Don’t Fence Me In Jail

The Maude family finally sees some relief from their terrible, government induced, nightmare.

Good Fences Make Terrible Government Neighbors

A very unnoticed story found some resolution in the last few weeks at the hands of the Trump administration, and specifically under the compassion and thoughtfulness of Brooke Rollins at the USDA. The Maude family is a ranching family in South Dakota who had their life upended by the United States Forest Service over the location of a fence built on their property by a previous owner before 1950. The story is an atrocious look at how the government uses its power to instill fear and terror into the population. I want to give major credit for the attention the government finally paid to this story to Keely Covello and her Unwon Substack.

Her writing is how I found out about this horrific story, and her reporting on ranching and land use issues is second to none in the new media landscape. If you haven’t heard of this terrible debacle, it isn’t surprising. So much of what happens to the average person at the hands of government bureaucrats and their stacks of ruinous regulatory papers is hidden from the public. In large measure, it is because individual stories have a lot of impact. The government knows that if people can see themselves empathetically in the stories of others, they tend to come to the defense of wrongdoing by the government with ferocity.

It turns out that governments do not like that.

The media loves to deal in statistics because it defuses their responsibility to report and do honest journalism. They use, to their advantage, that individual issues are statistical abnormalities. From the media’s perspective, no one else is dealing with a fence dispute in South Dakota, so no one really needs to hear about it. But this story is much deeper than one family that had their life ruined, this is a story about someone who was abused by a government and its officials for the sheer exercise of power.

What Happened Is A Tragedy of Wrong

Heather and Charles Maude are South Dakota residents who own a cattle ranch bordering U.S. Forest Service land. Their family has operated this ranch through several generations, peacefully as neighbors of public lands that were converted back to wild grasslands in the 1960s. The existing fence lines have been acknowledged by both the USFS and the Maudes as the official boundary without objection. The Forest Service has renewed and transferred grazing permits without any pushback from the administrative state.

In June of 2024, the relationship with the Forest Service changed after an unnamed hunter, using the OnX application on his phone, brought the “incorrect” boundary to the USFS's attention. Within 82 days of the Forest Service being notified by the hunter, the Maude’s were charged with theft of government property and threatened with ten years in prison, and $250,000 in fines each. They were placed under a gag order and were required to retain separate counsel for their “crimes.”

The episode nearly ruined their lives. In moments before the trial was to start in April, Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins dropped all of the charges and apologized to the Maudes for the overreach. It was an eleventh-hour moment of commutation that stopped the harsh treatment that the Maudes faced from their government.

From the Unwon Substack:

“We are very thankful to Trump and his administration for listening to citizens. The Trump team is committed to the things that they were elected upon. Brooke was wonderful. She is as personable and kind in person as she is on the news. Her team put in a ton of effort.”

Maude says Rollins took immediate action to resolve her family’s case once she heard of it.

“The time from when she found out about our case to her office doing something about it was very quick,” Maude says. “We found out that we might be coming to D.C. last Friday, and it was confirmed Sunday. Her team put all of this together in under a week, they deserve a great deal of credit.”

At the press conference, Secretary Rollins also discussed an online portal that the USDA has set up to disclose other abuses by government that ranchers and farmers are feeling from government agencies within the agency’s umbrella of oversight.

The fact that the agency set up a portal means that the Maudes’ case is not an aberration. Anecdotally, I hear of these kinds of stories often. I work in the real estate world and specialize in land development. I understand fully how the planning departments, the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and others use their bureaucratic maze and authority to destroy property rights and ruin the lives of people who, in good faith, believe that their actions and operations are within the boundaries of the law.

The least known, and saddest actuality of how our government works, is that there has been a forty-year empowerment of the agencies and their operators by ambiguous language within the legislative edicts. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled, unsurprisingly, in favor of the EPA and its bureaucracy, saying that if a law contains ambiguity, it is the duty of the department to define the terms that are in question. From John Paul Stevens’ opinion:

The power of an administrative agency to administer a congressionally created program necessarily requires the formulation of policy and the making of rules to fill any gap left, implicitly or explicitly, by Congress. If Congress has explicitly left a gap for the agency to fill, there is an express delegation of authority to the agency to elucidate a specific provision of the statute by regulation. Such legislative regulations are given controlling weight unless they are arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute. Sometimes the legislative delegation to an agency on a particular question is implicit rather than explicit. In such a case, a court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a reasonable interpretation made by the administrator of an agency.

In other words, whenever Congress fails to clarify a term or a definition, the minions at the agencies get to decide what it means. That leaves a lot of room for abuse. The Maude case is precisely the kind of misconduct that was created in the atmosphere surrounding the Chevron decision. Magnify that across millions of people whose land borders public lands, or who are impacted by wetland jurisdiction interpretation, or people who peacefully utilize their lands for a use that, simply by public definition edict, can have their lives ruined by vindictive administrators.

Chevron was overturned in the last Supreme Court session last year, but its impacts are part of what has contributed to a calcification of entrenched Washingtonians. They write the rules, and they can change those rules simply by re-interpreting the definitions of any law enacted by Congress. Those changeable rules that can be decided by the people supposedly there to look out for the interests of the citizen have come to represent the kind of government people are frustrated with. Fundamentally, if the agencies have the final say on anything that Congress passes, what use are the legislators?

The story of the Maudes illustrates why people feel a deep agitation about the federal government. As Heather Maude said in a phone call to Ms. Covello from D.C. after the charges were dropped, “How refreshing after decades of fearing retribution from our government, that should be there to protect our rights and freedoms, that we see justice and an outcome that is actually favorable.”

Rollins was a pick that many of the MAHA warriors were not in favor of. She was supposedly in the pocket of Big Ag and wasn’t going to be effective in her role. Perhaps all of that is true, but in this case, she deserves a tremendous amount of credit for her quick action to subvert the terror of a government that has grown far too powerful to protect the rights of the individual.

A Contrast of Methods

On a much larger scale, this illustrates a point I have been making a lot about the Kennedy approach to government operations and how to accomplish long-standing changes to it. The bluster and whirlwind that accompanied the Elon Musk version of spending changes and government cuts has seemingly fizzled out. The list of Republican and Democratic senators who voted not to codify any changes that DOGE has requested to the budget is a long one. Washington knows a secret that many of us refuse to look at or understand. They play a VERY long game. Short changes are easy to weather in Washington because they bet that the people will lose interest, and typically their thesis is proved out time and time again. It is rumored that Elon Musk is stepping back from his Role at DOGE in the next few weeks. No lasting changes will have been enacted by Congress: all of that bluster, with zero lasting results. What has Musk done? He has certainly raised awareness and made his acolytes on X happy, but when Musk is back to sleeping on his couch at Tesla, the Washingtonians will have won the war.

The difference in the Kennedy branch of government is that each win is a chip away at the fundamentals of how government operates. Food dyes here, placebo tests there, individual redemptions from abuses stopped over yonder, and the apparatus loses another chunk of credibility. They made an entangled world for themselves that they believe cannot be penetrated by radicalism. The Musk moment proves they are correct. Kennedy and his team, however, seem to understand the old lesson of the Tortoise and the Hare: slow and steady wins the race, or the war, or the dismantling of government, whichever you prefer metaphorically to embrace. Mr. Kennedy and his team are sowing seeds of doubt about the way that government functions, and they are doing it on a case-by-case basis. For as long as I have been paying attention, the Maude family story, and others like it have been ignorable in all iterations of the Federal Government. The mouthpieces in the swamp are quick to abscond any questions around these kinds of stories.

“It isn’t widespread abuse, and bad apples are a part of every batch.”

“Move along, and ignore their pain. Their story is doubtful anyway because they are clearly in the wrong.”

“What do you care about a single instance like this? It’s a Maltese Falcon, a one-off, just put your head down and stop wondering about it.”

There’s a simple method to the bureaucracy’s public encounters and operations. If they can dismiss, discredit, and degrade anyone that questions their actions, the agency and those who operate it, will continue to survive and thrive off the misfortune of others. This new era in Washington shows signs that it has the desire to turn the tables on the standard operation of government minions in order to benefit the people of the nation. There is a huge, uphill battle to reorient government to its proper function and defense of individual liberty, but the Maude case and the methodologies behind each new change of policy are bright examples of what might be happening for the better.

The Maudes are one example of hope, but in a government that has been operating under the premise of power and authority that it has been for the last forty years, my guess is that there are thousands of these stories that remain unresolved. How many people have had their lives ruined by bureaucrats who face no consequences for their terrible actions? I would bet that the list is too long and too tragic to deal with.

The American Experience: The Government Always Wins

This story isn’t about a fence or some kind of noble action by a government looking out for its citizens. This is simply about what power does and how it ruins the lives of people. The government knew what it was doing in the case of the Maudes. They went after them with the express intent of creating a chilling effect on others who might want to say something about the wrongs of it. Power up, and most people back down. Governments know it, and they use it to their advantage consistently. Arm the IRS agents or the Forest Service Rangers, and pretty soon, it is just easier to comply and stew in your own self-induced-defeat.

In a final slap in the face, Jack Isaacs, the regional Forest Service Supervisor who was leading the charge against the Maude family and many others in South Dakota, conveniently retired the day after the charges were dropped, saying, “he felt it was time.” So the rest of us, including the Maudes, will have the privilege of paying the pension and retirement monies for a man who used his power to try and ruin the lives of the Maudes and their neighbors.

When the postmortem of the United States is written, they will devote entire volumes of books to these kinds of abuses. The duplicitous rules and outcomes in a two-tiered society are why there is so much anger directed at the government in America. The consequence-free life of power is nothing the average person will ever have the chance to experience. Yet, despite the clear wrongdoing, there will be no scolding, no bringing Mr. Isaacs before a court to encounter justice. No, the bureaucrat will get to sail off into the sunset free of guilt and shame, clothed in a government pension.