Capitol Hill is confusing, frustrating, and complicated. The meetings are short. The staffers are young. Some offices are warm and engaged and some are politely going through the motions. You can walk out of one meeting feeling like you moved the needle a fraction of an inch, and out of the next one wondering if anyone was listening.

But folks from across the industry showed up for the Capitol Hill Summit, hosted by OIA. In many cases, far more often than this. Two, three, four times a year. Others are in Washington far more than that.

The Summit started with a day of presentations and panel discussions before anyone set foot on the Hill. It's part briefing, part networking, part getting everyone on the same page. There were deep dives on the policy asks, a panel on the current state of tariffs and trade investigations, conversations about how to frame stories effectively in meetings, and a lot of getting to know the people you'd be walking into congressional offices with the next morning. For a first-timer like me, it was invaluable.

So what were we actually there for? In brief: the re-authorization of the Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF), pushing for continued funding and implementation of the EXPLORE Act, and supporting more clarity and consistency on tariffs.

The LRF was created by the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020 to address the deferred maintenance backlog on public lands (it’s still around $41 billion), dedicating up to $1.9 billion a year for five years. But that authorization expired in September of 2025 and reauthorization has stalled. A bipartisan bill, the America the Beautiful Act, has 52 co-sponsors in the Senate (26 and 26). The White House budget even proposes reauthorizing it. The House is looking a bit more complicated. Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee have expressed concerns, saying the “draft proposal unduly includes tolls, fees and a “slush fund for Donald Trump to do vanity projects.” That's almost certainly a reference to the $10 billion 'Presidential Capital Stewardship Program' (*cough* giant Trump arch) in the FY27 budget, which proposes D.C. construction and beautification projects while cutting NPS maintenance funding by 40 percent everywhere else.

The EXPLORE Act passed in late 2024 by unanimous consent (almost nothing does) after roughly a decade of work, and represents the most significant outdoor recreation legislation in a generation. Susan Viscon, who has been at REI for over 30 years, talked in our meetings about what that actually looked like. REI spent nine years helping draft key provisions, from the SOAR Act (which overhauls outfitter and guide permitting) to climbing access language developed with the Access Fund. They co-founded coalitions, built support for the permitting reform, and drove thousands of constituent messages to Congress.

But passage and funding are two separate fights. We were on the Hill pushing lawmakers to make sure the EXPLORE Act gets the appropriations to actually do the things it authorizes. Some things have moved forward, like permitting reform and digital parks passes. But a significant amount of the bill still lacks funding. And with the Forest Service down roughly 8,500 employees, the agencies that would implement these provisions are stretched thinner than ever.

And yes, the constant issue of tariffs. Outdoor apparel and footwear already carry some of the highest base import duties of any consumer goods category, and the new reciprocal tariffs pushed some products to astronomical numbers. Cassie Abel, the founder of Wild Rye, has been one of the most visible voices on this, telling the story of what it looks like for a small brand with no ability to absorb those costs and nowhere else to source. She was joined by folks with similar stories from Cotopaxi, Keen, VF Corp, Columbia, and more. The IEEPA tariffs have since been overturned by the Supreme Court, but two new investigations are underway (one covering 60 countries on forced labor, one covering 16 countries on excess capacity), and the realistic expectation is that new rates will land by mid-July. The tariffs aren't going back to zero. But the question is what the new normal looks like – the repeated word was consistency. Companies can forecast and plan for tariffs but if the rules keep changing on a weekly basis, it's nearly impossible for companies already pricing FY27 and FY28 lines.

OIA organized the meetings in groups, each with a different set of lawmakers and a slightly different focus. Taldi Harrison from OIA led our group around the Capitol, keeping everyone on schedule and on message. Everyone finds their role. Someone opens with the economic case, someone tells a personal story, someone handles a specific policy ask. I was the data guy, so I'd lead off every meeting with the top-line numbers around the outdoor recreation economy, and dive into a few state-level stats relevant to whomever we were talking to.

My team’s meetings were primarily with Democrats and it often felt like preaching to the choir (I told Kent Ebersole, president of OIA, that I wanted all Republican meetings next time). But, that's still important. These offices need to hear from constituents and businesses that public lands and outdoor recreation are priorities, as well as safe, popular policy positions. One office told us they were working on a bill to prevent public lands sales from being pushed through via reconciliation. That bill, the Public Lands Integrity Act, has since been introduced by Bennet (D-CO), Merkley (D-OR), Wyden (D-OR), and Heinrich (D-NM). It would amend the Byrd Rule to make any provision resulting in the sale of federal public lands "extraneous" under reconciliation, meaning it would need 60 votes instead of a simple majority. This is a direct response to last summer, when Republicans nearly approved selling one to three million acres of federal land in the reconciliation bill. That provision got pulled after bipartisan pushback and public outrage, but nothing currently prevents someone from trying again.

Other groups had harder conversations. Some Republican offices were blunt about the Congressional Review Act being a tool they intend to keep using now that the precedent has been set (the Boundary Waters mining issue being the most recent example). Others conveyed a general sense of "we know, but there's not much we can or are willing to do right now" on public lands issues, which is honest but not exactly comforting. At least one was genuinely a bit hostile and off-the-wall. That feeds the cynicism. But it also makes the case for why you have to keep showing up. It’s still important for everyone to hear these stories and see this data, whether or not they vote your way every time.

It's not glamorous work. It's not even particularly exciting in the moment. You're sitting in a conference room surrounded by photos of the member's district, making a case you've rehearsed three or four times already that morning. Sometimes you're with senior staff who are helping make decisions and sometimes you're hoping a staffer who looks like they’re in high school will remember your visit and pass it up the chain.

But this is where the work happens. In boring, bureaucratic conference rooms with people who show up year after year, knowing that making progress is a game of inches. Most of the work done in these rooms won't bear fruit or show concrete results for years, but you have to do it anyway. That young staffer who took your meeting? They might become a member, or a governor, or remember you the next time and make your meeting a priority.

I should be clear: constituent engagement (emails, letters, phone calls, etc) matters as well. We heard it over and over again this week. When people call their representatives, write letters, show up at town halls, that registers. The public lands sell-off got stopped last year in large part because enough people made noise about it through the right channels. The distinction isn't between activism and advocacy, although those things are different. But we should make a distinction between engagement that's directed at the people who can actually change things and engagement that's directed at LL Bean's customer service line.

Many of the companies that showed up on the Hill this week are the same ones that social media has been furious at for various reasons over the last few months. AltNPS recently ran a campaign urging followers to flood the customer support channels of brands that didn’t speak out quickly enough about the USFS office reorganizations.

I've written about AltNPS before and the concerns haven't changed. It's an anonymous engagement engine with no organizational transparency, repackaging other people's journalism and selling t-shirts from a virtual mailbox in North Carolina. The petition does little to move anything, and targeting outdoor companies is misguided. Getting a company to sign a petition because you flooded their customer service line is not a win. And it's aimed at the wrong target, because the USFS directive is an executive branch action that is, frustratingly, within their power. We can argue it's bad policy, but LL Bean posting on Instagram is not going to reverse it. But, LL Bean was here, at the Summit. AltNPS was…not.

This has been a bit of a pattern. The Burgum letter outrage. The Patagonia/Pattiegonia lawsuit discourse. USFS coverage is frequently characterized as a "complete dismantling" or framed as affecting national parks (it doesn't). The underlying frustration is real and everyone should be alarmed about what's happening to public lands. But much of the content driving the outrage either intentionally or unintentionally lacks the depth of knowledge to effectively communicate the shape of the problems we face. And the people generating that content often have more of a stake in maximizing engagement than in the work toward better outcomes.

I had an academic understanding of lobbying before this week. Actually doing it changed my perspective. It's also, honestly, kind of fun. Put on a suit ($14 on Vinted), work with your team, figure out what data/stories/angles reach each member the best, and zigzag around the Hill hoping you're moving things forward. It takes an immense amount of time and effort to get anything done, and the outdoor industry is outspent by orders of magnitude by other sectors. But many of the people at the Capitol Hill Summit were founders or executives carving time out of running their businesses to be there, and we still manage to punch above our weight class.

It's true that the brands have often done a poor job communicating this work, and that they've sometimes moved slower than it seems like they should. But the folks doing the most useful work aren't typically the ones yelling the loudest on social media. The slow, deliberate progress of moving issues forward with repetition, determination, and compromise doesn't perform well on Instagram.