The Backpack Tax
Public lands funding is broken. This controversial tax could fix it.
Jul 15, 2025
Table of contents
Our public lands are facing more grievous threats than any time in recent history. Last fall, the Forest Service announced it didn’t have the money to hire any seasonal workers in the coming budget year. In February, a federal hiring freeze forced the National Park Service to rescind job offers to at least 400 seasonal workers. Later that month, the federal government fired more than 4,400 employees at the USFS and NPS combined. More firings went down at the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which also manage public lands. At the same time, freezes on funding from federal laws passed under the Biden administration put billions of dollars going to conservation efforts in limbo. The “deferred maintenance” backlog of work that needs doing on public land has grown into the tens of billions.
While visitation to public land reaches an all time high, the land itself and the people who steward it are on a path to crisis. Conserving these areas, which make up about a third of the entire country, requires allocating them the resources they deserve. But where will that money come from? Lawmakers have floated one idea—a small excise fee on outdoor gear—for decades. Dubbed the “backpack tax,” it could generate billions annually for public lands and conservation by putting a 5 to 10% surcharge on everything from sleeping bags to backpacking packs. However, every time the idea has surfaced, it’s been quashed by strong opposition—from the outdoor industry in particular. Why can’t we agree on how to fund conservation? And is it time we tax ourselves to fund the places we love?
Before the establishment of the Forest Service or National Park Service, ecosystems across the country faced a clear and dire problem: wildlife everywhere was dwindling, or even facing extinction. By the late-1800s, deer disappeared from parts of the East. Ducks were on the decline. Passenger pigeons once blackened the skies, but were shot out of existence. Bison and beavers were nearly exterminated. In response, grassroots groups of hunters and nature-lovers alike spearheaded a nationwide push for regulations and dollars that could go towards reversing course. Along with hunting laws, they instituted a monumental new system of funding.
The Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 put a 10 to 11% tax on guns and ammunition—the equipment hunters need to purchase to harvest. That money goes straight back to funding wildlife research, management, and restoration—especially at the state level—along with improving public access and hunter education. In 1950, the Dingell-Johnson Act extended the taxes to fishing gear, too. Today, this means every rifle, compound bow, handgun, and bullet purchased across the country provides dollars that go back to conserving wild places.
Wildlife, like public land, was (and continues to be) deemed part of the ‘public trust.’ It’s for everybody, not just private property owners where, for example, an elk herd spends part of the year. Hunting’s long relationship with conservation sounds counterintuitive—the desire to kill species helped save them. But the model is predicated on a simple concept, that the people who use a resource pay for its stewardship. Advocates sum up the model simply: the user pays, and the public benefits.
To date, Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson funding has generated more than $17 billion for conservation. Since at least 2020, those funding sources drum up more than $1 billion every year. The contribution of this model to conservation is even greater including the billions of dollars going back to landscapes all over the country from hunting license sales. This model—deemed the American System of Conservation Funding, or ASCF—has proven extraordinarily effective.
All that money was earmarked for wildlife—not necessarily public lands. Even before the latest administration’s government cuts, some hunting advocacy groups estimate that sportsmen and women provide about 80% of conservation funding while only addressing about 5% of the need.
When it comes to the big picture of public lands, where’s the need today? It’s nearly impossible to size up the overall needs for all public lands, everywhere in the country in a precise dollar amount. But there are a few numbers and anecdotes that can help grasp the scale of the problem. One number to track is the so-called “deferred maintenance backlog” on public lands. That’s the amount of work from infrastructure improvement to trail clearing to bathroom maintenance that’s sitting and waiting for federal workers to address. Among all federal land management agencies, that number sits at more than 38 billion dollars—and is likely even higher. That number also continues to grow every year as more needs go unmet.
By the 1990s, the way people used public land was beginning to look a lot different than it did in the first half of the 20th century, when our conservation funding mechanisms went in place.
Instead of more typical extractive industries, outdoor recreation was burgeoning. Compared to the early 1980s, more than 20 million more people were hiking—a growth of more than 90 percent. In the same time span, bird watching grew by 155%, backpacking by 73%, and primitive camping by 58%. Hunter numbers, though, began a steep decline starting in the 1990s as more and more people took to different forms of enjoying the outdoors. Logging—once the biggest revenue generator on Forest Service land—was beginning to see massive declines.
While hunting is often considered an “extractive” industry, along with oil and gas drilling, mining, and logging, outdoor recreation is considered “nonextractive.” However, everything from hiking to mountain biking takes a toll, too. In addition to trash at trailheads, erosion on forest roads, and human waste piling up in trailhead bathrooms, studies show that even modest numbers of people on trails impact wildlife behavior and movement. The impacts of outdoor recreation are just less immediately tangible than those of more traditional extractive industry.
The burgeoning world of outdoor recreation brought with it new stresses on public lands. However, there was no dedicated funding to address those stresses from recreationists. National parks charged entrance fees, along with some highly developed parts of other public lands. But for the most part, places like Forest Service trailheads didn’t generate any revenue of their own (and still don’t). So, where could money to fund the stewardship of these wild places come from?
By the mid-1990s, Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior under Bill Clinton, began to champion an idea. The program, called “Teaming With Wildlife,” or the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, or CARA, would charge an additional 5% on all outdoor gear purchases everywhere in the country. The funds would go to bolstering outdoor recreation infrastructure and conserving non-game wildlife. After all, under the American System of Conservation Funding, huntable animals got the vast majority of funding and attention, leaving smaller, less charismatic creatures—from bats to salamanders—neglected.
Many wildlife and hunting groups supported the move, but the outrage was swift—especially from anti-regulation representatives in the West opposed to what the legislation would mean for the purchase of outdoor gear. In fact, the Outdoor Industry Association—a trade group that represents gear companies from Patagonia to Black Diamond to The North Face—was founded partly out of opposition to the idea. A tax on outdoor goods, the thinking went, could lead to less spending on outdoor gear and hurt the industry as a whole. These detractors disparagingly called the measure a “backpack tax,” while wildlife groups and other proponents called it more simply a “user fee,” which sounds a lot less nefarious.
In 2001, the push for a backpack tax died in the Senate. Unlike hunters, who advocated to tax themselves early in the 20th century, the outdoor gear industry was instrumental in the legislation’s demise. Even today, OIA touts their role in defeating the backpack tax prominently on their website.
The discourse about the idea echoes some of the politics of today. "Taxes on particular items are intended to discourage certain unhealthy activities, such as smoking or drinking," Merrill Cook, a Republican U.S. Representative from Utah, said. "But this tax discourages American families from hiking, camping, climbing and enjoying other outdoor activities that foster an appreciation of our environment and promote good health."
Pete Hoekstra, a Republican Representative from Michigan, said, "This is complicating the tax code, and it provides another avenue for Washington to suck a little bit more money out of our pockets and feed it to the bureaucrats here in Washington."
Proponents maintained that a 5% tax wouldn’t impact customers all that much. A $210 backpack doesn’t impact the consumer noticeably more than a $200 backpack, proponents argued. But opponents said the idea would discourage participation in outdoor recreation, raise the bar to entry, hurt the economy, and would also be just plain too complicated to enact. Crucially, it turned out that it was really hard to separate outdoor-specific gear from more general purpose goods. How, after all, would you draw the line between a backpacking pack and a Jansport for hauling books to the classroom? The letter of the law at the time didn’t make this clear. The fee even extended to birdseed.
"Someone saw that bird flying over and said, 'There's something we haven't taxed. We can't catch the bird, but we'll tax the seed,'" former presidential candidate Bob Dole said when he got wind of the idea. "If they get their way, you won't even be able to escape the I.R.S. when you're hiking…Well, I say it's time to put the shoe on the other foot and tell the big taxers to take a hike!"
CARA’s death in 2001 wasn’t the last breath in the push for a backpack tax. In 2008, a version of the initiative was again revived—and defeated. Most recently, the idea was floated as part of a draft of Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, or RAWA. That act, first introduced in 2017, cites species decline across the country as a major threat to ecosystems. About a third of species in America face extinction. The bipartisan legislation would give states and tribes about $1.4 billion annually for on-the-ground, collaborative conservation efforts. But where would the money come from? Once again, that’s the rub.
Versions of the bill have experimented with fees on polluters, from oil and gas drilling, from Bitcoin mining, and, of course, from a new and updated version of a backpack tax. The legislature couldn’t agree on where all that money could come from. Despite repeated debates in Congress, the bill has so far filled. However, the bill was introduced in the Senate and House by Democrats Martin Heinrich and Debbie Dingell of New Mexico and Michigan respectively in 2024. More than half of the Senate bill’s cosponsors are Republicans. The need for conserving the country’s intact and wild ecosystems is one of the few things both parties agree on today. But how to do so is tough to settle. At the time of writing, a backpack tax isn’t a meaningful part of the debate over the bill.
Solutions need not come only from the federal level. For years, states have pioneered their own means of funding conservation, many modeled on a backpack tax. Texas, for example, devotes part of its existing 6.25% sales tax on outdoor gear for conservation. From 2018 to 2019, that fund generated $277.6 million for conservation in the state. Eighty-three percent of Georgia voters approved the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Act in 2018. That act devotes 40% of sales tax from purchases at outdoor stores to conservation in the state. Last year, local, on-the-ground projects were awarded more than $46 million from that pool of cash.
Other states also experiment with different tax models. Missouri, Arkansas, and Minnesota all devote a portion of their general sales tax on all goods to conservation. Missouri, for example, earmarked a new additional sales tax of one-eighth of one percent in 1996 that would go back to land and wildlife. States like Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Oregon use portions of revenue from the state’s lottery for conservation. Finally, South Carolina and Florida dedicate part of their real estate transfer taxes for that purpose. In short, states are innovating their funding streams much faster than the federal government, but no state has enacted an excise fee specific to outdoor gear similar to what was proposed in the 1990s.
In 2018, Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioned a study that included analysis of a possible “backpack tax.” The authors found that a modest 0.8% excise tax on outdoor gear could generate $13 million in revenue for state conservation initiatives. A higher tax of 10% could generate at least a whopping $160 million annually. However, the authors warned, a higher tax could encourage customers to buy in neighboring states, on online marketplaces that don’t charge state taxes, or to forego outdoor purchases entirely. The authors also interviewed a range of stakeholders for the study, from whitewater groups to wilderness preservation organizations to hunters to mountain bikers. They found there was a wide variety of perspectives on the idea. “Some stakeholders expressed that the outdoor gear industry has long avoided paying to support outdoor recreation opportunities and wildlife resources, and that it was time for the whole outdoor recreation industry to contribute to protecting public resources,” the authors wrote. “Others see this as a potential ‘seat at the table’ or mechanism to fund outdoor recreation or conservation objectives.”
Still, they found any such measure would likely face stiff opposition from the Outdoor Industry Association. Many stakeholders, the authors wrote, “expressed a concern about potentially pursuing an option that would be strongly opposed by OIA, an important ally and partner in achieving broader conservation, outdoor recreation, and wildlife related goals.” In fact, the very next year, OIA helped defeat a bill that would have established a tiny 0.2% sales tax on outdoor gear valued over $200 in Washington state.
There are other interesting means of funding conservation out there, too. Montana, for example, funnels about 20 percent of recreational marijuana tax revenue to a program dedicated to acquiring new public land and protecting wildlife habitat. Another 4% goes to state trails and nongame wildlife. Over the next couple years, those funds are expected to generate more than 9.3 million dollars for public land acquisition and nearly 2 million for other conservation initiatives.
Though they’re opposed to federal and state taxes on gear, the outdoor industry is stepping up in other, voluntary ways. The Conservation Alliance, for example, is a coalition of outdoor companies including Patagonia, The North Face, REI Co-op, and many others. In 2023, they contributed a total of more than $2 million to 49 advocacy organizations dedicated to preserving and protecting public lands.
Taken together, these initiatives contribute a sizable chunk of change to conservation and public lands. But the need is far greater than the relatively scattershot approach of the states and private sector alone.
Outdoor recreation continues to reach new heights. In 2024, about 175.8 million Americans recreated outside. That number isn’t specific to public land, but national park visitation shows a clear upward trend as well, despite a short lull during Covid. Still, in policy meetings, state fish and wildlife board hearings, and elsewhere, outdoor recreationists are labeled as free riders. Hikers, trail runners, backpackers, climbers, and mountain bikers, some argue, are using a public good without giving back to it.
Outdoor retail sales totaled $156.3 billion in 2023, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. A 5% tax on those purchases would generate $7.8 billion. The actual amount generated for public lands if a tax were to be instituted would vary from this based on how outdoor gear is defined. But it’s safe to say it could make a huge impact. The Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service’s budgets in 2024 amounted to only $5.5 billion combined—far less than a fee on outdoor goods would generate.
In a 2020 working paper for the independent research group Resources for the Future simulated a 5% fee on outdoor goods across the country. Such a tax, they found, could generate more than $3 billion a year for public lands, while having minimal impacts on the consumer and overall gear affordability. That’s nearly the same as the entire budget of the National Park Service. (The authors intentionally take a somewhat conservative approach to what goods could be taxed, which accounts for the smaller number compared to the $7.8 billion statistic above.)
The impact on most consumers would be modest, they found. An average household, they estimated, would only pay about an extra $16 per year. The average household spent $292 per year without the tax and $206 with the tax. However, people would, indeed, cut back on at least some spending on outdoor gear if the tax went into place. To generate the same income from national park entry fees, they found, parks would have to make passes seven times more expensive.
So, if a backpack tax could generate so much revenue for public land and conservation, what’s so hard about getting it done? Part of the answer is the outdoor industry itself. In 2016, OIA argued that a backpack tax would inequitably impact lower-income recreationists and small businesses already facing low margins, and would be a logistical nightmare to figure out what actually qualifies as outdoor gear. Part of the outdoor industry’s argument throughout much of the backpack tax debates was that the government has the money now. Before arguing over a backpack tax, they contended, the government should fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund. In fact, that happened back in 2020. The program pulls in $900 million every year from offshore oil and gas royalties that goes back to acquiring, conserving, and improving public land. However, the need is still acute.
I reached out to more than a half dozen outdoor gear companies for comment on an excise fee on outdoor gear. None agreed to an interview on a “backpack tax.” OIA provided a short statement: “While more federal investment is needed to maintain recreation infrastructure and expand access, an excise tax on outdoor products is not the solution,” Andriana Rogers, the group’s Director of Marketing Communications, said in an email. She said the outdoor industry already pays a disproportionate amount in import tariffs compared to other industries, including $6.1 billion in duty and tariff revenue in 2024 alone. “Adding another tax would unfairly burden small businesses, increase costs for consumers, and make outdoor products less accessible, particularly for lower-income individuals. Instead of imposing new financial barriers, Congress should reinvest existing tax revenue into public lands and recreation infrastructure to support economic growth, healthy communities, and equitable outdoor access.” A cynical reading of this is that they value public lands, but they value maximizing profits a lot more.
Currently, the government faces a budget deficit nearing $2 trillion. The federal government as a whole is slashing budgets across the board, including thousands of workers from the agencies that manage public lands. It seems unlikely there will be any movement on allocating more money for these purposes.
The “user pays” model makes sense to some extent. But public lands are owned by everyone, not just those who actually utilize them. There isn’t too much polling data on the specifics of a backpack tax. Though the latest Gallup polls show that about 56 percent of American voters think taxes are already too high. However, a 2021 study in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Science and Practice surveyed more than 17,000 students at universities in 22 states on support for conservation funding ideas. Among funding from resource extraction royalties, funding diverted from a general sales tax, and an excise fee on outdoor gear, the backpack tax was far and away the least popular option. About 43% of students supported the idea.
As the agencies that steward our public land face unprecedented staff and funding cuts, the question of how we fund these places to keep them accessible, healthy, and vibrant into the future seems to be a question few have the bandwidth to think about—but also more important than ever. However, there are currently no national proposals for a backpack tax. If the idea does resurface, it will have an uphill battle from lawmakers and the outdoor industry alike. Still, outdoor gear sales are near the highest they’ve ever been, at the same time that the threats to public lands are staggering in scale. The opportunity for a backpack tax is as strong as it’s ever been.
Looking back at the excise tax hunters continue to pay on gear offers a glimmer of hope. Many hunters take pride in their monetary contributions to funding conservation across the country. There’s no reason outdoor recreationists, who value the landscapes in which they explore, wouldn't feel the same if a backpack tax went into place. Perhaps demand for a backpack tax needs to come from the bottom up. Consumers can make clear that a small fee to support public lands doesn’t detract from their decision to buy gear. Rather, in a time of unparalleled threats to the places they love, it could add value to their gear and outdoor experiences alike.
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