Trump handed Elon Musk more than 700 acres of a protected Texas wildlife refuge, and the federal agency that gave it away is calling the move conservation. The land sits inside the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, home to endangered animals and sacred to the Indigenous people who have lived alongside it for generations, and now it is being cleared for the world’s first trillionaire to launch more rockets.

The deal runs through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which approved a land swap that moves roughly 712 acres of the wildlife refuge into SpaceX’s hands. In exchange, SpaceX hands the government about 683 acres it owns elsewhere in Cameron County, some of it sitting as far as 20 miles from the refuge. On paper it is a trade. In practice the public is giving up irreplaceable protected coastline so a private rocket company can expand a launch site it already built on top of wetlands. The acreage has been reported as high as 775 in some documents, but the number everyone agrees on is more than 700.

What lives on that land is the whole point. The wildlife refuge shelters two endangered wild cats, the ocelot and the jaguarundi, along with the aplomado falcon, sea turtles, and migratory birds that move through one of the last intact wildlife corridors on the Gulf Coast. The area is also a designated National Historic Landmark, and it is sacred ground to the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, whose tribal chair has said the government is allowing the destruction of their lands and ecosystems in pursuit of space ventures. This is not empty scrubland. It is one of the most ecologically and culturally loaded stretches of coast in the country.

The timing makes it worse. Elon Musk just became the first trillionaire in human history, riding the largest public offering the stock market has ever seen for SpaceX. Days later, the same man is being handed hundreds of acres of a public wildlife refuge at no real cost to him. A government that tells working families there is never enough money for housing or healthcare found 700 acres of protected habitat to give a man who could buy the entire state several times over. The optics are not subtle, and neither is the transfer.