Every argument for dismantling America's public lands is built to sound reasonable: we need affordable housing; the West shouldn't be run by faceless bureaucrats in Washington; public lands represent a broken promise to the states. Episode four, "The Lies," pulls those arguments apart, and asks a more consequential question: who profits when we believe them?

The episode opens with Scott Fitzwilliams, who spent his career in the U.S. Forest Service and rose to supervise Colorado's White River National Forest — the most visited in the country. He and his deputy carried more than sixty years of combined wildfire experience — knowledge that takes a career to build and cannot simply be rebuilt by the next election. Then came the DOGE firings: probationary employees terminated by form letter for "performance," a claim Fitzwilliams calls a bald-faced lie, just before fire season.

Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace how the hollowing-out of federal agencies is not an accident but a deliberate strategy. Land Tawney names the playbook — defund, dismantle, divest — and the episode follows it through Project 2025 and the budget starvation of agencies that together amount to less than a third of one percent of the federal budget. The decay that follows is easy to see: unmaintained trails, closed restrooms, expertise walking out the door for good. As Teal Lehto, Sarah Krakoff, and Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance Tania Lown-Hecht explain, an agency starved of people and funding becomes the argument for getting rid of public lands altogether.

On Common Ground: An American Inheritance tells the story of the lands that belong to all of us, and of the fight to protect them.

All six episodes available in August.

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On Common Ground: An American Inheritance is hosted by Bill Hedden and John Leshy. Produced by Sarah Hedden, Dagny Scott, and Del Feltz. Sound engineering by Joe Flood. Additional sound editing by Grace Wiley. This series is a production of Eleven Dollar Bill, and a project of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.

Correction: Episode 4 names Tania Lown-Hecht as a USFS Planner, instead of Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance. The Episode also uses a shortened version of her name "Tania Hecht," instead of her full name, "Tania Lown-Hecht."