The federal government spent years negotiating a settlement to end most ranching at Point Reyes National Seashore. Eighteen months later, the two families who refused the deal are betting the same government will switch sides — and the Trump administration is giving them reason to hope.

The January 2025 agreement was meant to close out a six-decade fight over cattle and conservation on the Marin peninsula: most of the seashore's historic ranching families would take buyouts from The Nature Conservancy and clear out, native tule elk would roam without a fence, and the National Park Service would run the land first for wildlife and visitors. But two holdout operations — Bill Niman's cattle ranch and David Evans's Marin Sun Farms — went to court to break the deal, and they have found powerful sympathizers in Washington. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum now involved, the live question is no longer just who prevails in the lawsuit. It's whether the Justice Department will mount any defense of the settlement its own government signed.

Point Reyes has always been a quarrel among allies. For years, environmental groups argued that leased cattle and dairy operations degraded water quality and squeezed out native wildlife on a taxpayer-owned park; ranching families, whose leases predate the seashore's 1962 creation, insisted they were modeling the small, humane agriculture the coast ought to defend. A 2022 lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity and allied groups forced a reckoning, and in a revised Record of Decision announced Jan. 8, 2025 (external source, opens in a new tab), the Park Service set the terms: the cows would mostly go, and the landscape would be managed for wildlife.

To ease the exit, The Nature Conservancy arranged private buyouts. The Press Democrat reported (external source, opens in a new tab) the total at roughly $30 million; POLITICO's E&E News put it nearer $40 million. By this spring most of the ranches had closed and their families had gone.

Then the alignment flipped. As the Los Angeles Times laid out this weekend, the Nimans and the Evans family — the two operations never offered a Conservancy buyout — sued the Park Service in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, aiming to keep grazing alive across the seashore's 18,000-acre pastoral zone. What makes their suit a threat to the whole deal is who now sits across the government's table.

Kennedy, the health secretary, moved within weeks of the settlement to undo it, E&E News reported, citing three people who spoke with him. Nicolette Hahn Niman once worked in Kennedy's orbit at the Waterkeeper Alliance, and she told the Press Democrat she had spoken with him "candidly about the situation." Kennedy has drawn in Burgum, whose department runs the Park Service and who assigned Wyoming property-rights attorney Karen Budd-Falen to find a "Point Reyes solution," according to E&E. Both Interior and Kennedy's department declined to comment.

The Justice Department's own footwork has fueled the suspicion. Rather than answer the ranchers' complaint by its deadline, DOJ asked for at least another month — a delay the families' attorney, Peter Prows, told the Press Democrat spoke for itself, given how hard it is to fight a case and negotiate a way out of it at the same time.

Nicolette Hahn Niman once worked in Kennedy's orbit at the Waterkeeper Alliance, and she told the Press Democrat she had spoken with him "candidly about the situation."

All of it moves alongside a Republican-led House Natural Resources Committee probe (external source, opens in a new tab) opened last year. Rep. Jared Huffman, the North Bay Democrat and former environmental lawyer who represents the seashore, doubts the administration can rewrite a deal this hard-fought — but frets about the people trapped in the middle.

Not everyone who left wants it reopened. Kevin Lunny, whose grandfather bought a Point Reyes dairy in 1947, accepted a buyout and relocated outside Sacramento. Yet even the departed are caught in a larger fight. Some 150 ranch workers and relatives — many Spanish-speaking, most shut out of any negotiation — lost their homes when the ranches shut. Of those, the 120 who stayed in West Marin have all been rehoused, Local News Matters reported (external source, opens in a new tab), after a public shelter emergency and nearly $11 million in public and philanthropic money paid for an interim tiny-home community in Point Reyes Station that opened in July.

For now the fence is gone and the elk wander freely. Whether they keep that run of the land may hinge on a court filing the federal government still hasn't made.