Interior Dept. signed Izembek refuge land exchange with King Cove Corp. without completing statutory reviews required for the road swap

On October 21, 2025, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed a land exchange agreement with the King Cove Corporation, an Alaska Native village corporation, conveying 490 acres of the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge to the corporation in return for roughly 1,739 acres of corporation-owned land added to the refuge. The exchange was intended to enable construction of an approximately 11-mile gravel road through the refuge connecting the community of King Cove, population about 750, to the all-weather airport at Cold Bay. King Cove leaders have sought the road for decades as an emergency medical route; conservation groups and several Yup'ik tribal governments in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta opposed it, citing the refuge's importance to migratory Pacific black brant and emperor geese that are a subsistence food source.

Izembek is protected under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), whose Title XI sets out mandatory findings and procedures before any road may be authorized through a conservation unit, and under the Endangered Species Act and National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act. Two earlier versions of the same land swap, signed in 2018 and 2019 during the first Trump administration, were withdrawn or struck down in court on similar procedural grounds. President Trump's January 2025 executive order directing Interior to expedite a King Cove road corridor set the current exchange in motion; Interior publicly announced the completed agreement on October 23, 2025, at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. with Alaska's congressional delegation, and the deed was recorded that afternoon.

Three tribal governments — the Native Village of Hooper Bay, Native Village of Paimiut, and Chevak Native Village — joined the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation groups in lawsuits filed in November 2025 arguing the exchange violated ANILCA, the Endangered Species Act, and the Refuge Administration Act, in part because Interior treated the exchange's removal of the road corridor from the refuge's boundaries as a way to avoid Title XI's requirements rather than a reason to apply them.

Updates

2026-08-18 — Federal judge vacated the land exchange, finding Interior violated three federal statutes [5, 6, 7]

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that Interior's October 2025 land exchange violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act, and ANILCA, and voided the trade. Gleason held that Interior could not rely on the exchange's removal of the road corridor from the refuge as the reason Title XI's mandatory road-authorization analysis did not apply. Alaska's acting attorney general said the state would appeal and would continue mobilizing to build a 2.8-mile section of road on King Cove Corporation-owned land outside the vacated exchange area starting in September 2026; plaintiffs' attorneys said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' July 2026 wetland-fill permit covered the full 18.9-mile road and was predicated on the now-vacated exchange, and that no construction could legally proceed.