“My sense is they seize it with some future use in mind that they’re not willing to share.”
Judging from comments made a few years ago by friends who worked natural resources at a state level, and who had to deal with the feds, I suspect the only agenda is:
“All your land are belong to us!”
The guys I knew have switched jobs, but they described USFS & BLM employees talking about ‘touroids’ instead of tourists, and wanting to introduce grizzly bears into places near large cities, and laughing about how a few eaten touroids would keep the humans ‘out of our forests’.
It isn’t so much a specific agenda as a belief that public lands belong to the BLM & USFS & USPS employees, for the employees benefit. The public are interlopers & transgressors who invade the employees’ home. From their perspective, enlarging the area by dishonest use of wilderness areas or water acts or the endangered species act is just a way of making their ‘home’ bigger and better. Like any good liberal, they think they know best and the citizens of the US - the unwashed masses - are trying to ruin ‘their’ property. It is the government mentality - we exist for them, not they for us.
Just, wow.