Implement guidance for archery and hunter education programs in schools.
• Promote youth and veteran hunting programs.
• Improve game species habitats.
• Promote wild game donations.

Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation

The order recognizes that recreational saltwater angling “is a strong driver of our Nation’s outdoor economy.” The order’s purpose is to modernize “Federal [fisheries] management by shifting the federal posture from restricting recreational access to fishing to actively empowering affiliated industries and coastal communities,” making it the “policy of the United States to elevate the marine recreational fishing industry as an important consideration in all Federal ocean, coastal, and public land decision-making.”

Specifically, the order directs the secretaries of Commerce, Interior, and Agriculture to execute the following:

• Partner with states and the private sector to improve and modernize fisheries data collection.
• Integrate state-level data into federal management decisions.
• Address the decline of iconic recreational fisheries, such as Atlantic striped bass.
• Fast track the creation of artificial reefs and other marine habitats.
• Establish a task force to address rising rates of shark and pinniped depredation.

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“These directives will benefit American sportsmen,” Jean concluded. “We are looking forward to seeing them come to fruition and seeing the benefits that our members feel, and our government affairs team will fully participate in the administrative rulemaking processes along the way.”

Issues like these are at the heart of the Sportsmen’s Alliance mission, and we will continue to monitor this important matter.

Republished with permission from Sportsmen's Alliance.