Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) on Wednesday committed to blocking any future nominees President Donald Trump seeks to have the Senate confirm until the government reverses an “extremist” environmental policy he warned is hurting farmers.
Cramer said he was “furious” that the Trump administration earlier this month decided against reforming a policy implemented under the Biden administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service, which is aimed at protecting duck habitats by preventing farmers from installing underground agricultural drainage tiles near protected federal conservation easements. The senator is seeking to pressure FWS to change course by vowing to place a hold on any nominees the president plans to bring before the upper chamber this fall.
“My farmers are furious and so am I. There won’t be another nominee confirmed until something changes,” Cramer said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The blind defense of a Biden rule favored by environmental extremists at the expense of farmers confounds me, particularly at a time when our ag producers are hurting so badly.”
The FWS has bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of easements to conserve wetlands and protect waterfowl habitats. The land lies in the Prairie Pothole region, an area in the Midwest that supports more than half of North America’s ducks.
Cramer has long pressed against FWS’s enforcement of Waterfowl Production Area easements in North Dakota, expressing concern over how the WPA land is mapped and how that mapping is enforced. He believes the policy impedes private property rights and harms farmers already struggling to cope with rising operating costs from the Iran war, particularly the global energy chaos caused by the backlog at the Strait of Hormuz. He also has contended that the policy “dictates the management of farmers’ and landowners’ acreage far beyond what the FWS ever paid for.”
Cramer’s latest announcement comes after FWS last week announced it would not change the wetlands policy “at this time,” saying it is “dedicated to protecting both the wetland easements purchased by the FWS that are necessary to protect our conservation heritage.”
“The Fish and Wildlife Service thanks the more than 200,000 commenters who responded to the request for information on the process for calculating setbacks for the drain tiles around the wetland easements,” the agency said in a post to X. “Our administration is dedicated to protecting both the wetland easements purchased by the FWS that are necessary to protect our conservation heritage as well as the private landowners’ use of their lands outside the easement boundaries. At this time, no further action is planned as we review the information received.”
Cramer shot back, calling the timing of the announcement suspicious, “coming immediately after I agreed to vote for a wealth manager to be the Assistant Secretary of Interior that oversees these issues.”
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“Even though he admitted to knowing nothing about waterfowl easements in North Dakota, I was fooled into believing as a business person he was going to reform regulations, not support Biden’s,” the senator said. ”Frankly, I am stunned … Rising fuel and fertilizer costs resulting from limited traffic in the Strait of Hormuz along with lost international markets have put farmers on their heels. Now they can’t even count on the administration to defend them against radical environmental activists who are advocating for the feds to take more of their land.”
North Dakota ranks among the top 10 states with the most farms. There are over 25,000 farms in Cramer’s state, according to the USDA’s 2025 Census of Agriculture.