Page:John Sturgeon v. Bert Frost, in his official capacity as Alaska Regional Director of the National Park Service.pdf/27

Rh huge tracts of land for national parks. But to protect Alaskans’ economic well-being, it mitigated the consequences to non-federal owners whose land wound up in those new system units. See supra, at 17–20. Once again, even the Park Service acknowledges that Section 103(c) was supposed to provide an “assurance” that those owners would not be subject to all the regulatory constraints placed on neighboring federal properties. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 50; see id., at 46–47; supra, at 9, 17, 20. But then the Service (head-spinningly) posits that it need only draft its regulations to cover both federal and non-federal lands in order to apply those rules to ANILCA’s inholdings. On that view, limitations on the Service’s authority are purely a matter of administrative grace, dependent on how narrowly (or broadly) the Service chooses to write its regulations. And ANILCA’s carefully drawn balance is thrown off-kilter, as Alaskan, Native, and private inholdings are exposed to the full extent of the Service’s regulatory authority.

The word “solely” in Section 103(c)’s second sentence does not support that kind of statute-gutting. We do not gainsay that the Park Service has identified a grammatically possible way of viewing that word’s function: as pinpointing a narrow class of the Service’s regulations (those “solely applicable to public lands”). But that reading, for all the reasons just stated, is “ultimately inconsistent” with the “text and context of the statute.” Sturgeon I., 577 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 12). And a different understanding of “solely” instead aligns with that text and context. That word encapsulates Congress’s view that the Park Service’s regulations should apply “solely” to public lands (and not to state, Native, or private ones). See