The US Interior Department published a rule Friday allowing hunters to bait bears with doughnuts, bacon, and meat scraps on federal lands in Alaska — reinstating a practice that has now been banned, unbanned, litigated, rebanned, and unbanned again across three administrations. The rule takes effect mid-November and was directed by executive order in Trump's early days in office. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum framed it as giving Alaskans "a stronger voice in decisions affecting the lands, wildlife and traditions they know best." The mechanics are straightforward and grim. Hunters place high-fat, high-sugar food in steel drums, monitor the bait station, and shoot bears at close range from a nearby blind. State rules, to which the federal rule now defers, permit the practice. About a dozen states allow bear baiting; most do not. The rule does not list specific permitted foods — it simply removes the federal prohibition and lets state frameworks govern. This is the latest in a pattern of Alaska-specific hunting deregulations since 2023: shooting bears from helicopters, killing swimming caribou from motorboats, dispatching wolf pups in dens, and using artificial lights to draw bears from hibernation. Each relaxation has been framed as local sovereignty over land management. Each has been criticized as ethically extreme even by mainstream hunters who observe fair-chase norms. The legal architecture matters. These are federal lands, created by Congress specifically to vest management authority in the federal government, not state governments. The 2024 Biden rule that reimplemented the ban underwent what critics of the new rule call "a more robust scientific process," grounded in evidence that baiting habituates bears to human food and increases aggressive encounters with park visitors. The Trump rule overrides that process by executive direction, which Nicholas Arrivo of Animal Protection Law says "doesn't smell right and raises questions about the legality of this rule." The beneficiary class is narrow: trophy hunters willing to use non-traditional methods, and the political coalition they represent. The cost is distributed across park visitors who face increased bear-human conflict risk, the wildlife populations subject to practices most hunters reject as unsporting, and the institutional credibility of federal land management. Drew Robertson of Humane World for Animals noted the executive order's origin signals "political motivation, not something that seems to be derived from careful consideration." This rule's history — Obama ban, Trump reversal, litigation upholding the ban, Biden reimplementation, Trump re-reversal — illustrates a governance failure beyond wildlife policy. When executive orders can override multi-year scientific rulemaking processes on four-year cycles, no regulatory regime achieves stability. The rule itself is less consequential than the precedent: federal science can be overridden by executive fiat as constituency service. No lawsuit has been announced, but the legal vulnerability is real. Courts previously upheld the Obama-era ban and overturned the first Trump reversal. The question is whether the new rule's process — or lack thereof — survives the same scrutiny.
